When reporting about India and Narendra Modi, the entire western legacy media uses just one, knackered boilerplate.
“India is important but…”
“Modi is autocratic…”
“India’s democracy is on the slide…”
“Muslims and Christians are facing persecution…”
The entire coverage revolves around these key phrases. No proof or data on any of this is submitted and no investigation done to find if these are true. So-called guardians of journalism like The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Economist or the Time magazine have even done away with the journalistic tokenism of taking, however perfunctorily, the other side of the story.
Opinion is the new investigation. Any view that contradicts or challenges that of Left-leaning western establishments, deep states and globalist networks is untouchable.
The timing of the latest wave of attacks on India and its twice democratically elected leader Narendra Modi coincides with his State visit — the highest ranking among a head of the state’s trips — to the US.
The visit seems to have split America’s Democratic Party ecosystem into two. One part, to which president Joe Biden belongs and which sent out the invitation to Prime Minister Modi, is pulling no stops to welcome him and court India. From US secretary of state Anthony Blinken to White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, a string of important officials and senators have stressed on the strategic importance of economic, security and cultural ties between the world’s two most important democracies.
The other part, the far-Left strain among Democrats which wields considerable influence in media, academia, social sector and the deep state, is nervous about India’s rise and the enthralling welcome to PM Modi which the US government and the powerful Indian diaspora has planned.
This network of global Left and anti-nationalists carved out of radical Dems and UK’s Labour and funded by chaos entrepreneurs like George Soros have long been in bed with Islamists. It has relentlessly peddled the narrative that Narendra Modi has stoked anti-Muslim sentiments and violence. It silences every voice that points to an ongoing, centuries-old jihad against India by calling it ‘Islamophobia’.
And this ecosystem has weaponised western media against India.
‘A Shrinking Space For Dissent’, ran The New York Times front-page headline earlier this month with a photo of the wrestlers’ protest. Another matter that the protests were allowed to go on for days till the protesters tried to physically disrupt the opening of India’s new Parliament. India’s powerful home minister Amit Shah personally met with them to assure them justice.
The Economist, in its editorial ‘America’s New Best Friend’, goes to the boilerplate right from the first paragraph.
No country except China has propped up Russia war economy as much as oil-thirsty India. And few big democracies have slid further in the rankings of democratic freedom. But you will not guess it from the rapturous welcome that Narendra Modi will receive in Washington next week.
Those three sentences contain at least two lies and a half-truth. Yes, India buys oil from Russia. But if that makes it prop up the war economy, the West is way more guilty of it. America kept importing pillows to clothing to shoes from Russia even six months into the war.
Germany was the biggest importer of Russian oil two months into the conflict, according to Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
As Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said, “I suspect looking at the figures, probably our total purchases for the month would be less than what Europe does in an afternoon.”
About the oft-repeated, templatised accusation of sliding democratic freedom, The Economist does not mention that the recent Press Freedom rankings laughably put India behind Pakistan and Afghanistan without any data to back it up. Also, the western media has never investigated western agencies which do these rankings, their composition and funding, or their strong biases and agenda. Perhaps because the puppet masters of western media and such agencies and NGOs are the same?
But the piece most illustrative of this boilerplate journalism which captures every trope manufactured about India under Narendra Modi is one titled, ‘What Modi’s Visit to Washington Tells Us About Indian American Voters’, in the Time magazine.
It is written by Yasmeen Serhan and Astha Rajvanshi. Yasmeen, who considers herself a Palestinian-Muslim-American Democrat, is often unleashed by western media to ‘objectively’ write about Islamophobia and the plight of Muslims. She is to Time, the Atlantic and other publications what Rana Ayyub — who has been called out for her Hinduphobic agenda and articles which have been discredited in the court of law — is to The Washington Post. Atlantic, for instance, published her rant, ‘The Hinduization Of India Is Nearly Complete’, which was taken apart on the Indian social media for its lack of honesty and research.
After the usual outbreaks of anti-Semitism during Israel-Palestine clashes, she is one of the footsoldiers of the faith in the media who whitewashes it by articles like, ‘Anti-Semitism Has No Place In Palestine Advocacy’, in which she argues that hurling anti-semitic abuses and molotov cocktails “did not mirror the actions of pro-Palestinian activists elsewhere”.
So, Serhan and Rajvanshi (whose articles defend Delhi riot-accused Safoora Zargar and the likes), set out to write this ‘objective’ piece for Time. They come straight to the boilerplate, first paragraph.
In 2005, the then-chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat was denied a diplomatic visa amid accusations he tacitly supported Hindu mobs during communal violence three years earlier that left more than a thousand people, most of them Muslim, dead.
After dragging in every single court of law for a dozen years during Congress-led UPA rule, not a single charge against Narendra Modi has been proven. Yet, this innuendo never dies.
As a candidate, the US President made defending human rights and democracy a cornerstone of his foreign policy agenda. Critics argue that his embrace of Modi, who over his two terms as Prime Minister has overseen significant democratic backsliding in India, is doing just the opposite.
What evidence do the two writers provide of “democratic backsliding” in India?
None.
If they are talking about the World Press Freedom Index (WPFI), numerous nations have raised concerns about the criteria, methodology and also its creator agency RSF’s perceived biases and opaqueness of the survey.
“Question-wise or category-wise scores used in computing scores for the six parameters are not made public, nor is the list of respondents provided. Similarly, clearly defined, credible sources are not available for quantitative data on abuse and violence against journalists, nor is any attempt made to clarify such data with government or country-wise sources in any of the countries being ranked,” says a Niti Aayog piece by Saumya Chakraborty. “When a limited sample of approximately 150 respondents and 18 NGOs are asked to analyse and respond to 83 questions for each country, the chances of biases and disconnect with the realities are high. On an average, 1 respondent is asked to provide parameter-wise assessments for 1 country; the implausibility of one respondent being able to accurately assess press freedom in a country renders the WPFI rankings highly subjective at best. Indeed, this might be one of the reasons behind RSF’s reluctance in sharing parameter scores or even anonymised country-wise responses.”
Former Singapore prime minister Goh Chok Tong had dismissed the WPFI as “a subjective measure computed through the prism of western liberals”.
The controversial Indian leader—who is poised to win his third term next year—has been accused of aggressively championing a Hindu-nationalist agenda that critics say reinvents the very idea of India as a pluralist, secular democracy to a religious, nationalist autocracy. Under Modi’s leadership, India has passed discriminatory laws that have alienated nearly 200 million Muslims; squashed dissent by jailing journalists, activists, and civil society organizations; and exercised judicial influence against his political opponents (notably, Rahul Gandhi, the de facto leader and scion of the Gandhi-Nehru family at the helm of the opposition Congress Party).
Amusingly, that champion of “Hindu nationalist agenda” has overseen the rollout of the most extensive welfare schemes from homes for the poor to cooking gas, from toilets to tap water, and from electricity in the last home to building roads where there were none. And Muslims have been one of the biggest beneficiaries of these schemes.
The foremost of the “discriminatory laws” which have allegedly alienated 200 million Indian Muslims is the Citizenship Amendment Act, a narrow-window legislation which hastens the process of citizenship for the persecuted minorities from India’s three Islamic neighbours: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. The agenda paddlers won’t tell you about the historic backdrop of the Nehru-Liaquat Pact that this move is tied to, or that Muslims from these countries can still apply for Indian citizenship under the normal Citizenship Act of 1955.
Nor do the writers of the article substantiate on how the Narendra Modi government exercised influence on the judiciary to get Rahul Gandhi disqualified from Parliament. Just as they do not elaborate on the grave charges against the jailed ‘activists’ and how many were killed or maimed in Bhima-Koregaon or Delhi riots as a consequence of their ‘activism’.
The State Department’s annual Religious Freedom Report, a survey of religious freedoms around the world, has expressed a number of concerns over India in recent years.
The report by USCIRF is the State Department’s annual farce. It has been criticised for its biases against non-Christians and called a front for American missionaries. It has been silent on forceful or dubious missionary conversions and jihad against India, trying to pressure India into accommodating such groups. Its current head Tony Perkins has been widely criticised for his views against non-Christians and LGBTQ+ individuals.
So biased is its stance that in 2020, three members dissented against its recommendation of sanctions against India.
But according to Audrey Truschke, an associate professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University and a vocal critic of Modi’s Hindu nationalist base, the decision to host Modi shows that the “Biden administration does not care about human rights in India.
Audrey Truschke is an apologist for one of the worst perpetrators of genocide against Hindus, the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb. She has not just tried to distort history to whitewash the emperor’s well-recorded mass murders, rapes, conversions and plunder of Indian cities and temples, she has been repeatedly reported for spreading Hinduphobia on western campuses. To quote her on human rights is akin to allowing Pakistan to lecture on counterterrorism.
In an open letter drafted by Hindus for Human Rights, a Washington DC-based advocacy group, several Indian Americans, human rights advocates, and concerned allies have also urged Biden to “push back” against the Indian government’s “escalating attacks on human rights and democracy.”
Hindus for Human Rights is a front created to do exactly the opposite. It is headed by Sunita Viswanath who is backed by George Soros’s Open Society. It is closely linked to Marxist and Islamist outfits and it tirelessly engages in attacking Narendra Modi, India and Hindus.
These are the shadowy outfits and causes whose shoulders the western media uses to fire at India. In turn, deep states and elitist networks which do not want a strong Indian government buoyed by rising nationalism fire from the legacy media’s shoulder for credibility.
It is to be seen which Democratic Party wins when Biden hosts Modi and what happens thereafter. The odds are the strategic relationship will win. There is too much for both democracies to lose — especially to adversaries like China — if the narrow self-interest of clandestine Marxist-jihadist-globalist groups trump much larger, pragmatic national interest.
Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed are personal.
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