A REJOINDER TO GARDINER HARRIS NYT ARTICLE ON N.

MODI

I HAVE had the privilege to live for more than 40 years in India.
It has long been my opinion that India is very difficult country to
grasp for a foreign correspondent, as it is so different from the
West, full of contradictions, paradoxes, baffling parameters, etc.
Thus, for Westerners, who share more or less the same religion
(Christianity), more or less the same ethnic origins (Caucasian), more
or less the same food habits (meat) and more or less the same dress
code (ties and dresses), India can be a very enigmatic country.

Yet, not only do we find that Western correspondents are generally

posted only for three, maximum five years in India too short a
time to really start getting the ABC of the subcontinent; but also,
that most of them have before even reaching India very strong
and biased ideas, prejudices, misconceptions, on the country they
are supposed to report about in an impartial and fair manner.
By the time they leave India, these foreign correspondents have
even been more reinforced in their prejudices: the Hindu
fundamentalists, the persecuted minorities of India, the Human
Rights abuses performed in Kashmir by the Indian Army, plus the
usual folkloric the stories about India.

Gardiner Harris article titled Campaign for Prime Minister in India

Gets Off to Violent Start, which came out in the NYT dated
17.9.13, does the same & much worse. Firstly, the usual dislike,
which borders on hatred, for Hindu politicians, comes out strongly in
his portrayal of Narendra Modi, after he was named as the BJPs
official candidate, even though he has, after all, has made of his
state, Gujarat, the most efficient, most prosperous and least
corrupt of all the states of India. Of course, he labels Mr Modi
anti-Muslim and accuses him of having engineered the 2002 Gujarat
anti-Muslim riots, carefully omitting the fact that they were
triggered by the horrifying murder of 57 Hindus, 36 of them
innocent women and children, burnt like animals in the Sabarmati
Express. Riots of that intensity like in Gujarat, do not happen in a
day, they are a result of long term pent-up angers and a spark like
the killing of Hindu brothers and sisters, whose only crime was that
they believed that Ram was born in Ayodhya, is enough the ignite the
smouldering fire.

Is it logical that only Mr Modi is targeted? But who went down in the
streets in fury in 2002? Hundreds, if not thousands of Gujuratis,
not only from the lower strata of society, not only Dalits, but also
middle class, and sometimes even upper middle class! Should they
also not be judged and condemned? But then it would be the whole
of Gujarat who should be hauled to court, an ancient and noble race,
who gave so much to India, including Mahatma Gandhi, and today is
still exporting all over the world its upright and successful
businessmen, to the US, for instance, where they own most of the
motels. Harris also choses to ignore this point.

Western correspondents often too do not bother to check their

fact and are criminally ignorant about India. Harris does just the
same by linking Mr Modi with the Riots between Hindus and Muslims
in Muzaffarnagar, UP, in the last week of August. The sate of Uttar
Pradesh is ruled by Mrs Mayawati herself her candidate for the post
of PM and a bitter enemy of Mr Modi.

Of course Harris choses to demonize Hindus, implying that the

roughly 80% Hindu Population (Hindus are much less today) are
ostracizing the 13% Muslim population (who are much more now with
the Bangladesh influx (I would say near 20%) & that Modi will use
the inherent Hindu nationalist streak in every Hindu to get elected
Prime Minister with the blood and tears of Muslims. Yet, in 3,500
years of existence, Hindus have never militarily invaded another
country, never tried to impose their religion on others by force or
induced conversions. You cannot find anybody less fundamentalist
than a Hindu in the world. However today, Hindus are still being
targeted: there were one million Hindus in the Kashmir valley in
1900; only a few hundred remain, the rest having fled in terror.
Blasts after blasts have killed hundreds of innocent Hindus all over
India in the last ten years. Hindus, the overwhelming majority
community of this country, are being made fun of, are despised, are
deprived of the most basic facilities for one of their most sacred
pilgrimages in Amarnath while their government heavily sponsors the
Haj.. They see their brothers and sisters converted to Christianity
through inducements and financial traps, & heir gods are
blasphemed. So sometimes, enough is enough.

There are about a billion Hindus, one in every six persons on this
planet. They form one of the most successful, law-abiding and
integrated communities in the world today see how well they
integrated in the United States, never giving problems to the US
government, paying their taxes, topping in universities and today
grabbing some of the top jobs of the country. Can Harris ignore that
and the fact that Narendra Modi may be their future spokesperson?

The author who was South Asia correspondent for the largest
French daily, Le Figaro, for ten years, is the editor in chief of the
Paris-based La Revue de lInde (larevuedelinde.com) and the author
of many books on India, amongst them The Guru of Joy (Hay
House, 100.000 copies sold)

By Sandeep Balakrishna
As several commentators have observed, the campaign for the 2014
general elections began almost immediately after Narendra Modis
third consecutive electoral victory in Gujarat in 2012. With it, the
media coverage on Modi only intensified. And that includes
international media as well.

For the most part since independence, India has not really been an
object of high interest in the western media and especially the
American media. And when there was some interest, the coverage
was mostly perfunctory, if not slightly biased. One cannot discount
the possibility that Nehrus conscious rebuffing of at least two US
presidents had a role to play in strengthening this disinterest/bias.
And then Indira Gandhi took this rebuffing to a new level, which led
to a near-closure of access to western journalists reporting on
India. Besides, interest in India waned significantly after the
country consciously chose socialism and made all the wrong economic
choices.

By the mid-1980s, as Koenraad Elst mentions in his

seminal Decolonizing the Hindu Mind, an India stint was not really
high on the list of any western media majors journalists. At one
time, an India stint was the equivalent of a punishment posting.
Western journalists posted here would typically spend most of their
time in Delhi and undertake little field work even on crucial, burning
issues. They would content themselves with inputs from their Indian
counterparts who themselves belonged to a power elite and had their
own blind-spots.

Theres really no other way of putting this. Most of our Delhi-based

journalists have had a track record of fawning over these
punishment posting western journalists. Perhaps the elevation of
William Dalrymple to some sort of a cult status in Indian journalistic
and literary circles best exemplifies this phenomenon,
as explained so powerfully by Hartosh Singh Bal. Foreign reporters
stationed here churned out reportage and analyses based precisely
on such biased inputs with predictable consequences: a distorted
coverage of India in the West, which in turn influences perceptions
of India in their respective countries. Of course, this phenomenon
has been on the decline in recent years with the greater penetration
of the Internet, both in India and abroad, but it still persists.

Today, in a vastly changed geopolitical situation, western and more,

specifically, American - interest in India has noticeably increased.
Yet a few things have remained the same. The same biased
reportage still exists among Indian media houses, with our English
TV channels leading the charge. And the same fawning-over-
western-journalists syndrome continues to persist. And heres where
we get to notice that theres another side to western reportage of
India.

Enter the New York Times.

Of all the adjectives one could apply to the NYT, venerable is

certainly not one of them. Veteran maybe. Liberal, definitely,
as NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan confessed last year,
qualifying her statement to say that her papers liberalism was
nuanced. So it is worth examining exactly how well it has adhered
to its self-confessed nuanced liberalism. But, more fundamentally,
how well has it adhered to what we can consider reasonable
standards by which one can judge the NYT or any media house:
factuality, fairness, and objectivity?

A survey of 11 pieces covering mostly political themes - both

reportage and opeds - reveals that they are characterised by an
undisguised undertone of what in India has become infamous as
'pseudo-secularist discourse.

A 2011 piece by Manu Joseph doesnt even make any pretense at

objectivity: it is a straight out personal attack on Sri Sri
Ravishankar and even Rabindranath Tagore, for good measure. It is
nobodys case that anybody should be above scrutiny but that
scrutiny must be based purely on facts, not personal likes or dislikes.

An even older report by Somini Sengupta claims that Hindu outfits

opposition to missionary conversions was what led to Swami
Lakshmananda Saraswatis murder in Kandhamal. However, she omits
mentioning the social and cultural havoc that conversions in the
tribal areas of Odisha have caused. More crucially, she fails to
mention the evangelism-caused horrors set out in vast detail in the
Niyogi Commission Report on conversions, a government document.
Also, Arun Shouries 1999 investigative essay provides the complete
picture of the kind of consequences that unbridled conversions have
wreaked in that tribal state.

This then is a mere sample of NYTs India reportage. But it gets

interesting when we examine its record of covering the BJPs PM
candidate Narendra Modi. Here, the NYT seems to have adopted a
template: nothing that Modi says or does should be shown for what
it is. It has to be shown in negative light. And so this templated
approach to Modi coverage is hinged on one, or several, or all of
these angles:

- Accused of presiding over the 2002 communal riots which

left more than 1,000 killed, majority of them Muslims

- The Supreme Court appointed SIT has cleared him of all

charges, but...
- His popularity has risen over the years but he remains a
polarising and deeply divisive figure

- Muslims dont trust him

- He is authoritarian, is described as a fascist, and thrives on

hate

- His model of Gujarats economic development is flawed

- He encourages only big industrialists and has largely ignored

the SME sector

Of the 11 stories surveyed, pick any of the seven pieces (linked

above) dedicated to covering Modi, and you will note that these are
the common threads around which the coverage is woven. Of course,
a leader who is eyeing the Prime Ministers chair needs to be deeply,
ruthlessly and critically scrutinised. His/her flaws along with the
good points need to be examined and exposed, and Modi should be no
exception to this. But, has the NYT done this?

Worse, the author of most of these pieces, Gardiner Harris, has

gone on to make what can only be called wild accusations. In at
least two pieces, he claims that Modi has been linked with a secret
police assassination squad that mostly targets Muslims. This is not
journalism by any standard - to put it bluntly, it is the journalistic
equivalent of a hit job.

And if that was not enough, the NYT has fudged facts not once
but thrice. A 2013 editorial had claimed that Muslims were poorer in
Gujarat compared to elsewhere in India, a lie that several people in
social media quickly called out, forcing the NYT to publish a
corrigendum.
The self-same Gardiner Harris had also claimed that the
Muzaffarnagar riots were triggered after Modi was announced as
the PM candidate, whereas the riots had begun much earlier than 13
September 2013. In yet another piece by Gardiner Harris,
the NYT issued yet another corrigendum for overstating what is
known about a 2002 train fire in Gujarat state.

Once is a mistake. Twice raises doubts about competence. Thrice

raises suspicions about integrity. It is impossible to believe that a
global media giant like NYT can consistently get facts available in
the public domain wrong three times. And this, apart from that
secret police assassination squad bit.

And our own journalists share a part of the blame because these
pieces acknowledge the reporting contributed from their Indian
counterparts. These counterparts could have pointed out what I
have done.

Among others, it was the New York Times which had once led a
campaign against what it termed was the yellow journalism practised
by Hearsts New York Journal. An apocryphal instruction that
Hearst gave his artist, Remington, goes like this: you furnish the
pictures, and Ill furnish the war. The NYT of today seems to have
followed the textual equivalent of this instruction in the case of
Narendra Modi.

In the end, this is much less about Narendra Modi than about
the New York Times, which seems to be on a single-minded mission
to demonise him even if that means throwing some simple
journalistic ethics to the winds. The NYT is certainly entitled to be
biased against Narendra Modi but it needs to at least keep up the
pretence of fairness in exercising its bias.
One is forced to conclude that at the root of it all may not be just
bias, but an irrational fear of Narendra Modi. Modiphobia, in short.