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Why is Western media so biased against India?

Written By Nirmalya Dutta | Updated: Dec 28, 2015, 10:50 PM IST

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From offending cartoons in The Australian and NYT to over-the-top criticism of PM Narendra Modi, Western media outlets often get India wrong.

After the CoP 21 debate, there were some rather tasteless cartoons about India. First, Rupert Murdoch’s Australian ran a cartoon, of a turbaned family trying to eat solar. Amanda Wise, an associate professor of sociology at Macquarie University, slammed the cartoons and told Guardian Australia. “This cartoon is unequivocally racist and draws on very base stereotypes of third world, underdeveloped people who don’t know what to do with technology,” Wise told Guardian Australia.”

“India is the technology centre of the world right now and has some of the most high-tech industries on the planet in that part of the world. The underlying message is that people in developing countries don’t need all these technologies to do with climate change – they need food. But actually it is people living in poverty that will suffer the most through food security, sea level rises, dropping of the water table.”

The imagery as she points out is 1950s symbolism. She added: “This is really old imagery he has drawn on. Thin, starving people wearing turbans, who are so starving they are going to chop up solar panels. That is 1950s symbolism. We have moved on. The rest of the world has moved on.”

The Australian defended its cartoon with the old-school 'freedom of speech argument', saying that people missed the joke:

“We stand by this cartoon and believe it is a strong example of Bill Leak and The Australian’s exercise of its commitment to freedom of speech. The cartoon does not intend to ridicule Indians but the climate change activists who would send poor people solar panels rather than give them something they need – cheap power, aid and a hand up,” the statement said.

“Those following the debates in and around the Paris conference run in our pages would have realised the target of the cartoon was not Indians. It was quite the opposite. Our readers would have – and, in fact, have – understood this.”

Similarly, sometime before that the New York Times had published a cartoon showing an elephant on the rail tracks, blocking the ‘climate train’. 

Writing for NDTV, Swati Thiyagarajan pointed out that the build-up the CoP 21 conference focussed a lot on India’s role in climate change. She wrote: “For weeks prior to the climate summit in Paris and most certainly since the summit began, the Western media has been busy portraying India as a problem. The BBC did an article on how coal and coal production, if not regulated, will derail any climate change gains. NYT ran a big article on how PM Modi could make or break Obama's climate legacy. The United States has been portraying itself as the country that created this summit and has taken credit for bringing together all nations for the discussion.”

This is a very unfair portrayal of India’s role in the climate change conference considering the carbon emission from developed nations. At the CoP 21, India was more than a bit-part player demanding that developed countries take on more responsibility and provide financial support to developing nations to help them switch to green technology.

Why is the Western media so ignorant of India?

The truth is that with a few exceptions, most Western media outlets are incoherently ignorant about India. We’ve seen it time and again and even liberal outlets, like the aforementioned Guardian are equally guilty of it.

The editorial stance of The Guardian called Narendra Modi’s visit over the top. At least that editorial, maintained a little balance, with another Guardian post by sculptor Anish Kapoor going completely overboard, which is reflected in the headline – India is being ruled by a Hindu Taliban.  The article is so over-the-top that if one didn’t know about India at all, they’d think that it was a mash-up  of Syria under ISIS and Kim Jong-Un’s North Korea with a dash of Orwellian thought police thrown in.

(Read: Why Anish Kapoor is wrong about India being ruled by a Hindu Taliban)

We saw similar reactions from across the world when the government banned India’s Daughter, a thoroughly amateurish documentary which has been making waves across the world and depicted the average Indian male as a heinous rapist. While the decision, to ban the documentary was wrong, there's no denying that it was an extremely shoddy and biased piece of work.

 The same thing happens every time someone writes about India or depicts it in film. Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire convinced the world most Indians live in slums, others think it’s all just call centres while some haven’t moved on past the 1950s rhetoric of ‘hungry Indians’.

Yes, there are call centres, yes it’s a travesty that some of our citizens don’t get two meals a day and we are working on it. Yes, there are some incidents of intolerance, but while not justifying it, we’ve to understand that in a land where so many people of different religions and creed live together, there will be flare-ups. Just like racist attacks in the US or UK or Europe against Muslims doesn’t make the entire nation Islamophobes, some clashes doesn’t make the entire populace of that nation bad.  

India, for all its troubles, is simply not as bad as painted by Western media. If it was, we’d really not be having such a huge debate around intolerance under the Modi government, because when true intolerance raises its head, people are not going to stay silent. This is why there weren’t any huge debates around intolerance during Bal Thackeray’s reign in Mumbai or during Mamata Banerjee’s Chief Ministership in West Bengal. 

For heaven's sake, we live in a land where the Chief Minister of one state, Arvind Kejriwal, can get away with calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi a ‘coward and a psychopath’. It doesn’t speak much for the level of our political discourse, but it is proof of our vibrant democracy.

Most Western media outlets fail to do so when they either look at it through their prism of privilege, or when they asked the India’s privileged to be its sole voice. It's not a problem unique to India. I've heard similar comments from people in Africa who feel that their greatly misrepresented in Western media. 

The idea of India is far too complicated to explain in one column, cartoon or sound bite. To borrow a phrase from Jug Suraiya, it’s like trying to explain ‘Dante’s inferno in a tweet’ and it is time Western media outlets got their heads out of their privileged arses and try to understand India without viewing it through pre-colonial glasses or through an Englishman's eyes. 

Someone who doesn’t live in India or hasn’t experienced its diversity, will never understand exactly how people from such distinct backgrounds live together with such harmony. When one sees the Western world grapple with issues like immigration or diverse religious groups, it makes one realise just how flexible our cultural system is, to allow so many people of so many backgrounds live with each other peacefully.