HVK Archives: God, Godse and the PR War
God, Godse and the PR War - Out Look
Janaki Bahadur Kremmer
()
April 6, 1998
Title: God, Godse and the PR War
Author: Janaki Bahadur Kremmer
Publication: Out Look
Date: April 6, 1998
Aportent of hard times for the foreign media to report freely on
India, or a long overdue reaction to distorted portrayals of
India? Whichever it is, the warning signals for the Delhi-based
foreign media have begun to flash.
It might have been all of five years ago, but the memory of both
Indian and foreign journalists of the beatings they received
while covering the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya
remain fresh. "I do not know whether it was the RSS or the kar
sevaks who were hitting us with lathis and breaking our cameras,
but I do remember clearly that the policemen were doing all they
could to avoid helping us some of them even asked us to give the
mob our cameras and films," remembers Baldev, photographer for
Sygma, a French agency.
As the debates about the extent of influence the RSS wields over
the BJP, led government gather momentum, so do concerns about the
interference of the saffron crowd in various spheres of daily
life. The reason for the current sensitivity is what appears to
be a highly organised campaign to flood Western newspaper offices
with official complaints about India based correspondents.
When The Times Delhi correspondent Chris Thomas filed his regular
story on Indian politics on February 27 this year, he was
unprepared for what followed. An RSS supporter from Birmingham
filed a case with the Press Complaints Commission in London
accusing Thomas of having called the killer of Mahatma Gandhi an
RSS man although Thomas had only referred to Nathuram Godse as a
'supporter' of the organisation-an oft-used description. Although
The Times has decided to back their correspondent, a Commission
decision that does not go in favour of the accused can cost the
writer his job.
And when The Guardian newspaper's Suzanne Goldenberg used the
words "Hindu extremists" and "fanatics" in articles about the RSS
and the BJP, the UK president of the Overseas Friends of the BJP
reacted sharply by saying that she was either ignorant of the
facts or there was "a more sinister and deliberate campaign of
disinformation afoot". One reader accuses her of a 'superiority
complex" which echoes, outdated sentiments of the duty to
civilise other nations". Another calls her writing
"gobbledegook"! According to Goldenberg, while she gets lots of
such mall at the newspaper's head office, only a few of these
letters are passed on to New Delhi. "Usually, when the letters
are purely abusive, the Guardian just throws them away," she
said.
"They (the correspondents) manage to write interesting stories
about complicated issues in developing countries, but there is an
underlying laziness when they write about a big complicated
country like India," says Dr Gautam Sen, lecturer in
international relations at the London School of Economics, who
has recently taken over as spokesman of the Overseas Friends of
the BJP in London.
In another case, the Overseas Friends of the BJP in New York City
have threatened to file a defamation suit against Newsweek for
calling members of the BJP, "Muslim-bashing thugs", who are
threatening "to make life tougher for foreign investors" and who
"plan to arm India with nuclear weapons", unless the magazine
publishes a correction for the 'deliberate misinformation'.
The saffron offensive, however, does not stop there. Late night
telephone calls to individual correspondents have become an
unpleasant fact of life. One British journalist talked about how
she had begun getting frequent calls at 3 am from someone who
wished to discuss one of her articles. "I had called him
(Nathuram Godse) an RSS activist in my copy, but the sub had
changed it to RSS member," she claimed.
The result: another case filed with the Press Complaints
Commission. Although the case was later thrown out, the newspaper
got an avalanche of mail. One letter alone had 168 signatures.
Her story, said a reader, was 'scurrilous", and "written in the
style of the Sun (a British tabloid)". "You see, the whole
Gandhi assassination thing was the biggest public relations
disaster for the RSS,' explains the correspondent.
The BJP says that the stories often misrepresent reality. "These
articles are often incorrect and full of innuendo," claims
Sudheendra Kulkarni, of the BJP's media press cell, New Delhi.
"The Western press as a whole is still not familiar with the BJP
and unfortunately they have not done their homework properly," he
says. Kulkarni believes that foreign reportage is ridden with
"preconceptions and prejudice" but has faith that all this will
change .now that the BJP is in the government.
References to the nexus between the RSS and Nathuram Godse is a
touchy subject and gives the letters to the editor a monotonous
sameness. 'While many of the top functionaries of the BJP may
have come from the RSS, they don't take any dictates from the RSS-
but the foreign press makes it out to be like it is one and the
same," complains Kulkarni.
Criticism of journalists is nothing new. Although it has to be
said that no other Indian political party complains about foreign
press coverage to the same extent as supporters of the BJP. The
last batch of complaints went out over a BBC Sitcom entitled
Good Gracious Me which poked fun at the 'havan' ceremony by
substituting bits of melted cheese and special herbs for the
traditional ghee and described how bits of bread and meat could
be dipped into this concoction. Rajinder Chopra, who heads the
Hindu Cultural Society in north London, had complained to the
Broadcasting Standards Authority that this episode 'shocked
British Hindus".
Hundreds of copies of the complaint went out to the Broadcasting
Standards Authority from Birmingham, Leicester, Croyden, Wembley,
IIford, Manchester, Oxford and other places. "Of course we wrote
to our friends and asked them to complain," said Chopra. "And why
not?" Most members of the Hindu Cultural Society, he said, were
supporters of the BJP.
John Stackhouse of the Toronto Globe and Mail says his newspaper
has received identically worded letters through the Internet when
he writes articles critical of the Indian scene. 'Which makes me
sure that these people are very organised.' One foreign
correspondent said that he was surprised to find that his stories
were being selectively faxed to RSS members in Delhi from one of
the Indian missions abroad. "Little does the Indian taxpayer know
how his money is being used," he said.
Some foreign reporters openly express doubts about their future
under a BJP government. "The difficulty will come when things go
wrong-when reports about the future of foreign investment is not
favourable to India-then you will find, like all conservative
governments, they will blame the messenger," says the German
correspondent for Stuttgarter Zeitung, Willi Germund.
The BJP lobby's anger at what they see as misrepresentation in
the foreign press has been exacerbated by what is claimed to be
an effort to censor justifiable complaints. According to Dr Sen,
not a single letter written by them about any incorrect or unfair
report has ever been published in the British papers. That, he
said, included letters over obvious errors like picture captions
describing Vajpayee as L.K. Advani.
But other letter writing campaigns have had some success. A
senior executive of Zee TV, London, apologised following letters
of protest and a demonstration over a portrayal of Krishna in a
programme. The Guardian too published a light regret after a
letter campaign over a report which suggested that Hinduism
promotes gambling. Well, after the Guardian episode Chopra phoned
in during a live radio interview with the author of that report
on another subject. "You remember me, you apologised to me over
your report," Chopra said. "Now don't do it again."
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