#1: What the West read about India (Sept-Oct 2022)
Analyzing Western media coverage about India
This is the first iteration of a newsletter that has been germinating in my mind for a while now. If you follow the modern media landscape, you will have observed that there is an increased interest in Western countries (the U.S., the U.K., and some western European countries) about India and her domestic politics. This is in stark contrast to even five-six years ago, when I was still living in the United States as a college graduate in his final year. Back then, India was perhaps the least covered large country in the world by the Mainstream Media in the West (henceforth referred-to as the "Legacy/Institutional Media"). If nothing else, this change should wake us up to pay attention.
But why is the coverage by the Legacy Media important in the West? This is so because despite these institutions (the New York Times, TIME Magazine, the BBC, etc.) losing some of their narrative control in their own domestic populations (especially among the people they have designated as "domestic enemies", i.e. conservatives), these institutions still enjoy a lot of purchase in the policy-making class of the West. Almost anyone who works in economic, social, political, or even foreign policy, as well as for the major western corporations that control more wealth than many countries, regularly keeps up with the Legacy Media's coverage of events around the world. The narrative set by the Legacy Media is internalized by this class of people as the unimpeachable truths and assumptions about any set of events. It is job of this reporting to inform the liberal-in-good-standing reader in the west, about What Is Going On In India. And obviously, what they've come up with after hours of dedicated research is that Diwali is a "South Asian" holiday, and that the blockbuster Telugu movie "RRR" is sign of creeping-Hindutva.
This narrative is also downstream from the ideas about a topic that have been developing in Western Academia. There is approximately a three-four year transmission period for these ideas to go from "fringe" ideas in Academia, to becoming the unarguable norms of the Western elite. In the West itself, denying or opposing these ideas with institutional backing comes with a heavy cost that could impact your reputation, your finances, or even your legal position. In short, the narrative of this Legacy Media on any event is powerful because it axiomatic for the class of people that make decisions.
Which means, that for a country like India, a growing "interest" or "concern" about its internal affairs among this media class is not necessarily a good thing. At the very least, it calls for a rigorous tracking and compiling of Western media coverage by us Indians. We need to know what's being reported about us and creating impressions about us in the minds of the educated western elite. And this newsletter is a small attempt at conducting a western media analysis through an Indian lens. But first, it is important to talk about my methodology.
I will be dividing this analysis into three categories:
Narrative-based articles: These articles will fall into the "story" that is currently being pushed about India in the western media. This narrative can be broadly summed up as follows: India is a rising country, but there is a lot of "concern" about how India's domestic politics is developing. Indians, and Hindus in particular, are broadly being seen as illiberal and "dangerous", inspiring emotions similar to the western media's own domestic "right-wing" enemies (i.e. a scary mass of people whose "disinformation" must be censored to protect Democracy). Which means that the reporting about Hindus and Indians is being done in a largely negative light. Hindus are now prominently presented as angry, distrustful and opposed to other religions, and on the verge of taking action that should spark "concern" in the average liberal good-samaritan reader of the New York Times, and stories depicting them as such are now the norm in the western press. Hindus are talking about increasingly uncomfortable things like the protection of Hindu rights, discrimination against Hindus in various places, and the right of Hindus to take back authorship about their own history and culture. This all is obviously unacceptable to the Legacy Media, whose impression of Hindu Indians as a harmless, timid and acquiescent community that never raises its voice, has been shattered. This narrative is the current dominant narrative about India in the western elite mind, so it stands to reason that most current western media coverage will fall into this category. If I include an article in this category, I will give a brief explanation as to why I've done so. Western legacy media coverage also likes to talk about India's relation with its two neighbors - China and Pakistan. This is the hyphenated-lens through which most westerners still see India, so those stories will fall into this category as well. The articles in this category are extremely easy to find these days, so they are important for Indians to read, and to understand what the priestly class of the west thinks of us.
Anti-narrative stories: This category will obviously contain the handful of stories in the western media that show India and Hindus is a positive light. These stories are obviously harder to hunt for, and very often, even stories that show India in a positive light will contain reminders to the reader about how "concerning" things are in India as a whole. I will be sure to point this out wherever I can.
YouTube, Podcasts and Social Media: This category is obviously different from the institutional media, even though there is an increasing presence of the legacy media on these platforms. But generally speaking, the increased interest about India is not just limited to the Legacy Media. There are a lot of fantastic amateur creators on social media that are increasingly talking about India's economy, politics, history and culture, often doing so in a more humble and objective manner. This category also offers me a chance to compare the legacy media's narrative on India to the story that exists in the mind of the average western person about India.
I will try and make this a weekly/fortnightly newsletter, that does its best to compile the comprehensive and voluminous coverage of India. But there is obviously a good chance that I will miss out on articles and media that could fit into this newsletter. If I receive comments about such articles I have missed in response, I will be sure to update my newsletter with a footer that talks about every article I missed.
The upcoming newsletters after this one will obviously not feature this lengthy explanation of my methodology, as I want to keep the length of these newsletters reasonable and readable. Since this is the first newsletter, I will mostly be focusing on the previous month or so, but the newsletters after this will cover a week/fifteen days worth of news. So thanks for reading and if you have any suggestions for how I can improve these, please let me know in the comments or on my Twitter, where I have also made two previous threads of Western coverage of India - here, and here.
If there's one thought that I want to leave you with before we get to the actual articles, it is this - India is a massive country, with a scale of human life that is almost incomprehensible to most people who live in other countries. In any single day across this country, you will find incredibly happy events taking place, and incredibly sad events taking place, with a large number of both taking place overall, just due to the sheer numbers involved. So in this context, the editorial power of the media is often not what it says about a topic, but it is often more about the topics they choose to speak about in the first place. It is the power to drive conversation, and making people value the importance of one event over another. WHAT the media chooses to report on is an editorial act, and a political statement. And that is something we should keep in mind as we get to these next section of this article.
Narrative-based stories
This first article is a great example of the kind of media article Indians are used to seeing in the western press. Just as expected is the Indian-sounding names of the authors - Rhea Mogul, Devendra Singh Chauhan and Vedika Sud. Presenting India only as a country unsafe for women has been a very common theme in the western press. To quote the authors:
"On average, India reports one rape every 17 minutes, according to the latest government figures, and campaigners say the girl's case highlights just how deeply entrenched misogynistic and patriarchal values are in the country of 1.3 billion."
Then there is usual description of India as a backward and "patriarchal" society. A good way to think about articles like these is what it would look like if an Indian news source created a story about an individual case of rape in Chicago, Illinois, and used it to talk about the "culture of rape" in Illinois.
It is always a pleasure to cover a story by the Gray Lady, whose very font makes a liberal-in-good-standing accept the authority of the reporting. If the western media is a storehouse of political power, then the New York Times is by far the most prestigious organ in this scheme. In my experience with the western liberal mind, the reporting of the NYT on an issue acts as a sort of religious edict (a fatwa, if you will) for the target audience. So much so, that many of my liberal friends have often said to me in an exasperated tone, "the New York Times has reported on this and said so!". In their minds, this statement is supposed to end the argument in that very instance. So, in conclusion, if you are doing a media analysis of the west, what the New York Times says, matters.
In this article, the New York Times has compared a bulldozer with Yogi Adityanath's (the Chief Minister of an Indian state, which if it was its own country, would be the fourth-most populated country in the world) face on it, to a burning cross at a Klu Klux Klan rally. It is a level of unhinged reporting that one doesn't really expect from the Gray Lady, but then again, perhaps it is our expectations that are wrong.
This one has to be read to be believed, and if I kept picking out gems from this article, it would take far too long. So please do go through it yourself!
I don't know what I like more about this one - the strange brooding from India's famous film industry that they can no longer openly make films that show the country's majority community and religion in a horrible light? Or the assumption that the industry "used to honor India's secular ideals"? Or the sinking feeling among these people that the population is no longer willing to watch unoriginal content that is made to mock the country's majority religion, commonly showing Hindu religious figures are dishonest, scandalous, fraudulent, etc.?
My favorite part of this article is:
"Drawing inspiration from bleak headlines—the religious lynchings, the cronyism, the autocratic acts of the state—had become a fraught enterprise."
This section is simply meant to remind the liberal-in-good-standing reader of the New Yorker about What Is Going On In India. It is meant to remind you that you need to be thinking negatively about the whole Indian and Hindu population - it is a framing device. It is also a great example of why, if the only source of knowledge you had about India was the western press, you would be completely blindsided if you landed in India - it is that far away from the truth on the ground in the country.
Read it, and realize that articles like this are meant to create the "concern" about India, that will make the use of the word relevant in the next New Yorker piece about the Things That Are Going On In India. It's a case of creating the supply of the term, to create the demand for it in the future - a self-licking ice cream cone.
And of course, the name of the author? Samanth Subramanian.
Honestly, this article is a great example of how the west sees India today. It has almost every aspect of the modern-day Narrative Story about India - comments about "concern" from cherry-picked members of the Indian diaspora (who are selected because they agree with the required narrative), a discussion about Indian internet users that is not too dissimilar to how they talk about western conservatives, etc.
The role of the U.K. media is also worth pointing out here. The BBC in particular has to be in contention for being one of the worst offenders in covering India from a western media point of view, and they also have a pretty hefty investment in the Indian market, with reasonably large channels in Hindi and Urdu. Reuters, which is allegedly a news-wire service, has also increasingly waded into the "Explainer" articles that allow editorial positions to be presented as news articles, is the source of the article I have linked in this section.
There are many angles to think about the U.K. liberal's increasing "concern" about India, with the legacy of a former colonial power (with a long liberal history of justifying colonialism that is often forgotten) looking at a former colony, being the most important one. But the one thing I'll leave you with on this topic is that the next time you're reading a Western media article about India, keep in mind the country of origin, and to try and differentiate into your head how different the coverage is from different countries.
Oh, and of course, the name of the author is Rina Chandran.
Despite not being able to create an Archive.org link for this article (and REALLY not wanting to give any clicks to the Council on Foreign Relations), I simply couldn't resist including this article. How could I resist including an interview where one of the questions is the perfectly worded, "When you look at the state of journalism and reporting in India, what concerns you most or brings you hope?"
After all, this is a beautiful example of the kind of tone and content that India's floundering legacy Nehruvian elite produces when it leaves the goldfish-bowl of Indian politics and media. A large portion of this anglophone Macaulayite elite, that inherited the rule of India from the British, actually feels more at home at western liberal citadels like the Council on Foreign Relations than they do in India. And this feeling has only been amplified since they lost control over the narrative of Indian politics to uncles and aunties aggressively forwarding WhatsApp messages to their friends and families throughout the 2010s.
In India, Suhasini Haider has to at least try to not violate certain norms so that Indian (or Chinese) advertisers continue to buy ads with Orwellianly-named The Hindu, but at CFR, she can be herself, and say what she really thinks.
The interview is pure, distilled Western Narrative Coverage of India. It hits all the narrative notes that need to be hit, and is worth reading even if you don't want to give any clicks to one of the biggest cheerleaders of the Iraq War.
It's a fascinating world we live in, where a technology company based in the United States is releasing "human rights reports" concerning another sovereign country. It's a reminder to the rest of the world, that most American tech companies are not independent corporations who are simply pursuing their economic goals in other countries. Increasingly, it is becoming impossible to tell where the private corporation ends, and where the western liberal regime begins. These two entities have the exact same ideologies, and act in unison and tandem to achieve them. Why then should the rest of the world see them as distinct from one another? In my opinion, the correct way for an Indian to look at corporations like Meta, Amazon, Google, etc. is the same way we look at ByteDance in relation to China. The only difference is that the control of the regime in China is explicit, whereas in the U.S. it is a form of spontaneous narrative coordination of supposedly independent entities.
Now of course, the liberal-in-good-standing sees nothing wrong with this at all. He also sees nothing wrong with the fact that Meta is facing "accusations of failing to adequately police hate speech against religious minorities". I'm sure he calls this "content moderation". But of course, if the Chinese government were to do the same, it would be called "censorship".
It takes a lot for an Indian to stop looking at the Chinese as public-enemy number one for the country, but the western liberal journalists are surely making this race a competitive one!
There's not much that needs to be said about this. It's The Guardian. "Reporting" about the recent violence in the English city of Leicester, with an "explainer" about "Hindu nationalism".
It's exactly what one would expect.
But one thing I will add is this - notice that in order to make the Guardian-reader-in-good-standing "understand" (form assumptions and heuristics in their heads) this issue, the subtitle to the article claims that the ideology "has been associated with rightwing extremism". What Hannah Ellis-Peterson wants to do here is to create the association of Hindus = Right-wing Tories = Bad in the minds of the reader. It's an attempt at heuristic creation, because the liberal-in-good-standing will "understand" the topic better if explained to her through the lens of her own domestic politics. And it will work on the intended audience.
We end this section for this article with another piece from the Gray Lady, this time authored by Afghan Mujib Mashal, the NYT's chief "South Asia" (I will 100% be writing about the narrative dissonance of the term "South Asia" in the future) correspondent.
Now I don't want to make this about an individual, but it is a very curious act by the NYT to hire an Afghan to be in-charge of their coverage of the Indian Subcontinent, which is a vast, diverse, hugely populated landmass made up of several countries and indigenous traditions not really found anywhere else in the world. And make no mistake about it, like everything it does, this is also a political statement by the Gray Lady.
But that aside, the article itself is again, exactly what we should expect. The clincher line is again the beautiful framing device of "stifling dissent, sidelining civilian institutions and making minorities second-class citizens". These are unsubstantiated and vague claims of course, but in this article, they are again doing their job perfectly - they are reminding the liberal-in-good-standing of What Is Going On In India. The reader of this article will then use this article later in the day to "prove" to his Indian-American friend that the latter's country is falling apart at the seems. And he will think that sharing this article will have "settled" the debate. But alas, this is why western liberal discourse about India will continue to be incomplete, naive, ideologically-motivated, and simply wrong.
Anti-narrative stories
This was actually a reasonable look at a public health issue in New Delhi. As a Delhi resident myself, this was a fair article that seeks to link the issue to climate change and municipal administration. The author is Delhi-based Monika Mondal. It's worth a read!
This is an interesting BBC article on the upcoming India-U.K. Free Trade Agreement, recent comments by the new U.K. Home Secretary, and why Scotch manufacturers are among the most eager for the deal to be concluded. Surprisingly, no real villainization of the Indian people by the Beeb, which is a competitor for the most anti-India foreign media house.
To end on a lighter note, I found this to be a rather positive article from The New Yorker. It's a piece about the Indian spice of heeng, a staple of Indian cooking whose history represents the positive aspects of India's relations with its neighbors - an exchange of food and other cultural items.
Youtube, Podcasts and other Social Media
While the mainstream western news obviously matters, this section is meant to highlight some of my favorite YouTube and other social media content being produced about India.
Social Media is actually a great example of how the world is growing interested in India in a positive way, with an increased curiosity about how nearly one-fifth of the world's population lives. It also helps that India is actually a great place for a western content creator to look to create a large audience. In my opinion, places like YouTube and Podcasts offer some of the most sincere and accurate attempts at trying to understand India from a foreign perspective.
Some of my favorite pieces of content in this theme are:
Conclusion
With that, it is the end of this first iteration of my newsletter. It's the first time I've tried to create something of this kind, so if anyone reading this has any suggestions, please do let me know!
And to reiterate, future iterations of this newsletter will not be nearly as long as this one, as I will not reiterate my methodology, and simply go into the new articles that I'm covering.
Thanks for reading!
EDIT: Here is an excellent piece describing this media phenomenon by one of my readers (named Warburg)
I've been waiting for something like this for a while, so thanks for the great work! Curious if you've previously read this article, which I thought did a good job of describing why coverage of India in Western democratic indices is so awful: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/08/indian-democracy-at-75-who-are-the-barbarians-at-the-gate/
Thanks for your great articles & huge efforts. I know elite white doctors, lawyers in US who believe everything the legacy media write about India. They have traveled to India several times & married to Hindu Indians & have kids but understand zero. They are blinded by Ideology. They believe a Nazi fascist Modi has taken over India. Hindus are persecuting Muzlims/Christians. The crazy part is Indian government does not even record religious hate crimes., there are no statistics on the subject, then on what basis are they talking? They are talking on the basis of articles that cherry picked 5-6 incidents in such a large population of 1.3 billion. Some are mob lynchings for theft not hate really. The least the BJP could have done is start to record religious hate crimes. The numbers would speak for themselves. It would become clear who is persecuting who? Almost weekly if not almost daily a Hindu women is being raped by Islamists & killed in LoveJ/grooming. The best part is since Hindus, Muslims have different names such date can still be collected & published. Why is it not being done? Why is BJP sleeping? T