Salil Tripathi says that the Prince’s remarks were ill chosen and regrettable but the deeper principle concerns freedom of expression and ever greater encroachments upon it
First Prince Harry, and then his father, Prince Charles, discovered that last week was their septimana horribilis and that they had both made the kind of gaffes for which the Duke of Edinburgh has gained notoriety. First, a three-year-old home video surfaced in which Harry called a Pakistani cadet ‘our little Paki friend’. And then it was discovered that the heir to the throne routinely calls a polo-playing Asian friend ‘Sooty’.
In the multiculturally appropriate times we live in, nothing else matters: not the fact that Ahmed Raza Khan, the Pakistani cadet, or Kolin Dhillon, Charles’s polo-playing friend, may not have minded the remarks; or, that Harry’s was a private video that was shot three years ago; nor, indeed, that Harry says he did not mean it as a racist or religious slur and has apologised. None of that matters. (Given that Pakistani is a nationality and not a faith, and not all Muslims are Pakistanis — nor all Pakistanis Muslims, for that matter — if anything, ‘Paki’ is a slur on a nationality, not a faith or race, but this is not the time to be pedantic.)
Dutifully, inglorious escapades from the Prince’s past were trotted out, such as Harry dressing up as a Nazi officer. Harry has had a lot of growing up to do, of course. If he were the child of any other broken home, whose mother died tragically in an accident in a distant city and who was coming to grips with responsibilities, the reaction may have been different, and we’d be asked to understand his context.
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