US, Oct. 26 -- On October 21, an Indian diplomat in New York did what too few Indian officials once dared to do: he corrected a United Nations Special Rapporteur, on the record, on a matter of fact.

Ben Saul, the UN's rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, had described Dawood Ibrahim's D-Company in his July report as "India-based". First Secretary Raghoo Puri replied that Dawood "fled India much before the 2003 listing" and "as per the UN's listing entry, resides in the same country where Osama bin Laden was found and neutralized."

Days later, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar put the philosophy behind that rebuke into a single sentence at the NDTV World Summit: "Get it right yourself. If you don't have the clarity of ...