Even the normally kind Francois Gautier of the French daily Le Figaro (who's just back from Kargil) believes that India has to "appear to be strong". Why just Kargil, he believes India has been losing the propaganda war with Pakistan since 1947 because they don't care what the world thinks of them. "They do need to care," he says, pointing out as a foreign correspondent it becomes difficult to sell India to the paper. "Look at China, despite their human rights record, the world takes them very seriously indeed."

Whether we like it or not, Tony Clifton of Newsweek, who covered the Bangladesh war in 1971, says when he is in India he always has to go "fiddling around" looking for people to speak to. "InPakistan, because Information Minister Mushahid Hussain was a journalist, I just have to call him up and he asks me to come over. I think Nawaz Sharif fairly early on decided he was inarticulate and got Mushahid to speak for him."

Of course, as Tarun Basu, Executive Editor of the Indian Abroad News Service puts it, the mishandling could be because for us there is only the Indian point of view whereas for the rest of the world, there is an Indian side and a Pakistani side. Add to this officials who are really "niggardly with information" and you have the makings of a PR nightmare.

Basu points to the difference in how the Pakistanis handled the release of Flt Lt K Nachiketa and the way India has handled the information that they recovered the bodies of three Pakistan Army regulars. "They paraded him before the world and released him before the world, appearing to be major peacemakers. Our officials merely mentioned the bodies and didn't elaborate."

Even the very proper Asahi Shimbun correspondent YasushiNakashima feels the daily press briefings could do with a lot more explanatory statements. It doesn't help that the politician doesn't speak in the same voice as the bureaucracy which doesn't say the same thing as the Army. Both Shimbun's Nakashima and Newsweek's Clifton believe that Defence Minister George Fernandes and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee were not right in blaming the safe passage controversy on the media. "Clearly, they were spoken to by the military who were absolutely appalled by the suggestion."

The Independent's Peter Popham (who describes himself as a one-man band) can't understand why India has lost the initiative to Pakistan politically and militarily. Clifton can, because he feels India started off on the backfoot with its Army being embarrassed by the Intelligence failure, which was compounded by the inexperience of the BJP-led coalition. "I don't think the Government has got its act together. Someone authoritative has to talk for the Government and give genuine information.Otherwise, we'll just rely on sources other than the Government."

Popham would like the Indian Government to invest about Rs 20,000 in proper acoustics for the South Block briefing room: "I mean it's a splendid room and all that but no one can actually hear anything those eminent people are saying. So it just becomes sort of amateurish and jokey."

Even the travel to Kargil is cause for confusion. Says Popham: "If you ask the Ministry of Defence here, they say there is no clearance for foreign journalists. But those who go to Srinagar find that it's no problem." Of course, now after the ban on movement of journalists on grounds of "operational secrecy", even that source of information might not be available. This hasn't gone down too well with the foreign journalistic community. Mike Woolridge of the BBC, who's just back from Kargil, says: "Wherever possible, independent travel should be allowed and journalists should have the right to make a risk assessment."