MMost of my friends know me as an Anglophile and clearly a royalist. That’s why I am writing this column with “sadness”. i can never forget the hundreds BBC Programs that I have heard or seen in the last 60 years. DVDs are not popular today. For the record, I have a complete DVD collection of Shakespeare plays. BBC To me, was reminiscent of the best of Britain. after all, George Orwell worked there, and he was BBC Who gave break to VS Naipaul and Mulk Raj Anand. It is disheartening to see a respected institution openly resorting to tainted and false reporting. What can one say about these times: “O tempora, o di amarli”!
About a hundred years ago, the British right-wing used to see us oily, sly, cowardly, slouched, pot-bellied, lean Hindu Banias and Brahmins as suspicious and treacherous adversaries. Just read Beverly Nichols, the “fashionable intellectual” who wrote about India nearly nine decades ago and you’ll get my drift. It was the British Leftmanchester guardianamong others, who treated us with respect. This gave some relief to people like my grandfather. Not all British are “unreasonable”, that was his usual defense.
things have changed. The British Left hates us today. We are not sly, oily, cowardly, scheming brahmins and baniyas. We are now ‘supremacist, fascist, bigoted and politically incorrect bad guys’. BBC Has decided to lay an ax on our ‘fascist, bigot, supremacist leader’. In this process he has the support of our own domestic leftists.
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I remember years ago (and this one long Some time ago), my Leftist NRI friends were overjoyed when former Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) chief, RK Raghavan was appointed as the head of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) in 2008 – especially after the then Gujarat chief was “right Minister Narendra Modi was set up to do. When I tactfully tried to point out to him that communal riots had been happening in India for hundreds of years and that no chief minister had been questioned despite some of the worst riots in independent India, he shrugged me off. He never accepted that Modi cooperated and deposed. When Raghavan gives Modi a clean chit, suddenly the honest cop turns bad guy!
Once again, in a low-key way, when I mentioned to my “friends” that the army general deputed to “suppress” the 2002 Gujarat riots, General Zameer Uddin Shah—who was illiterate— were for, Is a Muslim – went on record to praise Modi, he dismissed it. When I mentioned that Shah has praises about Modi, but not so much about our bureaucracy, that didn’t register either. However, it registered when I told him that Shah’s brother is a famous Bollywood actor. But by then his anti-Modi position was set in stone. I have tried to argue that despite the “honest” Raghavan’s report, the litigants took up the matter in the courts.
The Gujarat High Court and the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Raghavan and concluded that there was no evidence that Modi was involved in the riots. Incidentally, every adjournment and delaying tactic came from the anti-Modi litigants, who wanted to prolong the case so that the international media could continue to report that Modi had not been cleared. The Supreme Court has mentioned this in its Pronounced the verdict and reprimanded the litigants.
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Why western media is turning against Hindus
It does not matter. My leftist friends want to believe that Modi is a bad guy. BBCOf course, he has listened to them and is convinced that Modi is also a bad man. BBC It seems that India’s “majority” Hindu community, in other words, most or all of us, consists primarily of bad people. it doesn’t hurt that BBC’s The pro-Pakistan audience loves it. isn’t it embarrassing enough BBC deliberately and consciously ignored the “grooming” and “exploitation” of young white British girls in rotherham, The criminals there were of Pakistani origin. Of course, criticizing him would tantamount to racism and Islamophobia.
Attacking ‘Hindu supremacists’ makes sense as politically correct and politically expedient. BBC’s The coverage of the Leicester riots has been so confusing that one can only associate it with an Orwellian nightmare. And the situation is ironic: a hundred years ago, the British establishment thought of Hindus as cowardly losers; Suddenly, these losers have become supremacists!
it’s not just BBC, A large section of the ‘awakened-leftist’ international media has turned against us helpless Hindus: the new York Times, Washington Post, npr, Guardian, And le monde Everyone is up there. even right wing publications seem to prefer The Financial Times And economist Have become prisoners of the cultural left. when i was very disappointed economist Editorial against the 2006 Manmohan Singh-George W. Bush nuclear deal. According to that qualified paper, legitimizing India’s nuclear status was a “deep mistake”. one could argue that economist It is not so much against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or Modi as it is against a mighty India. economist Chose to proceed on internal elections of a foreign country and the editorial opinion is that BJP and Modi should not be elected.
Unusual, but increasingly, this kind of thing seems par for the course. Any residual praise has been limited, backhanded and understated. Theft Chose to dedicate column space to crafty articles defaming the present system in India. respectable too wall street journal It has left two or four ridiculous, trivial and stupid pillars.
The question is whether we should ignore all these ill-informed and prejudiced self-appointed experts. This was the Mahatma’s advice when American historian Katherine Mayo published her Mother India many decades ago. The important thing to remember is that when Gandhi advocated ignoring Miss Mayo, he groomed American journalists such as Vincent Sheen, William Shirer, the controversial Louis Fischer and photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White. Gandhi always had leading intellectuals like Romain Rolland and Quakers like Reginald Reynolds on his side in the West. No wonder Gandhi put himself on the cover time magazine,
Today’s system in our country can probably learn from the Mahatma. Cultivating right wing outlets like in their time the audience He would not be found anywhere. trying to farm today BBC And its siblings will be a waste of time. Ironically, at present the audience Could make an interesting ally. As can think tanks like the Hoover Institution in the US. Let us not forget that the American Left opposed the Indo-US nuclear deal even when the American Right was comfortable with it. This fact should give us some insight into moving on from my initial statement of simply feeling “depressed”.
There may be other sympathizers on the horizon. Salvatore Babones, an American academic living in Australia, comes to mind. He might be the Reginald Reynolds of our times.
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There is no threat to Muslims in India
I have tried to tell my NRI leftist friends that unlike them I live here. Twice a week, I drive through Mohammed Ali Road in Mumbai. The street is filled with loud, active Muslim shops, retail outlets and restaurants. I don’t see anyone out of fear. Incidentally, I have seen the same in Bangalore, Hubli, Chennai, Shivamogga, Coimbatore and Chikkaballapura. In major Muslim neighborhoods, I have many Muslim friends who run successful businesses in advertising, interior design, construction, architecture, audio equipment, and more. None of them is acting out of fear.
Lynching of people of different castes, religions and castes is not a new thing in the peninsula of India. To say that only Muslims are being lynched and all this is an eight year old incident is not only absurd but completely wrong and mischievous. BBC, All organizations should know that these incidents have been going on for a long time. but then again, none of today’s BBC Journalists probably read material from Charles Allen, who produced reliable and honest material for BBC many decades ago.
My suggestion is a simple one. We need to pitch west to right wing, not left. We need to make the case that Muslims are living quite freely in India and that they have more freedom in this country than many other places. Incidentally, Ahmadis are not persecuted in India as they are in many countries. Muslim homosexuals are not automatically criminalized in India. Muslims are flourishing in different ways – running small and big businesses freely.
Hindu supremacism is a fictional creation of the Left. It has no basis in reality. Violence and riots are not uncommon in India, but their frequency and intensity are decreasing, not increasing. Most of the violence in India has nothing to do with the Hindu-Muslim binary. There are hundreds of underlying tensions. The truth is that despite these tensions, we get along and our overall violence is no different from that of other societies. After all, we did manage to “peacefully” administer over two billion Covid-19 vaccinations in a very short period of time. This proves that our society is not completely disjointed or chaotic. I think a solid engagement with right-wing think tanks and publications would help. In the meantime, best to ignore BBC and its Stalinist fellow travelers.
Jayateertha Rao is a retired businessman based in Mumbai. Thoughts are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)