Today in Hinduphobia October 28, 2019: “Austere Religious Scholars” and How the New York Times Covered Terrorist Attacks on India 1993–2008
The Washington Post has been justifiably criticized for its headline yesterday sanitizing the leader of one of the most violent religious extremist groups of our time as an “austere religious scholar” (in case you haven’t seen it yet, look for the hashtag #WaPoDeathNotices for some dark humor).
To victims of systematic media Hinduphobia, this sort of cowardly, unprofessional evasiveness by mainstream media is however not surprising at all. For several years now, major Western news outlets like the BBC, NPR, Washington Post, and the New York Times have been carrying out a relentless program of whitewashing of violence against Hindus and against Indians in general (see my other essays on Medium for more on this).
The discourse on Kashmir in the last few months for example, has studiously avoided acknowledging that the majority-Muslim population once had a vibrant native Hindu minority community alongside that was violently expelled in 1990. The killing of 40 Indian policemen, mostly Hindus, by an explicitly anti-Hindu Muslim suicide bomber on Valentine’s Day 2019, was also covered in a most unprofessional, biased, and dishonest way by the New York Times and others (see my Medium piece for more on this). The fact that the killer had recorded a message declaring his intent to kill people he called “cow-piss drinkers” and “impure polytheists” was mostly ignored in the Western news media, which instead focused on interviews with his family and friends of the “what a nice boy he was” sort.
Western news media has also completely ignored the killing of several Hindus, including Dalit Hindus, by Muslim criminals and lynch mobs in recent years, even while promoting a fear campaign about an alleged Hindu “cow vigilante” epidemic in India based on dubious data provided by a supposed research outfit that has now actually ceased operations presumably because of its inability to justify its false claims any longer. None of the major Western media, including the Washington Post, New York Times, BBC, or even Netflix’s Hasan Minhaj, who have directly or indirectly referred to this dubious source for their reports about alleged religious violence over cows by Hindus against Muslims, have acknowledged that they may have erred in relying on this source (read Swati Goel Sharma’s reports on this here).
The demonization of Hindus as aggressors, and the erasure of Hindus as victims, is a pervasive, systematic media phenomenon, and a key aspect of Hinduphobia. While I have been writing about this phenomenon and its different aspects in some details, here I would like to provide an overview of what sanitization of terrorist violence looks like when examined over a long-enough period. I share below my research so far on how the New York Times has covered some of the major terrorist attacks by Muslim extremist groups on Indian people (I should also mention that India has its own equivalents of the “austere religious scholar” meme thanks to several acts of similar sanitizing of terrorism by Indian news media — look up “And they hanged Yakub” and also “son of a school headmaster Burhan Wani”).
The following tables contain the headlines that appeared in the New York Times under the search term “India” in the days following several major terrorist attacks on India beginning with the Mumbai bomb blasts of 1993 and ending with the Delhi blasts of 2008 (I have not included my findings of the Times’s coverage of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks in this selection and will return to it at a later time).
These twelve major events that took place from 1993 to 2008 in India are well-known cases of terrorism done by Jihadist terrorist or criminal groups against Indian civilians (the only partial-exception being the 2002 Gujarat Hindu-Muslim riots that followed the burning of Hindu children, women and men on a train by a Muslim mob in Godhra). The New York Times covered these events to varying degrees, with some events receiving several days of coverage, and others as little as one story. In the table, I list the headlines for all the reports appearing immediately after these events, and in some cases, I also mention articles from a few weeks later to give us a sense of how the picture of the “Hindu” that the Times constructs is fairly consistent with what we might describe as its deep Hinduphobic bias.
The name “Hindu” appears again and again as essentially a source of fear or concern for Muslims in India and as a negative label in itself, and does not appear in most of several dozen headlines here as the identity of a targeted group. On the other hand, the headlines never mention the word “Muslim” to describe the culprits or suspects in these one dozen acts of egregious mass violence against civilians, nor even the name of the suspected terrorist groups (only once is Al Qaeda mentioned, while LeT, JeM and other groups are never named in the headlines).
The 1993 Mumbai blasts coverage actually begins with a red herring of sorts by naming “Tamils” as possible suspects, but never actually mentioning the names or identities of the suspects or perpetrators (it was the death penalty awarded to one of the convicted conspirators of this bombing that led the Indian Express to its infamous “And they hanged Yakub” yeller-headline). The 1998 serial blasts in the south Indian city of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu (which, along with Hyderabad, is one of two major south Indian targets of Jihadist violence in this list) are covered up even more intensely in a spate of headlines hurling the “H word” around as if some political apocalypse was unfolding in India because a “Hindu” government was being formed. The first headline to mention “Hindu” and “Muslim” after a Muslim Jihadist group has massacred dozens of people talks about a “rising Hindu tide” that is “frighten(ing) India’s Muslims.” Then, the words “Hindu bloc,” “Hindu Nationalist” and just “Hindu party” dominate several headlines. As I pointed out with NPR coverage recently, the Times goes back and forth between “Hindu” and “Hindu Nationalist,” as if the intent to occasionally use the latter phrase is not to respect the difference but to actually equate the word “Hindu” with an innately negative reality.
The Gujarat train attack and riots of 2002 are the only instance (as far I have seen) where a headline indicating that Hindus were victims has ever appeared in the New York Times. The subsequent reports move onto erase Hindu suffering, and also situate the violence as somehow related to an ongoing outbreak of Hindu religious fervor as was the case with the general Western coverage of India from the time of the 1992 Ayodhya uprising (note the use of the phrase “Hindu rite” in one headline). The subsequent attack by Muslim extremists on the Akshardham temple is also covered in a somewhat obfuscatory way in the Times (though one headline indicates that the temple is a Hindu one, the identity of the gunmen in the same headline is not specified.
The coverage of the vicious 2006 Mumbai train bombings also continues this pattern while at the same time also diluting any religious or anti-Hindu angle in the motivations of the attackers. It is very instructive that a trope that appears frequently in “austere religious scholar” sort of sanitizing-commentaries and also in popular culture, that of terrorist violence being somehow less about Islamist religious belief and hatred for others and more about romantic protest against capitalism is centered in an actual headline in the Times (“business class”). From a media research perspective, this is an important trope in current Hinduphobia as it serves to dehumanize Hindus and present them in a manner reminescent of the greedy, dishonest quizmaster Prem who despises poor Muslim tea-seller Jamal in Slumdog Millionaire, rather than as human beings who had a right to not be blown up while simply going to work perilously hanging onto a window-rail on Mumbai’s overcrowded trains.
The broad conclusion we can draw from this system of seemingly calculated presences and absences is that the New York Times has been quite complicit in the toxic climate of Hinduphobia and extreme Hinduphobic violence that exists in the world today. In at least three cases (from the examples listed above), their reporting has gone out of the way to make it appear that these undeniable acts of mass violence against civilians did NOT have a religious, anti-Hindu, angle to them (the 2005 New Delhi bombing story for example, describes the time as “one of the busiest shopping seasons of the year” without specifying that it was Diwali season, lest anyone think perhaps that there was an anti-Hindu/Sikh/Jain element in Jihadist killings perhaps).
It is important for media consumers, educators, and practitioners to begin to take this sort of systematic exclusion seriously. Merely reporting acts of violence without the courage and professional integrity to name the reasons why these are happening is one of the main reasons for the decline in public respect for journalism as an institution today. A conversation on the connections between media sanitization of Jihadist violence, Hinduphobic bias, and anti-Hindu violence is necessary and I hope we will not forget about this real need for change after the “austere religious scholars” fiasco stops trending.
