My Doordarshan Interview about Western Media Coverage of the 2019 Indian Election (Notes and Ideas)

I was interviewed about the Western media coverage of the 2019 Indian elections by Malcolm Brown for India’s national broadcaster Doordarshan last week. I am sharing my notes for the interview below along with links to some supplemental readings (it is not an exact transcript as the conversation took its own direction, but the outline below indicates some of my ideas for what a post-2019 vision for an Indian communication and soft power policy might look like, and also some points I did not address in the interview itself towards the end).

You can watch my interview on Doordarshan’s You Tube page, here.

Q. Your views on re-election of Modi in India with a better result than the last election

- It’s a vote for Narendra Modi and what people see in him.

- Selfless person, someone dedicated to service, and in contrast to a neocolonial urban elite patronized for decades by one powerful political dynasty.

- It’s almost like voters chose between a model based on narrow identity-based “self-interest,” and another model in which you are asked to think beyond one’s self and more and more about others, a greater social, civilizational or national self as it were.

- The term that comes to mind for what voters see in Mr. Modi frankly is an indigenous Indian idea, and that is “Dharma.”

- It’s a universal, premodern Indian sensibility that cannot be reduced to religion in the academic sense.

- So the re-election of Modi is about returning to a rooted, non-colonial model for India. But it’s not about the past or nostalgia. It is driven by optimism for the future. About dignity and an end to poverty.

Q. Your views on how India has been projected in International media in last few years

- It’s my professional opinion as a media researcher that international news media have severely damaged their own credibility in the past few years through their biased India coverage.

- I have been studying the New York Times and BBC and other Western media closely. Their coverage of India has not been anything like professional or objective journalism that presents multiple sides of a story. Instead, their election coverage of India looks straight out of a regime-change propaganda playbook. (Read my analysis at Pragyata here.)

- If you look at the covers that The Economist and Time magazine did on Prime Minister Modi for example, they look exactly like the hysteria they whipped up while invading Iraq in 2003. Anyone would think the US and UK were at war with India quite frankly! (Watch the Upword video on this here).

- The picture that these media have been relentlessly constructing is that India is being taken over by Hindu fundamentalists who are supposedly trying to make India “more Hindu” by regulating people’s diets.

- The reality is that poor farmers are suffering from a crises of cattle-theft, both Hindu and Muslim farmers. Previous governments have allowed this to reach Wild West proportions, with cattle death trains and the like. Farmers are trying to keep their cattle from getting stolen, and that has somehow turned into a false narrative about religious fundamentalism being on the rise. (Read Swati Goel Sharma’s important article on the subject here).

- There are issues of crime, and mob violence, but to turn this into some innate moral crisis in Hindu culture as Western media have done, is not just anti animal-rights but also anti-human. It’s just racist, like they are on a civilizing mission.

- On a lighter note I would like to add: It seems as if foreign correspondents going to New Delhi from London or Washington are getting not just an Indian visa from the government but also some kind of time-travel visa through which they are regressing to 1492 and are sailing on Christopher Columbus or Vasco da Gama’s ships to civilize the natives. The MEA should really check up on those time-travel visas and remind these reporters racism is no longer cool!

Q. How do you see India’s own effort in projecting itself. Where are the gaps?

- India too has to take some responsibility for its failure in projecting itself in the world media.

- The average Indian and many Indian leaders seem to think Americans are all doing Yogaπ and Bollywood dancing and are therefore taking Indian soft power seriously. That is unfortunately a bit of an exaggeration.

- The truth is that the average American has been reading only about Hindu lynch mobs attacking minorities and women because of their Hindu religious beliefs, and this they have been reading day in and out for several years.

- I actually heard from people here who believed that the culprits in the Sri Lanka bomb blasts were “Hindu Nationalists” because the New York Times had an article on the attacks that began with a misleading comment in that direction.

- This should be a cause of concern for the new Indian government as it could well lead to xenophobic attacks on overseas Indians.

- Every time a big Hollywood movie comes out with an Indian theme in a negative way, there is an outbreak of racism, like gangs using the term “slumdog” while attacking Indians a few years ago.

- More recently the phrase “cow urine drinker” was popularized in media widely, and the suicide bomber who killed 40 Indians in Kashmir on Valentine’s Day actually used that phrase in his video. (read my analysis on the New York Times’s cover up of this event here)

- So the new government needs to recognize misrepresentation of India as a security concern, and step up efforts to start a global Indian news platform that projects India’s self-perception today. India needs information sovereignty.

Q. Do you see the election result in India playing a role in the upcoming US elections?

- I don’t think Indian elections would affect US elections really. Maybe Indian Americans will take some of the anti-establishment mood seriously here too, but not much more than that, I think.

Q. What does this result mean for Indo-US relationship?

- I think the people to people level connection between India and America is going to remain very strong, but leaders in both countries need to step up and reign in the systematic misinformation and disinformation campaigns that are being waged in parts of the media. We must address the source of these campaigns now.

- Most of the assumptions in the recent propaganda against India in Western media goes back to old Cold War myths about the perceived usefulness of the Pakistani military to the US in comparison to India.

- The whole “South Asia” paradigm that was spawned in that context has really been proved redundant and counterproductive in real life again and again, but is being kept alive on artificial systems in universities and of course in media discourses today.

- I think that Narendra Modi winning a huge victory is a defeat for this academic orthodoxy which is trying to reduce civilizational India into a theory called “South Asia” which views India as a former outpost of the Middle East which had no history before the Mughals came. The defeated Congress regime is really the political face of that theory.

- I believe that the natural direction for the US and India to engage with each other would be more along the lines of the “Indo Pacific” conception. This is far more aware of the organic pan-Asian presence of Indian civilization historically speaking.

- I think we can easily imagine, like the volcano chains of the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an Indo-Pacific “Ring of Dharma,” a chain of Hindu-Buddhist temples and communities; southern India, Southeast Asia, the far East, and of course, California, which is basically a cultural extension of Asia and the Pacific Islands today.

Q. Will this Modi victory gives India an advantage in the US-China imbalance of trade and power?

- I believe India has been steadily heading towards a position of some independence and worth on the basis of its own economic growth and also in terms of Prime Minister Modi’s own efforts in diplomacy, as we saw with the recent changes in China’s position on an important concern over Pakistani terrorism.

- But the real advantage that India has going forward is the potential moral leverage that a mandate as big as this gives Prime Minister Modi. In this big three scenario, Mr. Modi is going to come across perhaps as the one who is carrying his people most strongly with him. He can leverage democracy in a way perhaps others cannot, and it is to his credit.

Q. What is your view on India’s soft power for projecting India on the global map?

- There has been a huge vacuum on this front for several decades now — India has not really put out a message on its own terms after Gandhi and Nehru and Non-Alignment.

- The anti-colonial paradigm coming out of India which most of the newly liberated nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America supported in the 50s and 60s went into hibernation somewhere, and I think that’s the scale on which it should be woken up now, as a new India paradigm that expresses how its citizens are thinking about the world today.

- Much of the talk about Indian soft power in the past few years has focused on exports like Bollywood and events like Yoga Day, but we have not addressed the messages, the whole narratives themselves around these exports.

- Take Yoga. It’s a multibillion dollar industry in the US, but doesn’t benefit India culturally or economically. The US Yoga business is being increasingly accused of systematic appropriation and racism against Indians. There are Yoga experts and historians in America writing books saying that Yoga has no real cultural or philosophical ties to the Indian people, and that Yoga was actually copied from European gymnastics by Indians!

- This is very different from say martial arts in the West, where Asian teachers and lineages are offered a lot of respect. There is a concern about intellectual property in a sense.

- The present challenge with soft power in India is that we have not invested in telling a story about all the real accomplishments we have made, either with the opening of the economy in 1991, or with the mandate against corruption and nepotism in 2014. We need a new India paradigm, and we need the tools to take it to eyes and ears all over the world.