The damaging interpretation
Truth unread, facts unseen
Citizenship of the sons of the soil, be of any faith, will not be or cannot be questioned. Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Population Register (NPR) are no threats to any Indian of any faith. The maligning propaganda, even by popular western media, harms the interest of India and stains her image, which in turn may hurt long-term economic interest of India.
The western media is still cherishing the colonial mindset and maintain the habit of chasing the rich and cooking stories without fact-check, perhaps with a notion that the rest of the world is below their standard.
The Economist, an international news magazine in a recent story on India, has reduced its value further by dealing with a subject that its editorial team didn’t study
made or it made a deliberate attempt to stain the image of India, may be at the behest of more influential global powers.
In the January third week issue, its cover report titled, “Intolerant India: How Modi is endangering the world’s biggest democracy” was sold out to someone who wanted India to stop her race for a bigger global clout. That was clearly evident from the manner the story was prepared. India didn’t enact any rule that would deprive any born citizen of India of his or her deserving citizenship. Any sane person can realize this fundamental truth. Such report is only a weak effort to instigate fears, nothing more. India has a strong legal system in place whereat every citizen has a trust and where from every citizen gets due justice. That is an open truth, a non-negotiable
mechanism, but cynics may differ.
In the January third week issue, its cover report titled, “Intolerant India: How Modi is endangering the world’s biggest democracy” was sold out to someone who wanted India to stop her race for bigger global clout. That was clearly evident from the manner the story was prepared.
The Economist cover report compared poorly with its own boastful standard of analysis and principle of liberalism. The scribe who made the story seemed heavily confused about the content of the CAA and India’s periodic Population Census. It is not the first time India embarks on a Population Census. Every country in the world has its Own population register.
If anyone makes an attempt to study the pattern of The Economists reporting on India, he or she cannot miss its rising bias against India. It has not lost the soul colonial ghost that it inherited more than one and half centuries ago, thanks to its scribes with education in same set of universities.
No country in the world has ever been heard of endangering their political system and constitution with the institution of a population registry or Population Census. It is difficult to understand the invention of the new theory that the CAA which deals only with immigrants from three neighboring countries endanger India’s secular democracy. National Population Register (NPR) is not to threaten any citizen of the country, but may catch illegal immigrants in the net. Even in that process how would India’s democracy be in danger is a strange invention that none would really understand. In the story it said, “but many of the countrys 200m Muslims do not have the papers to prove they are Indian, so they risk being made stateless. Ominously, the government has ordered the building of
camps to detain those caught in the net.” Simply laughable.
Which country can build so huge detention camps to detain so big a population of “many of the country’s 200 million Muslims”? A joke or a churlish discovery?
What was tough to understand from the report was, how only Muslim citizens of the country will have a problem of proving that they are Indian.
Every sane Indian, including those of Muslim faith will ask, if a Hindu can, why cant a Muslim, who is also an equal son of the soil? Even by any level of foolish standard, a true citizen of a democratic country like India being made stateless in the aftermath of a Population Census is unimaginable.
At the end of the cunningly written story, what was more interesting to see was its instruction to India’s Supreme Court. The story said: “The Supreme Court, which this week declined to suspend the citizenship law, should heed this, show some unexpected spine and declare it unconstitutional.” Should India’s Supreme Court listen to what The Economist wanted it to say? It seemed, this international publication forgot the boundary of its constitution. By the statement, “unexpected spine”, the story also insulted India’s Supreme Court. That showed the imperialist mindset of the British Press, which interestingly claimed to be a liberalist. Interestingly again, the same publication, in another story titled, “Narendra Modi’s sectarianism is eroding India’s secular democracy,’ wrote: “India’s robust institutions, as well as its sheer size and diversity, also appeared to be adequate brakes against authoritarian rule.” The British magazine never used to have a stable view on many international issues, because of its deep prejudices against the third world and other developing economies. It used to depict colonial mind – set in all its stories. Once, James Fallows, an American writer said, “The Economist used editorial lines that contradicted the news stories they purported to highlight” Many times, it had retracted from earlier versions of stories, contradicted facts and apologized for wrong stories it carried.
The Economist had provoked India in May 2011 also by carrying a map of Kashmir, which marked the area of Kashmir incorrectly to show the State of India as divided between India Pakistan and China. That also showed it’s bad taste for India.
In January 2012, The Economist launched a new weekly section devoted to China, the first new country section in the magazine after similar step in 1942 for United States. Later in that year, 2012, it wrote in a story about India’s government: “But the opposition BJP in even more precarious state. It does not have a central unifying figure (leader). Modi is disliked by state level BJP leaders who are not from west and some part of north India. The worst problem for BJP is that if it can’t win now when the economy is slowing down, it may become impossible to win in future elections when economy is likely to grow at healthier rate.” Barely one and half years later, we saw the gap between its imagination and political reality that Indians showed. The Economist had misread India as it used to do ever.
If anyone makes an attempt to study the pattern of The Economists reporting on India, he or she cannot miss its rising bias against India. It has not lost the soul colonial ghost that it inherited more than one and half centuries ago, thanks to its scribes with education in same set of universities.
Those who now consider The Economist, as a print media bible must remember what Karl Marx and Lenin called the British weekly as, “the European organ of the aristocracy of finance”. Lenin referred it as a journal that speaks for British millionaires and had seen it as a bourgeois-pacifist that supported peace out of fear of revolution.
Many American and Canadian journalists and authors used to deride its reporting style filled with inaccuracies and for poor background checks. Some years ago, its Obituary Column on Hamilton Naki had carried untrue stories Of his professional record as the real surgeon who had done the first transplant surgery, but the world didn’t decorate him because of the apartheid, demeaning the achievement of Dr Christiaan Bemard.
A magazine that claims to grapple with the concept of free immigration as one of its principles, besides liberalism, cannot miss its staunch work as PR for China.
Not to be surprised, The Economist will continue to write stories against India for the interest of China, in whose case its liberalism is parked in garage.
