 |
||
|
||
|
||
Our Prime Minister, you will be happy to know, has finally been
given a clean, "secular" chit by Time magazine. This should come
as a great relief to us since no foreign publication is more
widely circulated in this country than Time. But what is most
interesting about the certificate of good behaviour are the
reasons for Atal Bihari Vajpayee's transformation. According to
the article, Vajpayee is absolved of his Hindu nationalist past
because he enjoys an occasional drink, likes music and even has
(Allah be praised) a few Muslim friends.
I have to tell you that I read the piece twice to make sure what
I was reading was, in fact, what I had read. I then realised the
writer had probably confused Hinduism with Islam and India with
Pakistan. Well, so what? One heathen religion must seem pretty
much like any other heathen religion, one chunk of south Asia
much like any other if you are a North American Christian.
Errors of this kind could have been dismissed as mere ignorance
if the entire foreign press had not, through the general
election, portrayed the BJP as some kind of saffron incarnation
of the Ku Klux Klan. By inference, this means that those Indians
who voted for the BJP are little more than a bunch of "Muslim-
bashing thugs"-to borrow the words of another foreign
publication.
Now, that is when things start to get more worrying. If those who
get their entire information on India from foreign newspapers and
magazines are going to be constantly told that our country has
moved backwards into some kind of Hindu dark age, then we could
be in real trouble. The very foreign investors whose concerns
foreign publications try to reflect would be frightened away more
surely than if swadeshi became the mantra of the new Government.
As someone who worked for many years for a British newspaper and
who is an Indian journalist writing in Hinglish, I always had a
sneaking admiration for Delhi's foreign correspondents. They
wrote so much better than us. Proper English and all that, no
dropping the definite article when it should be there and putting
it where it should not.
They travelled so much more easily than mean, old Indian
newspaper proprietors would let us. They seemed so much more
professional with their laptop computers and tax machines. They
also seemed to have more access to our politicians (specially
Indira and Rajiv Gandhi) than we ever did. So it has taken me
some time to recognise that the foreign media's coverage of our
recent general election has, by and large, been illiterate, ill-
informed and prejudiced. I first noticed this during a trip to
Europe just after the recent election campaign had begun. I had
left India with the distinct impression that the BJP was in the
lead, despite Sonia Gandhi's sudden advent. From my own travels,
I had gleaned the main reason why it was in the lead was because
the average Indian voter felt it was the only party that had not
been given a fair chance at ruling India. Also, people seemed to
think Vajpayee was the most credible candidate for prime
minister.
Imagine then my shock when I learnt from the few reports that
appeared in International Herald Tribune that Sonia Gandhi was
making huge waves across the country and could well end up as
India's next prime minister.That others were equally fooled can
be seen from the fact that The New Yorker, one of international
journalism's most revered publications, sent a well-known India
expert hotfooting it down to Delhi for a profile on Madame. It
was only when the results started to come out that he had to seek
an interview with Atalji in order to balance things.
It is not the first time that the foreign media has got a south
Asian election wrong. It was equally wrong about Pakistan in
1997. If you followed that election in the western media, you
would have concluded the fight was essentially between Benazir
Bhutto and Imran Khan. Newsweek, in fact, put Benazir on its
cover just before the results came out. In the end, there was a
landslide victory for Nawaz Sharif and not even one itsy-bitsy
little seat for Imran.
To come back to our own election, I notice that the foreign press
is busy trying to make the case that it is being hounded by BJP
supporters for describing the party as fanatical and Hindu
extremist. I sympathise with these journalists up to a point.
This is because I have often had the BJP's hound dogs after me
and they can be a real nuisance. I have a whole bunch of abusive
letters to prove that these hound dogs do the BJP more harm than
anything any journalist could ever have written.
Having said that, I would also like to point out that it is more
than time that Delhi's foreign correspondents started to
reconsider either their sources of information or their
analytical abilities or both. They may discover, for a start,
that Vajpayee does not need to have a drink, listen to music or
have Muslim friends to prove he is not communal. They may also
discover that the Congress has been losing elections mainly since
Muslims (and Sikhs) discovered it was not as secular as it
claimed to be.
They could also discover that Nathuram Godse, a man who clearly
fascinates them, was not just once a member of the RSS but also
of the Congress-and that he was a member of neither when he
killed Gandhiji.
|
||
|
||
|
||