Vayalar Ravi, minister for overseas Indian affairs, has rushed in where more sensible people might think twice before treading.

By asking the Indian embassy in the United States to formally complain to the state department about a silly joke by TV host Jay Leno, Mr Ravi opened himself and his country to ridicule.

Even before the embassy could formulate its protest note came a gentle but unmistakable rebuke from the state department, which defended Leno’s right to freedom of speech and also noted that President Barack Obama had celebrated Guru Nanak’s birthday at the White House.

Mr Ravi could have spared himself the blushes had he actually bothered to study what the fuss was about. In showing the Golden Temple, Leno (himself a millionaire) was making fun of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s opulent lifestyle; no slur was intended about Sikhism. The main US Sikh organisations remained unperturbed about the so-called “slur”.

But of course, as we have seen at the Jaipur Literature Festival, there are always busybodies who rush forward to take umbrage, which gives them some publicity. And Mr Ravi, no doubt eager to please voters in election-going Punjab, waded in with orders to the Indian ambassador (who, incidentally, doesn’t report to him).

The government, clearly, has learnt nothing from the Salman Rushdie affair. We run the risk of becoming a global laughing stock over our ultra-sensitivity and our disregard for the principles of free speech.

Countries with pretensions of becoming superpowers can’t behave like this, and Mr Ravi needs to be reminded of that.