When a diplomatese payload is dropped

The work of a diplomat is tricky indeed as so much depends on semantics. Foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale lived up to the credo of his service when he launched a new diplomatese missile by describing the Indian Air Force strike on a terror camp in Balakot in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as a “non-military pre-emptive action”.

Presumably, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s emergency meeting was delayed by several minutes as his diplomats and generals scoured relevant dictionaries to decipher the Indian neologism. Earlier in the day, Pakistan had lobbed its own euphemistic projectile when it called India’s laser-guided bombs a ‘payload’, leaving many wondering whether it meant a comestible — say, tomatoes, of which there is reportedly a shortage these days across the border — or something more combustible.

While other countries can take credit for favoured military-diplomatic jargon such as ‘hybrid warfare’, ‘sub-conventional warfare’ and ‘low-intensity conflict operations’, India is no newbie when it comes to conveniently vague decoy phrases, of course. After all, the ministry of external affairs paradoxically deemed the Pokhran blast of 1974 to be a ‘peaceful nuclear explosion’ and stood by it till Pokhran 2 in 1998. As long as terms have to be thought up to describe actions, times can only get better for diplo-linguists.