Our national motto is: Satyameva Jayate (Truth shall triumph). It is drawn from the Mundaka Upanishad. What it says is that Truth does not need defence. It is capable of defending itself.

In the sixties and seventies, there was a lawyer called ASR Chari, about whom it was said that if anyone could afford to pay his fee of Rs 10,000—a big sum in those days—he could kill any person.

The story may be apocryphal, but it contains an element of truth. Take the case of a religious leader in the South who allegedly got his secretary killed as he had an illicit relationship with his wife. He was arrested, but he engaged India's preeminent lawyer at that time and escaped unscathed. Truth is cheap; falsehood comes with a price.

In other words, Truth can stand on its own legs; it does not need a prop. If a person is falsely accused of murder and he was not even in the area when it happened, all he needs to do is to tell the court where he was at that time, and the case against him will fall like a house of cards.

Of course, there have been umpteen cases of the police picking up the wrong person and sending him to jail. He may suffer, but before the Ultimate Bar, he will stand victorious—like Stan Swamy, accused of treason and more.

These thoughts arose after seven delegations of 51 MPs, former MPs, and retired ambassadors representing almost all the political parties represented in Parliament visited 30 or so world capitals to tell them the "truth" about Operation Sindoor.

One of the delegation leaders, Shashi Tharoor, MP, took the opportunity to lambast President Donald Trump, whom he projected as a vainglorious nincompoop in comparison to his predecessors like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Of course, the video clip forwarded to me by a friend came with the comment: how bold he was to attack Trump while standing on American soil!

Tharoor's brief was to defend Operation Sindoor and not make a comparative study of American presidents. I told my friend that he should have the courage to give his honest opinion about the current regime, whether on American or Indian soil. Then he would have known how he would have been declared persona non grata by his new-found admirers who heaped calumny on him in the 2024 elections.

Immensely pleased with their performance, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave them a treat in New Delhi and got a group photograph taken with him standing at the centre. In doing so, Modi created history.

There have been many wars in the world—say, beginning with the First World War. At no time did any country feel the need to send delegations to various countries to explain why it waged a war.

True, Indira Gandhi, as Prime Minister, personally went on a world tour to tell presidents, prime ministers and monarchs, as the case may be, about what West Pakistan was doing in East Pakistan and how millions of East Pakistanis were taking shelter in India. She prepared the groundwork for the 1971 war that India won spectacularly.

The picture of Lt Gen Jagjit Singh Aurora and Pakistan's AAK Niazi signing the surrender agreement in Dhaka was so telling that it needed no explaining. The world knew that it was a war imposed on India, and it only retaliated. Therefore, there was no need to send delegations to explain the war to world leaders.

Anybody who knows anything about what is called protocol knows the limitations of an MPs' delegation. To illustrate, the Mar Thoma Church once invited the then Chief Election Commissioner Navin Chawla, who authored Mother Teresa's biography, to deliver the Juhanon Mar Thoma Lecture in Delhi. The guest of honour was Shashi Tharoor, who was a Minister of State at that time.

When they were invited to the stage, Chawla wanted Tharoor to be the first to climb the stairs. He refused, saying that Chawla was the more important person as he was to deliver the memorial lecture. Chawla, who knew the protocol, reminded Tharoor that the protocol demanded him to be the first. Immediately, Tharoor moved forward, with Chawla following him.

A delegation of MPs cannot get access to the head of government because of protocol reasons. None of the seven delegations was able to meet the head of government or head of state. They spent their time visiting Mahatma Gandhi's statue in the cities concerned and meeting the regular visitors to the Indian embassies and high commissions there.

Small wonder that they failed to find a mention in the newspapers and media channels there. In other words, theirs was an exercise in futility. When Modi took over, he announced that his policy would be neighbour-centric. In other words, he would give top priority to the neighbours. Yet, not even a single delegation was sent to any of India's neighbours like China, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Myanmar, Bhutan—forget Pakistan.

Far more important for Mr Modi was Guyana. Did the visits change the policies or attitudes of the countries they visited? There is nothing to show that they made any impact. Of course, Indian television channels have been going ga-ga over these trips. They knew very well that the purpose of the visits was not to influence foreign countries but to influence public opinion in India.

Let's admit war always unites people. Something similar happened in the case of Operation Sindoor, too. From the state's point of view, the war was to teach Pakistan a lesson for sponsoring terrorism, the kind of which led to the attack in Pahalgam, resulting in the death of 26 innocent people, including a local Muslim and a Nepali. Then, what was the need for the delegations?

Unlike in 1971, when access to information was limited, today, we live in a world where all information is in the public domain. Within seconds of the Air India crash in Ahmedabad, someone sent me a video that showed the aircraft ascending from Ahmedabad, then failing to gain altitude and crashing into a building.

There are private satellites which can monitor missiles sent by India and Pakistan and conclude what exactly happened. True, it was one of the gravest terrorist attacks. In 2008, when Pakistani terrorists attacked Mumbai, the security forces were able to kill all the terrorists. The arrest of a Pakistani terrorist exposed their identity. He was tried and hanged.

In this case, the four terrorists have gone scot-free, and there is no talk about bringing them to book. On the contrary, Modi has said that India has avenged all the cross-border terrorist attacks. Till today, no country has fully supported our claim that the Pahalgam attack was by Pakistan-based terrorists. Far from that, even countries like America refer to India and Pakistan as enemies. The two countries have been hyphenated. Of course, they all condemn terrorism.

For a country or a leader, what is most important is credibility. Why are we not credible? The Modi government has only itself to blame. Over the last eleven years, we've mastered the art of calling every uncomfortable fact "foreign-funded fiction." When the BBC did a story on the Gujarat riots, how did the leadership react? Cases were lodged against them. Their life in India was made miserable.

"When global agencies flagged India's rising hunger levels, we said, "Jealousy." When they downgraded our press freedom, we cried, "Conspiracy." When journalists were arrested, we claimed they were a "threat to peace." The whole world was watching how journalists like the one from Kerala, S Kappan, were arrested in Uttar Pradesh and lodged in jail for many years.

When people were lynched, our government hesitated to take action against the perpetrators. What's worse, criminals who gang-raped Muslim women in Gujarat were garlanded when they came out of jail as if they were heroes! When an octogenarian Jesuit priest who could not hold a glass asked for a straw to drink water, the judge asked the police to respond within a month.

India behaved like an ostrich, thinking that the world was not taking note of the goings-on in the country. "And when the international community raised an eyebrow, we told them to mind their colonial business." When Canada accused India of interfering in their internal affairs and killing a Sikh "leader," we ill-treated their Prime Minister. The whole world saw how Modi welcomed Prime Minister Trudeau when he attended the G-20 Summit.

"We yelled so often, so loudly, about imaginary attacks on our "national pride," that now, when there's an actual reason for national pride — like a measured, strategic military response — the world blinks and says, "But you've been spreading falsehoods and rejecting all the truths we brought to your doorstep before. Are you crying wolf again?

"Worse still, we're not just losing the world's trust — we're losing our own people's belief. Scroll through social media today, and you'll find citizens second-guessing their own government. Not out of disloyalty, but because they've been bluffed one too many times."

We want the whole world to understand our position. We spent precious foreign exchange on their visits in business class and stays in five-star hotels. What did Modi himself do? He was in Saudi Arabia on an official visit when the Pahalgam attack happened. He cut short his visit and rushed to Delhi. That day, an all-party meeting was organised to brief them about the attack. But Modi did not think the meeting important.

Instead of attending it, he went to Bihar to address an election rally where he remarked that the best answer to Pakistan is through the ballot. What he meant is that the best reply to Pakistan is to re-elect the discredited Nitish Kumar government. He did not want to listen to the briefing, but he wants the world to listen to the briefings by his all-party delegation.

Pakistan is essentially ruled by the military, but it did not have any problem holding a session of its Parliament. The members had an opportunity to discuss the war. It is now more than a month since the four-day war ended, but the members of Parliament do not know anything other than what the Modi media reported — that Karachi was totally destroyed and the Pak prime minister was arrested.

They have also been watching how he has been milking Operation Sindoor to garner votes. They also know that the four terrorists who struck at Pahalgam are having the proverbial last laugh — and that there is no attempt to nab them or kill them.

Of course, Modi has cleverly caused confusion in the opposition ranks. See how he used Tharoor to confuse the Congressmen! The whole purpose of the delegation was to impress his domestic audience and not to make any difference to world opinion. His attempt reminds one of the tiger who found an excuse to kill the lamb, which did not cause any trouble to the beast.

In the end, the whole drama has become less a demonstration of national resolve and more a performance scripted for domestic consumption. The government's extravagant efforts to "educate" the world—through chartered delegations, photo ops, and hollow speeches—have failed to mask the growing gap between its rhetoric and reality.

At home, dissent is labelled sedition, questions are treated as conspiracies, and truth is buried under the weight of selective narratives. Abroad, India's credibility suffers not because of foreign conspiracies but because of its own refusal to uphold transparency, justice, and democratic decency.

When the Prime Minister skips an all-party meeting on national security to attend an election rally but expects world leaders to take his delegations seriously, it becomes clear that optics matter more than substance.

The world sees through this charade, as do the citizens at home. A government that is afraid of the Truth cannot be the guardian of a nation's conscience. As the Upanishad remind us, Truth does not need props nor spin doctors—it stands by itself, strong and victorious.

Satyameva Jayate!