India’s upcoming Lok Sabha elections are once again in the news in the US. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s interview in Newsweek marks one important moment in this topic of continuing interest abroad. The well-known journal Foreign Policy has also published a whole issue on India.
When compared to the paranoid and hysterical tone of the Anglo-American news coverage of India’s 2019 elections, the present coverage seems a little better, spanning a range of positions which we could place in three categories: Factual, propositional but reasonable and fairly debatable, and finally, just desperately deceptive.
How India’s polls are being covered in Western media
In the first category are statements about the Modi government’s achievements, particularly in terms of welfare and development schemes. There seems to be little battle left among Western critics to contest the fact that he remains immensely popular in India, and far more than leaders in most other democracies.
In the second category are statements that are critical of the Modi government, such as accusations of “illiberalism” and “authoritarianism”. These claims are best judged on an individual basis — perhaps some qualified criticism is valid, while others might well be easily refuted by government supporters.
In the third category are misleading or false statements, which are deeply concerning, and yet not a surprise. These evasions and lies pertain to an issue that the Western media obdurately refuse to course-correct on, and that is the question of Hinduphobia in their news coverage (Hinduphobia, in my view, is not a matter of personal opinion but can be objectively operationalised, as I have done elsewhere, to allow systematic study of media content for bias).
The charge of “Hindu supremacism,” for example, occurs regularly in Western reports on Indian politics today. What exactly do they offer as evidence of this? In his essay in Foreign Policy, Ravi Agrawal talks about the 2002 Gujarat riots with a seemingly innocuous statement that the “train caught fire.” That the whole of India knows (and of course, would much rather not hold it against anyone any more, perhaps), that the train was “set on fire,” still remains too hard a truth for some to swallow.
American journalism’s half truths
One can forgive uncertainty in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy when facts may not be fully known, but what does it tell us about Western journalism that even after 22 years, they have relentlessly and religiously, repeated the same, unchanging set of misleading words about Hindus, India, Hindutva, and Modi?
If it’s the 2002 riots, it is always a case of spontaneous combustion. If it is Ayodhya, it is always a case of history beginning only in 1528 when a mosque was built on the terra nullius of “South Asia” where it lived peacefully until the Hindu supremacists broke it in 1992.
I have studied the coverage of this issue too. The exclusion of a fuller history that allows a more honest debate, with room for civil disagreement, has been done with precision and persistence. How long do they plan to keep old wounds alive with their lies?
And yet, none of this is about India or Hindus alone. The retreat of American news media into a miasma of propaganda, delusion, and self-deception is a wider concern in America too. Some scholars have blamed it on changing class dynamics; from a working-class profession, journalism has been “gentrified” into the preserve of multi-generationally privileged elites hired from a tiny number of elite colleges who fail to see the world from the eyes of anyone outside their bubble (because outside the bubble it’s all “right-wing”).
A problem beyond India-reporting
A poignant account of the fall in American journalism was published recently in The Free Press by veteran National Public Radio (NPR) editor Uri Berliner. Berliner describes the warmth that American listeners felt with NPR in their daily lives, even if it was always liberal, and even among its conservative audiences.
Then, it changed. NPR became overwhelmed with a singular line of argument; rigid, unyielding, unable to muster the space for even a few minutes of a counterview.
Day after day, listeners were harangued that Trump conspired with Putin. And then Covid. And BLM. And after Ukraine, Putin, again.
In an earlier time, media researchers used to say media can tell us what to think about, but not necessarily what to think; a nod to a time when the spectrum of representation was wider perhaps. But not anymore. By sheer dint of what we may call its “viewpoint diversity-aversion,” NPR lost much of its credibility. Berliner writes that it reached a point where NPR was boasting that polls had shown that Americans trusted them more than even CNN. But how many? Three out of ten.
American journalism is in a state where a once-venerable institution celebrates that a mere 3 out of 10 Americans trust it!
NPR has, of course, also been in the same rut with its India-reporting. Hindu American researchers documented its bias and wrote to its news editor in the wake of an ugly incident in 2019 when its producer, Furkan Khan, tweeted hateful abuses at Hindus asking them to convert out of their “piss-drinking” and “dung-worshipping” religion. Khan resigned, but nothing changed. Her reports on Hindus and India remained online, as did NPR’s state of denial about bias and Hinduphobia.
Some years later, I met NPR’s then-CEO John Lansing at a talk on my campus. I gave him a copy of that letter. He was polite enough to me, even after having been very angry at Putin throughout his talk earlier. But again, nothing changed.
The refusal to listen, or even permit audiences to hear everyone and draw their own conclusions, is the mark of American journalism today.
The letters in its presses have probably turned to rust. Whether it’s the India story, or even the America story, not one change is deemed necessary.
How the East and West can come together
But this sad situation may turn out to be a wake-up call for a more inspired, and inspiring response, from Indian communication professionals now.
Instead of settling for mere “befitting replies” on Twitter or WhatsApp, or worse, retreating into complacent boasts that nobody in India cares about what US media say, India’s new government should take global leadership in establishing a new vision for news — in the West — which is still the belly of the world information (and disinformation) beast.
At the moment, frankly, no one on American campuses or on its streets knows what is happening in India, or what India could make happen for the whole world in the coming decades. Vaccine-diplomacy, yoga-days, pirate-policing, good, yes, but barely known here, still.
What India should start envisioning is a whole new global model of news and communication.
News may have started in colonial Europe for the purpose of plunder in the colonies, dressed up with some dignity alongside as a handmaiden of democracy, but the world is different now.
We need to ask: What might a vision of news from our own civilisational ideals, from a social idea of yoga, in ideals like satya, ahimsa, asteya, brahmacharya, look like?
What would the rishis and yogis do if they had Hollywood at their feet?
Can creative people working across cultures forge a vision for not just transactional politics but for something larger, like ecological, social, and cultural health? The great renaissances always happened when East and West sparked together.
It may seem idealistic, but I believe it can happen.
I still remember how American students flocked to Al Jazeera English (AJE) in the early 2000s because they finally had a vision of the world from outside their shores. That vision is fading fast though. They will look to India for light, as they have always done. And we must be ready.
The writer is professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco
