Typical Excuses of Indians and How to Deal with Them ①

Indians will come up with "excuses" for everything.First of all, what makes you frustrated when you arrive in India is this communication mode of Indians. This is a kind of self-defense instinct for Indians, but it is quite formidable when you actually face them as subordinates or business partners. As a result, if you find arguing with them troublesome and just let it slide, and you end up accepting their claims, Indians will genuinely believe, "I was right after all." Therefore, leaving arguments or responsibilities ambiguous will lead to mutual misunderstandings in the long run, resulting in resentment or failure to fulfill promises. If the other party is your subordinate, you will not be able to control him or her. After all, if you stop pursuing the matter, they will think they have been accepted. If they were Japanese, you might expect them to understand their own unreasonable claims and feel a pang of conscience somewhere in their hearts, but you cannot expect that from Indians in their cultural context.

What we Japanese must be conscious of is winning in the "local battles" of each argument, and not being afraid to point things out and challenge Indians. Without winning these daily local battles, there is no overall victory. This is one of the costs you must pay in India. If we ask Indians to do something and it is not fulfilled, or if they fail, we must have them perform it again, provide compensation, or take some kind of action. If you cannot break through the defense of the other party's "excuses" at that time, you or your family will end up suffering the loss. That is why we foreigners must learn how to crush these characteristic arguments deployed by Indians and protect ourselves. That protects your personal life and the company's profits.

To win in local battles, you need to have three elements. The first is the basic physical strength of logical thinking, the second is a legitimate claim regarding the issue, and the third isprior knowledge about the unique tactics that Indians will unleash. The first and second are basic elements required regardless of who the other party is, but for the third, unless you spend some time in India, you will not be able to reach a structural understanding, and as a result, you will be caught up in the arguments that Indians are good at and suffer disadvantages.As international students, expatriates, and accompanying family members, I hope you will understand these special tactics early on, protect your own interests, and make your work and life go smoothly. Below, I will explain what these typical special tactics are, one by one, and introduce counters and mindsets for them.

Typical excuses often deployed by Indians are mainly classified as follows.

① Shift Responsibility
(Taking the cause of the problem elsewhere)

② Cancel out own fault
(Bringing up another topic where you are at fault, aiming for a draw)

③ Shift to another topic
(Starting to explain a completely unrelated topic to blur the point)

④ Elaborate wrong route course
(Using things without causal relationships as if they were causes or reasons)

⑤ Solve and Escape
(Refusing to admit fault and immediately solving the problem to make it seem like it never happened)

None of these arguments are suitable for constructive discussion.First of all, it is important to know the existence and names of these arguments so that you can recognize them the moment the other party deploys them.Just recognizing what kind of argument is being used gives you peace of mind. By recognizing specific arguments as categories, when they deploy them,you can understand, "Oh, this guy has started using this argument," and if you have the answer within yourself, such as "I will hit them with this phrase," you can gain an advantage in the discussion.With the mindset that you are in the right and that you are the one saying reasonable things, you should develop your argument without being intimidated by the confident attitude of Indians.

The five arguments introduced here have one thing in common: their purpose is to avoid criticism of themselves, and they are focused on defense. This strongly reflects the environment of India.As mentioned in this column as well, the essence of India is overcrowding and fierce competition, and the potential mindset that they absolutely want to avoid losing an argument or suffering an immediate loss is deeply rooted in the hearts of Indians. While winning an argument is desirable, there seems to be a simmering fear within them that the moment they admit defeat regarding an event where they are at fault, death and poverty will visit them. That is why the five arguments reflect the philosophy of"trying to avoid losing at all costs when you are about to lose," and as a result, they become defensive. Of course, as a result of deploying excuses, credibility and trust may be damaged, and they may suffer losses in the long run. However, for them, short-term profit is important, and not losing on the spot seems important.


From here on, I will explain the five arguments one by one.First is Shift Responsibility (taking the cause of the problem elsewhere), its explanation and how to deal with it. This is one of the most common excuses seen in India, and it accounts for more than half of the cases. For example, the following case.

<<I asked a travel agency agent to book a train ticket, but the Indian Railways reservation system was down, and I couldn't apply for the train ticket I had planned. When I questioned the agent, they brazenly said, "It's the fault of the railway reservation system, not our fault." >>

In this case, they are shifting the responsibility for their failure to book the ticket as promised to the reservation system. What the other party is saying is, "I did my job properly, but I couldn't get the ticket due to an unpredictable system failure, so I am not bad, I am not responsible (I cannot compensate for that)." Of course, there are many ways to point out such childish excuses, and by our common sense, it is an act that shows they are taking their work lightly. However, you should assume that they will say things like this with a straight face.

Now, what approach should you take when you hear this excuse?The most important thing here is the grand principle of "sticking to asserting the concept and original responsibility without entering into trivial arguments or specific examples."If you start an exchange like "Why didn't you book earlier?" in a way that goes along with the other party's argument, the goal will be far away. The moment you state such individual points, the other party recognizes that they can escape responsibility by answering this "question," and will state further excuses for shifting responsibility. Indians are not good at thinking about solutions or preventive measures, but when thinking about excuses for troubles they have caused, they are equipped with the ability to instantly create one illogical argument after another with about 10 times the usual instantaneous power. This is an ability that even manual laborers with low education levels, rural merchants, and drivers possess, and they exert abnormal power, so if you get caught up in this, the thread of the argument will go in a different direction.

In other words, if you say, "Why didn't you book in the reservation system sufficiently in advance? If you had taken it earlier, couldn't you have taken the ticket before the system error occurred?", they will find any number of materials to smoke the argument, such as "The day before was a company holiday, so it was impossible to book in advance. I thought about doing it early, but my boss wouldn't approve it until the day of. Errors rarely happen, so there was no reason to book early," and so on. If you get caught up in this, before you know it, you will reach an incomprehensible direction of analyzing the internal approval process of a travel agency you don't even know, and proving whether they really couldn't make the booking arrangements in advance.

What you need to do here is to ask a simple question and confirm the facts, such as
What did I ask you? Did you complete what I asked? Yes or No.
.
And then, make them admit the fact that
If it was not done, it means that you didn’t perform what you were expected to do and your job.
.

Since the purpose of the shift responsibility argument is to escape responsibility, you must eliminate the other party's escape route by firmly blocking that point. The person asked this question might line up various "reasons why they couldn't do it" again,but essentially, whatever the reason for not being able to do it, it does not mean they are released from the responsibility of achieving that job. You just need to repeat the same question and demand confirmation of simple facts.
After this confirmation is obtained, you can let the other party swim however you like, but if the other party shows signs of shifting responsibility again, you just need to return repeatedly to the point that
Whatever was behind, we confirmed the fact among each other that you didn’t perform what you needed to do.
.

This is a slight digression, but why is carefully organizing the background and reasons a bad move in India? Andwhy is the shift responsibility argument easy to function? There is the instability of Indian society there. In India, the task of fact-checking is incredibly difficult. To give an example of the previous case, you cannot expect Indian Railways to carefully announce the system failure that occurred, nor can you expect it to be known in an easy-to-understand form. Even if you seriously try to confirm the presence or absence of a system failure, it is unclear which counter to check with, and it is doubtful whether the person at the counter will deal with you properly. Even if someone miraculously deals with you, you don't know if that person is really a credible information source. Because society is operated at this level everywhere, it is difficult to pursue fact-checking for events that are not under your own control. And even if you estimate rationally, you can raise any number of materials to deny the estimated facts.In such a society, it is effective to deflect attacks from yourself for the time being, and even if you pursue the facts where you deflected, there is no exit. That is why this method of shifting responsibility is very effective in this country, and it has become a method that anyone at any level can use frequently and easily as a basic pattern of excuses.

Now, after making the other party admit the existence of responsibility, you may return to a constructive discussion. If the other party is a subordinate, you can return to the normal communication mode of having them think for themselves about how to prevent trouble, or teaching them yourself. Although Indians make excuses so desperately, in terms of work, they are actually seeking feedback from their superiors. While the classic leadership style of Indians is a way of using slaves by a master that is like power harassment in Japan (scolding if they can't do it, cutting them off if they are unnecessary), your constructive feedback and suggestions for improvement are rare acts in this society, so they are often accepted willingly.

In the second article andthe third article, I will introduce examples and response phrases for the second, "Cancel out own fault," and the other three typical excuses of Indians, just like "Shift Responsibility."