Western media must be truthful

Last month, the BBC aired a two-part malignant documentary titled, “India: The Modi Question” that sought to exhume a dead controversy—the role of Narendra Modi in the 2002 Gujarat riots. Then on 11 February, the New York Times published a full-page scathing opinion piece by Lydia Polgreen, titled, “India is Jettisoning Freedom and Tolerance” that again attempted to put the spotlight back on the Gujarat riots while broadly lamenting on the diminishing space for freedom and tolerance under the Modi government. The next day, an editorial in the same newspaper (India’s Proud Tradition of a Free Press Is at Risk, 12 February) toed the same line.
It is difficult to convince oneself that this sudden barrage of anti-India articles is a harmless coincidence devoid of any ulterior motive. A reading of the fine print and in between the lines reveals a Machiavellian game plan: a toxic campaign driven by Western envy, liberal antagonism and above all a blatant but subliminal Hinduphobia occurring in the setting of a resurgent optimistic India under the BJP Modi government, which is up for re-election next year. India is specifically being targeted and demonized not because of its mundane deficiencies but because of Modi, the BJP and their Hindu identity.
The image of India as an authoritarian state out to censure free speech and suppress minorities scripted by the Western media is a false patois; a devious narrative built on a mountain of lies and a profound ignorance of complex Hindu-Muslim dynamics of the subcontinent or its history.
There is no denying that more Muslims lost their lives than Hindus in the Gujarat riots. But it is also important to acknowledge that the incineration of 59 Hindu women, men and children in a train compartment by a Muslim mob at Godhra was the cardinal event that sparked the Gujarat riots. Without Godhra there would never have been a Gujarat 2002. After an extensive investigation and a trial, in 2011 a special court concluded that these killings were a planned conspiracy; 31 Muslims were convicted, 11 of them being awarded the death sentence.
Despite the unequivocal verdict of the court, the Western media continues to project this incident as an accident or at best a crime of questionable culpability to shift the entire blame to Hindus. Lydia Polgreen writes that the “cause of the fire was disputed, but some people blamed Muslims, prompting spasms of violence targeting them.”
Time magazine also reiterated this falsehood, A recent article (Astha Rajvanshi and Armani Syed. Why India Is Using Emergency Laws to Ban a Documentary About Prime Minister Modi, 23 January 2023) states that the “Muslim community was allegedly held responsible for the incident, leading to heightened retaliatory attacks.”
Further Lydia Polgreen asserts: “Under Modi’s government, violence against Muslims in India has risen and is often unpunished. His government has enacted laws and policies that target Muslims, including changes to citizenship rules that disadvantage Muslims and revocation of the special status of Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region contested by India and Pakistan.”
Flippant sentences like these speak of a writer who has not done one’s homework before penning such a weighty article. Article 370 was a flawed statute that discriminated against other Indians and encouraged a radical fundamentalist insurgency that was responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindus from Kashmir.
The CAA, a compassionate law meant to provide succour to persecuted minorities from India’s neighbouring Islamic countries was craftily distorted by violence, misinformation and exploiting insecurity among Muslims to project it as a divisive instrument of hate. The Western media continues to further this distorted narrative.
The editorial in the New York Times (India’s Proud Tradition of a Free Press Is at Risk. Editorial, the NY Times, 12 February 2023) pontificates: “The misuse of their powers to intimidate, censor, silence or punish independent news media is an alarming hallmark of populist and authoritarian leaders…Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has fallen squarely into this camp….The latest manifestation of the government intolerance for critical reporting was its invocation of emergency laws last month to block a BBC documentary.”
While the Indian government may have gone a little too far in banning the documentary, there were mitigating factors. After a period of prolonged turmoil (the CAA protests and the farmer’s agitation) India was experiencing a period of relative calm, this blatantly false and incendiary British portrayal of Indian events had the potential to resurrect hate and rancour and accentuate existing Hindu-Muslim differences. The British were back at their old game. The government did what it thought was best for civic harmony.
Next the editorial references a Human Rights Watch report to make a hyperbolic claim: “…the B.J.P.’s ideology of Hindu primacy has infiltrated the justice system and the media, empowering party supporters to threaten, harass, and attack religious minorities, particularly Muslims, with impunity.”
Another exaggeration. Despite some isolated instances, Muslims in India continue to have the same rights as every Indian citizen and to call the situation in India “a climate of impunity” is a stretch.
When I delved deeper into this Human Rights report, it confirmed what I have always believed: the anti-India narrative in the Western media is to a great extent influenced by expatriate Indians or partisan activists of Indian origin. The report was authored by none other than Meenakshi Ganguly, an ex-Time magazine reporter notorious for an anti-Hindu slant to her writings on Gujarat.
Finally, the million-dollar question: Is the Western media really the champion of democracy that it claims to be?
Discrediting the verdict of one of the most important institutions of a democracy, the Supreme Court of India, in favour of a shoddy enquiry conducted by a bunch of amateur British diplomats, who the ex-Foreign Secretary Jack Straw admitted, “did the best they could”, and which has been quoted extensively by the Western media in recent days does not further the cause of democracy. It undermines the process.
For all their talk about freedom of speech, the Western media outlets have failed to practice what they preach; they have consistently blocked out counter views. I have yet to come across in the last 20 years an article or news report in the New York Times that tells you the other side of the story with regard to Modi, the BJP or Hindu victimhood. Such lopsided reporting is called propaganda; it is not a jeremiad for liberty.
And is this sleaze campaign an attempt to influence India’s general election a year away?
By distorting facts, by its ignorance (deliberate or otherwise), by aligning with Indians with a partisan agenda, and by attempting to illegally sway the electoral process, the Western media has proved to be the villain rather than the hero in the story of democracy in India.
The era of colonialism is over. India no longer lives in awe of the Western world. Today, we are comfortable in our own skin and confident that we have not and will not violate the basic principles of humanity ordained by our civilization culture.
If the western media is really serious about engaging a post-renaissance India in a debate about democracy, then it should disassociate itself from its shady Indian waterboys and girls and adhere to the fundamental principles of truth and honesty in reporting.