#2: What the West read about India (Oct-Nov 2022)
Part two of exploring the western gaze into India
Hello everyone! Though slightly delayed, I am back with my second newsletter covering the western media's coverage of India. In this issue, I will covering the months of October and November, which have had various newsworthy events that have sparked international coverage of India, as well as the general continuation of the narrative that the western media has settled on when it comes to covering India.
I spoke about my methodology and the nature and ideology of this narrative in great detail in my first newsletter, which you can find here, so I will not be delving into that again here. If you are interested in all that, please feel free to check out the first newsletter!
Narrative articles
We start out with a perfect opinion piece published in our fair Gray Lady, the New York Times, by someone named Spencer Bokat-Lindell. Beautifully titled, Is Liberal Democracy Dying?, the piece is a great insight into how the western elite is seeing world events as they try to make sense of recent developments.
The immediate trigger for writing this piece has come with the election of Giorgia Meloni to the position of Prime Minister in Italy. Of course, as the current western elite expects (maybe even wants?) to find fascists around every corner even without provocation, the elevation of someone who is very right-wing in a country that birthed the term, is a very concerning development. And of course, the foxes in-charge of the West know of only one way to deal with a problem like this - right opinion pieces in credible media institutions expressing this concern. These pieces then become reference material that can be used as authoritative sources to settle debates on these same topics, or simply to be used by other journalists and opinion columnists when they want to write on the same point. Functionally, they exist to create proof for their own point of view.
This Bokat-Lindell piece does this exact thing, by quoting another opinion piece in the Times, by someone named Debasish Roy Chowdhury. The title of the piece is "Modi's India Is Where Global Democracy Dies". (Global democracy? Huh… what a peculiar term…)
Let's just say I regret not including this piece in last month's newsletter. It's such a perfect specimen of the phenomenon that I'm trying to capture in these newsletters - mediocre Indian writers who no longer have an audience in India, but have found a new home in liberal western media houses, "explaining" India to elite westerners.
The Roy Chowdhury piece also gives us a great example of another phenomenon that has been in the news in the past month - the use of Human Rights Indices and "Freedom Indices" to manufacture the story that India is now a bad country. Here it is in full:
I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on this, but if you are more interested in these Indices and how they are prepared, check out this podcast by the person who has been in the news in India with regards to this very topic - Salvatore Babones.
The Bokat-Lindell piece also has a perfect concise example of what I call the Western Narrative on India. Here it is reproduced in full:
When liberals in good-standing are talking about India today, this line - and these two vectors ("anti-Muslim" and "anti-free speech) in particular - is the new settled axiom of their position on India. The above heuristic is being hammered into western heads every day, and the Gray Lady will obviously not miss a chance to remind our good liberal reader, once again, that India is now a country to be concerned about.
Do check out this article (using the Archive.org link provided in the title) if you only want to read one thing this month. It's a great starting point to understand the phenomenon I'm trying to document in this newsletter.
Aah VICE. It's really interesting to track the development of media outlets over the years. Founded by among others, Gavin McInnes, VICE made its name engaging in "edgy" journalism, while also being an actual good window into many stories throughout the 2000s, especially when it came to stories about the U.S. involvement in the Middle East. Today, VICE is owned by the Walt Disney Company, and is indistinguishable from any other liberal media source. As Nick Land famously once said, the very act of engaging in criticisms of capitalism seems to further entrench and strengthen capitalism. Nothing embodies this more than once-"edgy" media outlets ending up being owned by the Walt Disney Company.
This particular "explainer" is written by Max Daly, Sahar Habib Ghazi, and Pallavi Pandir, and it bases its "explanation" about Hindutva on the clashes that look place in Leicester, United Kingdom, in October 2022.
A few framing devices stand out here. Since this is aimed primarily at a young, western audience (although who knows how "young" VICE's audience really is anymore), the activists/authors are using the framing device of other "extremist" movements that the western audience will be familiar with, to create an association in the minds of the reader with "Hindutva". Here is the relevant portion:
The last line is included quite obviously as a call to action to reader - "you might think this crazy hateful ideology won't affect you, but the Hindoo extremist is now in your country". It could be your harmless looking doctor!
The article is long, and worth reading (especially if you want to hear from "experts and community leaders" like Shokat Adam Patel, Mohammed Ali and Sharmen Rahman), but this one section stands out to me:
It just shows that, in addition to being a pure Narrative Story about India, it is also just factually wrong and poorly researched. Ten minutes of familiarizing yourself with the ideas of Savarkar and his movement will tell you how much it despises caste and sees it as a big factor is "weakening" Hindu society, which made it vulnerable to outside attacks.
But then again, maybe I expect too much.
This is a fascinating opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz from an Indian "journalist", the infamous Swati Chaturvedi, or "Bainjal" as she is on known on Twitter.
The background of this piece is this the controversy that was caused by Israeli film-maker Nadav Lapid. Lapid had been a part of a jury of a Film Festival in Goa that had been organized by the Indian and Goa government. As a member of the jury, he has strongly come out against the Vivek Agnihotri-directed The Kashmir Files.
If you are unaware about this movie, the one thing you should know is that very few people actually care about the movie. The discourse around the movie, just like the discourse around the Kashmir issue as a whole, is highly politicized. The way you feel about the movie largely depends on how see the issue of Kashmir as a whole.
The "Hindu" narrative (that pieces like these are mainly written to oppose) on Kashmir can largely be summed up as the chronicling of the long-term erosion of the Indian civilizational identity in the Kashmir Valley due to the spread of Islam. This narrative starts from ancient times, and remembers Kashmir's ancient history as a seat of Shaivism and ancient Buddhism in India, and then its consequent loss to a foreign ideology through the memory-eroding effects of mass conversion of a society. The best place I've seen this narrative captured is V.S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness. Naipaul spends a lot of his first visit to India in the early 1960s in the Kashmir Valley, and a lot of his observations are prophetic in being able to see the groundwork for Kashmir's dance with jihad, and the ethnic cleansing of Hindus that this quest for what some westerners describe as a "struggle for self-rule", necessitated.
Of course, Hindu society's mind is aghast at the fact that the erstwhile human-rights-loving international liberal regime has not cared one bit about this ethnocide. Why they have decided to turn a blind-eye to this, and instead resorted to "both-sideism" and victim-blaming is anyone's guess, but what cannot be denied is that The Kashmir Files represented a long-suppressed and ignored (in the mainstream culture) point of view, and was also the first film that truly chronicled the plight of Kashmiri Hindus without having to play the game of enforced communal harmony. The reactions of Kashmiri Hindus to the film are worth watching, even for the person who has been propagandized to hate this movie by the mainstream media's view.
The other view on Kashmir is represented by Ms. Bainjal in this Haaretz piece, and can be summed up by this paragraph:
"The actual tragedy of Kashmir's Hindu minority has been politically manipulated for years. They are still unable to go back to the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley and still face targeted killings. The real anguish of the Pandits is used by Modi's BJP for electoral gains."
Now, it doesn't take a genius to figure out why this is a stupid point to make. It basically says that one should forget the actual event, and instead focus on the second-order effects of the event. It slyly allows the legacy Indian elite to admit the ethnocide that took place in Kashmir, but then divert the conversation to attacking their political enemies.
The piece is notable for one more reason - the Israeli media's platforming of voices such as Bainjal are a sign of a the Israeli liberal elite's upcoming attempts to undo a lot of the good work that has been done to grow this relationship from the political leaders of both nations. And for someone like me who's long wanted stronger ties between India and Israel, that's a real shame.
I won't be adding too much to this piece, as The Guardian is one of those western media outlets so disconnected from reality that they need to be read to be truly believed. But as mad and meme-worthy as their Opinion section is, it is still an important barometer of the views of the British Left, who despite not having political power in the U.K. for a few years now, still dominate the institutions and the media like their American counterparts.
I will just quote one line here to demonstrate a point:
"It is a reminder that while New Delhi basks in its diplomatic success at recent G20 and COP-27 summits, it might find the international environment less accommodating if Mr Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) continue to stir up hatred to win elections".
This is a great example of the phenomenon described in this Twitter thread. Lines like these in western institutional media articles, which claim to report or observe certain processes, are actually commands or ideological pointers by the media to their political "leaders" to achieve the actual outcome they are claiming to simply surmise.
Read this piece, and further familiarize yourself with the clown-car that is The Guardian opinions section.
I must say, rarely do articles fall apart for me in the first line itself, but Dheepa Sundaram, the author of this article in this curious new website called "The Immanent Frame", has managed to achieve this.
There is growing use of the term "decolonization" within populist, right-wing Hindu spaces to defend state-sanctioned discrimination against minorities and mute discussion of atrocities, all while claiming a position of vulnerability. U.S. Hindu nationalist groups capitalize on anti-racist discursive models, decolonial language, as well as the liberatory structures of Black and Indigenous futurisms to characterize Hindutva ideology as a modern, anticolonial resistance movement.
Here's some important background for the reader: this upstart-looking website is actually funded and founded by New York-based American think-tank The Social Science Research Council (SSRC). I must say that I just love the name of this organization (Americans have truly mastered the art of creating word-salad sounding organizations, that use a lot of words, but say or mean nothing at all), and it's hard to overstate just how strongly this organization reflects the views of the entrenched American liberal elite. It is through seemingly invisible and harmless organizations like the SSRC that the U.S. elite rules this world, so we absolutely need to pay attention to what they're saying about us.
All things considered, I will give this article credit for at least being somewhat different in its criticisms of India's civilizational movement than the predictable dross served up by most of the other articles on here.
But sadly, I can't help but get a sense of envy when I read articles like these. Because if you read between the lines of this piece, you realize the following - the urge towards decolonization and reclaiming an indigenous identity is effective, and more importantly, accurate and true, when it comes to the Indian civilizational movement.
The author seems to be very concerned that her precious "antiracist discursive models", "decolonial language" and "liberatory structures of Black and Indigenous" (both capitalized as is required by the latest fatwas of the regime) are being used by these dirty "Hindutva futurists" to advocate for causes she do not like.
I do wonder: who this language is meant to be used by, if not the indigenous people and culture of a nation?
But I don't think I can expect an answer to this most perplexing of questions. Either way, if you want a somewhat different, but still air-headed take on India's current political dynamics, you could check this article out, because it is certain that a lot of people in academia and the western priestly network of institutions will be doing so.
This tired-sounding article is written by none other than Ash Sarkar, a Bengali Muslim British grievance artist. It is another article whose central frame is the "communal violence" (the regime-sanction neutral-sounding term) in the British city of Leicester.
Now, most of what I knew about Ash Sarkar was her infamy in British politics as lightning-rod for conservative activists. She's very much the definition of someone who bases their entire politics on the winds of racial and ethnic grievance. Like others in her field, she excels at being a self-appointed "voice" for the downtrodden and oppressed and "invisible" people in a city or country. People of this category often have outlandish personalities and excel at generating controversy. I have never heard her comment on Hindu issues or politics, but I guess it's not surprising that her Bengali Hindu father was not able to raise her to not grow up and hate her father's community.
Because yes, the simple message of this article is this: "Hinduphobia" is not really a thing, and simply an dream that has been constructed by the evil BJP to win votes. The "Exporting Hindutva" section is again, a great insight into just how misinformed the western liberal elite is about India and Hindus. The same tired tropes of "supremacy", "love jihad" as a conspiracy and how India's Muslims, who have ballooned from less than 7% of the population in 1947 to 20% of the population in 2010 (almost certainly much, much higher now in 2022-23), are being taken to the camps and fed to the wolves.
The one unique attempt in this article is to call the legitimate fear of Hindus being targeted for being Hindus, something that has an incredibly well-established track-record in the Indian subcontinent as well as abroad, as a "moral panic". In my opinion, it is nothing more than egregious gaslighting, and a simple denial of any possible situation where Hindus even could be victims.
Maybe I am crazy to imagine or wish for a world where one western liberal or leftist tries to explore this upsurge of Hindu identity (a sturdy and consistent political phenomenon amongst a billion people for the last decade now) that they don't know very well, with the honesty and humility it deserves?
Aah, Ramachandra Guha. I was wondering when I'd first run into this name.
If you're familiar with this person, this article should be ground you've already covered by now. What is interesting, again, is the legacy Indian elite, who have been left powerless and pointless in India, "failing upwards" to write for supposedly "respected" platforms like Foreign Policy (although in my opinion, since the 2015-16 media singularity, there really has not been any obvious and measurable difference between supposedly respectable places like Foreign Policy, and more openly radical Left journals like Salon or Jezebel).
Honestly, the little part of this article I was able to read (before the paywall kicked-in) just sounds like an exasperated speech you'd hear from the one strangely passionate Indian National Congress supporter in your friend group. It's a domestic political attack on India's Prime Minister, being delivered from the hallowed halls of Foreign Policy. Unsurprising for many of us who expect India's domestic political opposition to internationalize many of the country's domestic disagreements in the years to come.
The Gray Lady returns to help us "understand" what's going on the whole Nadav Lapid-Kashmir Files episode.
As usual, the main aim is to allow the liberal-in-good-standing to properly "contextualize" how to think about the movie. This paragraph here is the one doing the narrative-discipline work:
"Some film critics and opposition politicians, however, found the film dangerously and unnecessarily provocative. The film supports a B.J.P. narrative of Hindu persecution to emphasize subjugation, a theme that is often repeated in political speeches and in efforts by top government officials to rewrite India's history, playing up violence committed by Muslims against Hindus."
As usual, the aim here is to force Hindus to feel bad about the natural negative emotions they feel when they read about their own historical persecution. As I've said above, it's textbook gaslighting, and an attempt to deny Hindu people any right of even remembering moments in their history where they have been persecuted. One does have to wonder why the western liberal elite has pushed hard on ensuring that some groups (like African Americans) are allowed to talk about their historical persecution, but also becomes uncomfortable when other groups want to do the same.
If you ask me, I think the answer lies in the fact that this western liberal elite does not control, or have their hands on the wheel, of this emergent Hindu understanding of their own persecution. Because they do not control it, they are afraid of it, and the result will be more articles like these from the U.S. Department of Information attempting to maintain narrative discipline primarily among diaspora Hindus and aspiring future-U.S.-citizens in India.
We remain with the Gray Lady, and take an interesting tangent from her usual, predictable diatribes against India, to a somewhat more broader concern she has right now - the loss of Twitter as an arm of regime narrative enforcement.
I'd have to imagine that the western liberal regime is really bitter about Elon Musk right now. After all, they have spent years, and billions of dollars in subsidies to prop up this guy. He was the front-man of their push for electric vehicles, making him an unmistakable part of the ESG revolution (which is one among many of the newer ways the western priestly class has reinforced their control over the merchant class, along with its siblings like DEI). Sadly, the eccentric South African has seemingly gone rogue, and has taken away the social media platform that western journalists (a crucial part of western liberal elite regime enforcement) loved the most. The Musk capture of Twitter is most accurately understood as a monarchical coup against an oligarchical system, and the liberal regime is not happy.
So along comes this article, which wants to inform our card-carrying-liberal and all around good-person, that the real proof of why Elon Musk is "dangerous" is found outside the U.S. It has been written by one of the NYT's older Delhi correspondents and tells a familiar story of "oppressor-oppressed" groups that one would expect of the western liberal elite. In this hallucination, Twitter in 2009 in India was this beautiful place where every "underrepresented voices" in India like "Muslims, lower castes and women" (the holy trinity of western progressive deconstruction of India that seeks to take the place of groups like African Americans in the U.S. analysis) were able to spread their wings.
But in a few years, the evil degenerate hordes of the BJP supporters and their "conservative religious allies" (a clear case of phrasing being used to signal to the western liberal's hatred of their own conservative fellow-citizens) took over the platform. And sadly, it's all been terrible every since.
Then there's the usual stuff one expects from a piece like:
"Independent journalism is increasingly under threat (another example of the Gray Lady referencing itself to "prove" the existence of something). Much of the mainstream press has been neutered by a mix of intimidation and conflicts of interests created by the sprawling conglomerates and powerful families that control much of Indian media. Like the United States, India has a big election coming up in 2024. Preserving a free and open public square for debate will be critical to protecting India's democracy."
If this sounds like an action item, that you - the dear reader liberal-in-good-standing should be "concerned" about India and let all your friends know this too - that's because this is exactly what it is.
It is a good sign of the coming reality of Indian politics - it will increasingly be internationalized by western liberal elites and their growing "concern", and a defeated domestic opposition who has lost the game in India itself, but will find money, resources, and column-spaces in like-minded, and much more powerful, institutions in western countries.
The South China Morning Post is in this weird no-man's land as a supposedly journalistic institution. It is physically based in Hong Kong, which is a self-governing-but-not-really part of the People's Republic of China, but is also owned by the Alibaba Group, which if you don't already know, is one of the largest Chinese companies in the world.
But here's the fascinating thing about progressive/liberal institutions - it doesn't really matter who owns them or where they are located. One can expect almost the exact same opinions on let's say, a topic like the Ukraine-Russia conflict, from a newspaper based in Sydney, Hong Kong, London, Bonn, or New York City. There's a great homogeneity to it all, best understood as a human-equivalent to the animal-kingdom phenomenon of stigmergy.
So it should not surprise you, dear reader, where Kunal Purohit, writing in the SCMP, stands on the issue of the "U.K. mob violence" seen in Leicester. Regardless of the actual facts on the ground, there was always going to be only one possible narrative being drawn from it in the western liberal media - the growing specter of "Global Hindutva". Here's what articles like this want to plant in the receptive reader's mind:
Dear (western liberal) reader! You're a good person, aren't you? You have all the right opinions on issues like climate change, gender, racial justice, etc. Well here's one more "right opinion" for you to add to you collection - Hindus are not to be trusted. They are not the peace-loving, harmless Gandhians that we had previously taught you they were. They might seem friendly, but look at (this event) and how much hate they're hiding deep inside. Your friendly-seeming Indian doctor may be in on this international conspiracy. You don't know what his relatives are sharing with on WhatsApp! So its best to be vary and "concerned" about these dangerous and hateful people…
Here's another Gray Lady piece about Sanna Irshad Mattoo, a photographer who had been given a Pulitzer Prize, presumably because she represents a population that is seen as opposed to the current political dispensation in India. As usual, here's the part that you're supposed to internalize, the religious instruction:
But Ms. Mattoo's harassment by the Indian authorities is the latest example of what human rights organizations have called an erosion of free speech in the country. The Indian government, the groups say, has weaponized the legal system and other levers of power to harass and intimidate journalists and activists, with the crackdown manifesting particularly harshly (another case of the NYT quoting the NYT) in the Indian-controlled portion of the Kashmir Valley, which is disputed with Pakistan.
I suppose that overall, this is pretty standard fare that one should expect from the Gray Lady by now. But it's still important to read and understand how they view the Kashmir issue in particular.
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That's it for this version of my newsletter. I thank you a lot for reading, and will try and take lesser time to publish the next one. Till then, hope you all had a great holiday period and a Happy New Year!
To momentarily invert the lens, journalists/academic can be seen as a Western equivalent to the Brahminical orthodoxy of old. They do not carry out any materially productive labour and must rely on begging (i.e. grants) to live, fulfill an important civilizational role as spiritual and epistemological guides, and are obsessed with ritual purity and pollution (i.e. avoiding associations with the outgroup).