Today in Hinduphobia September 9, 2019: Kashmiri Hindus Protested The Washington Post’s Biased Coverage, and This is How their Protest Was Covered
American media companies have rarely acknowledged concerns from Hindus about bias, misrepresentation, and callous dehumanization patterns in their uniquely pre-post-racist approach to Hindu lives and voices. While I have written about these issues for several years, I have rarely seen any member of these media houses come forward to talk about these concerns with me, other media scholars, or with members of the Hindu community.
Apart from the rare correction or half-hearted “we stand by our greatness” sort of comment, the media in the US have remained consistently invested in their conviction that these rich, white institutions with rich white colonial patterns of coverage and exclusion, are somehow above having to deal with charges of racism and bias from the Hindu community in the U.S. Even a series of on the ground protests in early 2016 by Hindus in several cities against CNN for its sensational show “Believer” (which Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard rightly criticized for being “as if touring as zoo”) did not elicit remorse or change. Reza Aslan deployed a couple of willingly gullible Hindu figureheads as his sanctioning agents and told Hindus to go civilize themselves or something like that.
Given this persistent state of arrogant indifference by media houses which otherwise claim to be all for immigrants and much against President Trump for being anti-immigrant, it was inspiring to read that the Kashmiri Hindu community staged a strong protest on the streets of Washington, D.C. to protest The Washington Post’s one-sided coverage of Kashmir.
What is interesting about this important moment in the Indian American community’s engagement with hostile white media houses, though, is the different ways in which media covered, or failed to cover, this protest. Given that Kashmir is very much in the news, and the protest itself was fairly well-attended, one would imagine that U.S. media took this moment, and the concerns expressed, a bit seriously. However, it seems that while the protest was widely covered in India (though not without problems, as I show below), the Washington Post merely said it stood by its coverage, and no other news media seem to have covered it.
The coverage in the Indian and Indian American press seems to have leaned, in some quarters at least, to diluting or discrediting the protestors and their concerns.
The Times of India, for example, used a file photo of Kashmiri Hindu women laughing and smiling, leading to a very misleading impression that the protests were somehow frivolous; a relevant concern indeed to Hindus everywhere whose criticism of Hinduphobic media coverage comes from a sense of life and death fears, from Islamic militancy in the 1990s to xenophobic violence in the US in more recent times.
While other newspapers covered the protest in a more sober fashion, what is interesting is also the way in which some newspapers chose to discredit the concerns of the protestors by placing their charges in quote marks, or with qualifiers like “alleged bias.” The popular Indian American newspaper India Abroad offered what seemed like a lengthy analysis aimed at contesting the charges of bias as well (and some gratuitous digs at discrediting the protestors by noting they arrived in “luxury” buses), and propping up the Post’s defense.
Only the popular Indian media watchdog blog Op India offered extensive space to the concerns of the protestors and published the entirety of their letter to the Washington Post.
While I have not yet studied the Washington Post’s present wave of Kashmir articles closely, the protestors’ concerns about the targeting of Hindus through the selective silencing of indigenous Hindu genocide and the simultaneous slanting of a democratically elected Indian government’s actions as some kind of Hindu religious expansionism are not unwarranted. Western news media have taken their dehumanization strategies of Hindus to brazen levels as far as Kashmiri Hindus are concerned, hiding the truth of the grave injustices done to them under some outlandish charges of their victimization being “weaponized” against Muslims.
It seems to me that the problem with media Hinduphobia today is not one of mere bias, but active collaboration in a project of extreme racial and religious intolerance for a people of color they believe deserve no human rights, let alone fair media representation, simply because they call themselves Hindus. I call on the Hindu community to follow the lead of the Kashmiri Hindu exiles who have taken on the important role of being media watchdogs in a time when media has become an appendage of the military-intervention business model and not what we all expect the media to be in a post-racist democratic country. Representation begins at home, with our communities, and with our bodies, most of all.
