West Is Not Best!

By Hardayal Singh

In a recent editorial, the Irish Times agreed that Prime Minister Modi would easily sweep the current elections to the Lok Sabha. However, pretty much in sync with the current Western media narrative on India, it questioned the democratic credentials of the country. The hit job was nothing new; we've been seeing it since 1947, perhaps even earlier!

"If you ain't with us, you're against us," my family and I watched an important-looking public figure thundering on our black and white TV, one summer evening in Washington D.C. in the mid-fifties. We had no doubts about which country he had in mind. Almost acting on cue, we saw U.S. media trash India's attempts at following an independent foreign policy. Truth be told we were always presently surprised when India was not shown in a poor light - often as a poverty-stricken, overcrowded, unhygienic land of superstitious people, snake charmers, and fakirs!

Times may have changed, but prejudices continue, albeit in different forms. Umesh Upadhyay (Western Media Narratives on India from Gandhi to Modi, Rupa, 20024) not only traces the history of this bias but more importantly, also analyses why it exists. Consider a few glaring examples of misreporting: Soon after Independence, a deliberate and mischievous narrative was created to show that India was hopelessly divided and would never survive as a single country. Both the British media and Government could never quite comprehend how Sardar Patel was able to persuade the 562 princely states to sign the Instrument of Accession. They questioned the methods the Sardar used to integrate Hyderabad into India.

Fast forward to November 5, 1971. Richard Nixon called a meeting of his advisers just before his summit with Indira Gandhi who had come to discuss the crisis unfolding in East Pakistan. By then, about ten million refugees had flocked to India, putting an impossible strain on our economy.

When he talked to his advisers, Nixon's attitude was remarkably insensitive and cavalier, his language typically littered with expletives. He called PM Indira Gandhi a "b--ch" a number of times; Kissinger replied that Indians were "b-----rds anyway." Soon after the files were declassified in June 2005 and the details of this meeting came out, the media did not talk about the American policymakers' foul and undignified language, but instead highlighted Kissinger's weak and anemic conditional apology which came thirty-five years too late!

PM Indira Gandhi never believed that the BBC was autonomous of the British government or that it was fair and objective in its reporting, as it often projected itself. She banned its broadcasts on two occasions. Even so, In June 1984, the BBC broadcast an interview with one Jagjit Singh Chauhan, a separatist Khalistani leader, who called for her beheading. Months later she was actually assassinated. Quite recently because of its bias against the present government, the Western media tried to sell the narrative that the GoI was grossly under-reporting the number of deaths from the Covid pandemic. In May 2021, the NY Times estimated that under one scenario, the number of people likely to have been infected was over 700 million - half the Indian population - with about 4.2 million likely deaths. The actual number of deaths in the whole world then was 3.52 million. The figure estimated for India was thus more than the actual number of deaths from Covid in the whole world. Later in 2023, the NY Times accepted the official Indian figure of 5,30,779 along with the fact that over 70 per cent of the population stood fully vaccinated, but there was no apology for its earlier misrepresentation. At 379 deaths per million population, India suffered much less than many other countries - such as the U.S. (3560 deaths), France (2556 deaths), and the UK (3389 deaths). This fact was never reported because it was inconvenient.

Instances of such bias can be multiplied ad infinitum. Both Umesh Upadhyay as well as Vikram Sood, the former head of India's Research and Analysis Wing (The Ultimate Goal, Harper Collins India, 2020), have pointed out that it exists because the western media cherry-picks facts and data to fit it into narratives that suit their foreign offices and intelligence agencies. Some assumptions behind foreign policy are at times a colonial hangover, based on dubious and arrogant assumptions of superior Western values; perceptions of national interests are often camouflaged in terms of grandiloquent declarations of universal human rights!

(The writer was Chief Commissioner of Income-tax and is the author of the Moral Compass- Finding Balance and Purpose in an Imperfect World, Harper Collins India, 2022)