An unholy alliance Mon, Mar 30 2015. 01 34 AM IST
One cannot dismiss lightly the importance of public opinion shaped by a hegemonic, agenda-driven media narrative
Photo: Sanjeev Verma/Hindustan Times
Do an Internet search for “will Hindu nationalism derail Modi’s economic reforms agenda?” or a phrase to that effect, and you will discover so many pieces on the subject that to digest them in their totality will take you just slightly longer than reading Leo Tolstoy’sWar and Peace—although, given the literary and analytical merits of most of these pieces, I do not recommend attempting the exercise.
Now that the Narendra Modi led government has managed to shepherd all but one of its Christmas ordinances through Parliament, and appears to have a road map of sorts for making a case for the land acquisition Bill, you might reasonably hope to see a diminution in the production of such pieces. But you will be disappointed.
That Modi the economic reformer is besieged by religious and social conservatives within his own Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the larger family of Hindu organizations has become such a handy and all-purpose trope for those hostile to the man or the party that they are unlikely to discard it. Nor are they likely to allow themselves to be persuaded by evidence to the contrary.
Facts, if inconvenient, may always be ignored by those who made up their minds long ago. Or, better yet, one may manufacture an entirely new set of falsehoods masquerading as facts—such as that religious minorities are under threat in a BJP-ruled India—to deflect attention from the government’s considerable progress in pushing forward the economic reforms agenda while at the same time refraining from embracing the socially conservative agenda favoured by some of its supporters.
It is entirely to be expected, of course, that Indian commentators tied umbilically to the Congress-fed intellectual and media establishment should take this self-servingly anti-BJP tack. One does, after all, need to remember on which side one’s bread is buttered, and genuflect vaguely in the direction of the creamery now and again.
It is easy to dismiss those critics at home who have a vested interest in the BJP failing. What is more damaging is the unremitting hostility of the Anglo-American liberal media establishment, for they help to shape perceptions of the influential elite in the US, the UK, and elsewhere. In the vanguard of the assault is The New York Times and, in particular, its increasingly vitriolic unsigned editorial commentary on India, which has long since lapsed from being merely anti-Modi, which would be entirely legitimate, to veering into outright spin, which is, or ought to be, illegitimate in a media organization that purports to produce the national newspaper of record in the US.
My sense of anger and dismay is sharpened by the fact that I was one of the stable of writers who helped launch and nurture the now defunct “India Ink” blog for the first year of its existence—which, in its day, produced genuinely good content—a far cry from the rabid anti-India editorializing of today’s New York Times.
Lest you believe my barrage is ill-tempered: consider The New York Times’ unsigned editorial (A rebuff to India’s censors, 26 March) on the quashing of Section 66A of the Information Technology Act. While it rightly criticizes the Modi government’s use of the law, it excuses the previous Congress-led government, which introduced the law, as acting on a “misguided” belief that it would curb hateful speech. The editorial also argues that Section 66A has been used by the government and “right-wing activists” against those who purportedly insult Hinduism—without adding that it has been used at the behest of many other aggrieved parties and groups.
This editorial, indeed, deserves to be a case study in spin, perfectly constructed so that nothing that is said is literally untrue. Rather, the uninitiated reader is swaddled in a carefully spun fabric of half-truths, omissions, and insinuations—and thereby is invited to be complicit in the writer’s implied agenda. As a friend aptly put it, just because something is factually true, doesn’t mean it tells the truth.
The reader who knows little about India will be left with the impression that the muzzling of free speech is a vice unique to the BJP, rather than being a larger problem of the Indian polity cutting across all parties. He or she will then be primed to be unsympathetic, if not downright hostile, to the Modi government, and will be more receptive, and less questioning, of manufactured stories suggesting, say, that India’s minorities are imperilled.
Ironically, the visceral dislike of Modi and the BJP by the Anglo-American Left serves the interests, not of progressive groups, but of fundamentalist evangelical Christian organizations who rightly see the BJP as an obstacle to their aggressive proselytizing agenda: thus forging an unholy alliance of convenience bent on seeing the BJP fail.
One cannot dismiss lightly the importance of public opinion shaped by a hegemonic and agenda-driven media narrative. It was widespread popular support for war—fuelled in no small measure by disingenuous media reportage and commentary on what turned out to be non-existent weapons of mass destruction—that emboldened former US president George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003, and that subsequently legitimated the invasion. We all know the sequel.
Every fortnight, In the Margins explores the intersection of economics, politics and public policy to help cast light on current affairs.
Comments are welcome at views@livemint.com. To read Vivek Dehejia’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/vivekdehejia
http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/jy7TGBLVRTPJs0qGuHunML/An-unholy-alliance.html
Jagdish Bhagwati | The false alarm over Christians in India Mon, Mar 30 2015. 01 34 AM IST
Alarmist views about Indian Christians being under threat are overplayed and must be forcefully exposed as such
Photo: Danish Siddiqui/Reuters
A recent opinion piece by Julio Ribeiro, the much-admired scourge of Khalistainis, complains plaintively that he is on “a hit list” today from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) because he is a Christian. Similar alarmist views on Christianity are common in India today, simply because of the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the decimation of the Congress by the BJP. They are being spread by church leaders; for example Catholic Archbishop Anil Couto is reported to have even celebrated the defeat of BJP in the recent Delhi elections as if a calamity for Christians had been averted. But they are so ridiculous and libelous to the prime minister, and even the BJP generally, that they must be exposed forcefully as such.
Before I do that, let me establish my credentials concerning the issue at hand. I come from a family that is impressively pro-Indian-minorities. My wife, Padma Desai, has converted to Christianity (in a moving ceremony described by her in her memoirs, Breaking Out, published by Penguin/Viking in India and MIT Press in the US). Two of my nephews have married Christians: one is from Mumbai and is a multiple-award-winning psychiatrist practising in London and periodically in Mumbai, whereas the other is a Syrian Christian from Kerala. Another niece is married to a Parsi (who, of course, belongs to a still smaller, and equally beloved minority as Christians in India); and yet another almost married a Muslim young man. My only daughter’s significant other for years was a Christian and indeed an American-Indian on his mother’s side.
Abid Husain, my closest friend of over 40 years, whom I met in Turkey when we were both working there, was one of India’s most distinguished reformers and a pioneer in community development programmes. He was a Muslim and had married a brilliant Parsi intellectual. Indeed, the other equally close friend for over half a century has been former prime minister Manmohan Singh, a devout Sikh (yet another minority much loved in India except for the awfully heinous massacre, indeed a pogrom, of the Sikhs in Delhi by some Congress party men in 1984 after prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards).
Most of all, I went to St. Xavier’s High School in Bombay. I got excellent education there, and I expressed my sentimental bond with the school when I was chosen recently to receive the coveted Xavier Ratna award. On a lighter side, with discipline a high point, we used to joke how strict the school was because they even had a guy nailed to the wall.
So, if there was anything to the Christian fears today, I should be the first to join the protests. But the truth is that these fears are totally groundless and are, at best, a product of a fevered imagination.
First, we now know from the admirable investigative report in Firstpost (Crying Wolf: The Narrative of the ‘Delhi church attacks’ flies in the face of facts, 17 February) by Rupa Subramanya that there is simply no evidence for the six alleged attacks on Christian churches and one Christian school. This turns out to be a case of the “monkey say, monkey repeat” phenomenon that converts false allegation into a fact.
Second, Ribeiro resents the remark of Mohan Bhagwat of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh that Mother Teresa was interested in conversions to Christianity, not just in the welfare (as distinct from the spiritual salvation) of her flock. But surely, Christians do believe in conversion, as do Muslims; does Ribeiro deny that? Again, what is sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander. If Christians can convert non-Christians to their faith, what is wrong with Hindus doing the same? In fact, being a religion that does not normally convert, only a minuscule number of Hindus will do this whereas a far higher proportion of Christians and Muslims will.
Moreover, Ribeiro is offended that Mother Teresa is not respected as a saint by Bhagwat. But he is clearly ignorant of the fact that Mother Teresa may have won the Nobel Peace Prize but many doubt her bona fides, including the late Christopher Hitchens whose scathing critique of her was not the only dissenting voice on her, as recently recounted by the Washington Post reporter Adam Taylor (Why, to many critics, Mother Teresa is still no saint, 25 February). Since Hitchens followed this with a scathing attack on Hillary Clinton (an icon mostly to herself), I must confess that when he was coming out of a television debate on Hillary Clinton and I was going in to do a debate of my own, I could not resist telling him: Christopher, you did not say that Hillary Clinton was no Mother Teresa.
Ribeiro, the Archbishop and other Christians also forget that Sonia Gandhi is a Roman Catholic. To my knowledge, many have objected to her leading the country because she was born abroad (much as Americans disbar foreign-born citizens from becoming the president), but hardly anyone, in BJP or elsewhere, has objected to her because she was a Christian.
US President Barack Obama’s speech in India where he talked of Mohandas Gandhi’s legacy of respect for all religions has been self-servingly appropriated by anti-BJP and anti-Modi critics (such as my former Columbia University student Siddharth Varadarajan) as a chastisement of their alleged communalism. But this interpretation is absurd since the president clearly had in mind the difficulties that the US itself is having with such issues. In fact, on returning to the US, he proceeded to tell Americans that Christianity itself had been guilty of serious lapses over many centuries.
Ribeiro and the Archbishop are good men who have allowed themselves to be dragged into politics that plays on fear and partisanship. I only hope that they will join those of us who would like to see religious harmony, not the religious discord that can only subtract from our humanity.
Jagdish Bhagwati is University Professor (economics, law and international affairs) at Columbia University.
Comments are welcome at theirview@livemint.com
http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/lNKcsuArsta4yushnlQ9cI/Jagdish-Bhagwati--The-false-alarm-over-Christians-in-India.html?utm_source=ref_article