 |
||
|
||
|
||
Indians, both within India and outside, often cringe at many of the stories about India in the foreign media - mostly the western press - that show the country in poor light. There is an assumption which is not entirely correct, that foreign reporters are fixated about India's social maladies such as dowry and casteism, and that they never lose a chance to write about the sores and pustules of benighted India.
Anecdotally though, it appears there has been more positive coverage of India over the past decade than negative writing. Stories of Indian energy, entrepreneurship, and achievement, in areas such as entertainment, science, engineering, literature and the arts are now frequent and copious in the western press, just as famine and flood stories were in the 1970s and 1980s.
Still, Indians never lose an opportunity to fulminate about the occasional negative coverage and the latest round of bloodletting 'm Gujarat has had many NRIs frazzled, when they were not hiding in embarrassment. Indian officials have expressed (in private) their resentment at the reporting by western journalists. They are even more incensed that some Indian-American reporters based here, and sent to India by their papers to cover the events, have been far more critical than their western colleagues. They probably know India even less than their western colleagues, who at least make an honest attempt to learn about the country, one diplomat fumed, after reading dispatches by Indian-American reporters; in the New York Times, Washington Post and other prominent publications. According to him they were doing a great disservice to the country of their origin.
In contrast, Indian reporters are often accused of not reporting on the negative aspects of American life and society. After all, one NRI community leader bristled recently, if American reporters can incessantly describe India as “largely Hindu India” or the BJP as a “Hindu Nationalist Party,” then Indian journalists should be describing the United States as “largely White Christian America” and the Republican Party as the “White, Christian, Nationalist Party”.
Besides, he argued, the U.S. has almost every malady India is stricken with. There are droughts (one right now in much of the Past Coast), floods, hunger, disease (even outbreaks of plague). Planes crash, trains derail, and there are false alarms over hijackings. There are also similar societal woes, especially discrimination based on gender and race. So how come foreign reporters in the U.S. spend so much time and energy covering piffle from the American entertainment world and what the state department spokesman says?
There is some validity to this criticism. Mostly under-staffed and under-resourced, and largely based on the East Coast or West Coast, foreign publications (and not just Indian) in the U.S. rarely go out to report on the hinterland. Out there in Middle America, there exists discrimination, fundamentalism, violence and degradation that seldom make it to the front pages of newspapers in the U.S., much less outside America. In a crime as revolting as Roop Kanwar being burnt on her husband's funeral pyre, a black man was dragged to death in Texas some years back. A gay youth was shot to death in Wyoming because of his sexual orientation. And gun violence in schools is endemic.
In one of the more egregious cases of hate crime, a 17-year-old girl in Denver was attacked early this week and the word “dyke” (lesbian) was carved into her forearm with a razor, according to the Rocky Mountain News. April Mora was walking to a store through an alley near her house at about 2 pm. last Tuesday when she encountered three teenage white males in a black Honda. The teens ragged her, began calling her dyke, and when she protested, they slashed her face with a razor blade. They then carved out the letters RIP on her stomach and “dyke” in inch block letters on her forearm.
Indian nationalists here say such incidents are as common in the U.S. as the burning of missionaries or the raping of nuns is in India, which is to say it is fairly uncommon and cannot be seen as a pattern. Yet there are no human rights reports originating from some other country in the world chronicling such grisly events.
There is one big difference though,
between societies such as India and Pakistan, and the U.S. in each of these
cases, it is inconceivable that the guilty parties will get away with their
crime. The state does not dilute or dissemble the gravity of the act. The
criminals are prosecuted and justice is usually swift and severe. Now look
back and count how many perpetrators of the most horrendous atrocities
in our part of the world have been prosecuted. Perhaps that might answer
why the “negative” reporting hurts so much.
|
||
|
||
|
||