Column: Cross Talk
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK, July 14, 2021 – When the Pew Research Center survey of religion across India, based on nearly 30,000 face-to-face interviews of adults in 17 languages was being conducted, demonstrations broke out in parts of New Delhi and elsewhere over the Indian government’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).
The CAA was passed by Parliament on December 11, 2019. It provided a path to Indian citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who are Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis or Christians, and arrived in India before the end of December 2014. Some protests began days later.
In essence, the CAA was as much a humanitarian act propagated by the Modi government, as a carefully thought-out immigration law to help minority refugees fleeing terrible atrocities in the three Muslim-majority countries attain a new life of freedom in a secular country like India. Think of persecuted Jews finding a place they could finally call a permanent home, in Israel.
Contrary to what critics of India might think – especially with demonstrations against CAA going on at that time – the major Pew survey, released last month, revealed that Indians of all religious backgrounds, and especially Muslims, overwhelmingly say they are very free to practice their faiths, and a majority of them don’t feel discriminated.
The Pew survey says, ‘Not only do a majority of Hindus in India (77%) believe in karma, but an identical percentage of Muslims do, too. A third of Christians in India (32%) – together with 81% of Hindus – say they believe in the purifying power of the Ganges River, a central belief in Hinduism.”
It added: “Today, India’s Muslims almost unanimously say they are very proud to be Indian (95%), and they express great enthusiasm for Indian culture: 85% agree with the statement that “Indian people are not perfect, but Indian culture is superior to others.”
It adds: “Relatively few Muslims say their community faces “a lot” of discrimination in India (24%). In fact, the share of Muslims who see widespread discrimination against their community is similar to the share of Hindus who say Hindus face widespread religious discrimination in India (21%).”
If there was ever any doubt that Muslims in India feel comfortable living where they do, this statement from Pew should dispel it: “When it comes to their religious beliefs, Indian Muslims in some ways resemble Indian Hindus more than they resemble Muslims in neighboring countries. For example, Muslims in Pakistan and Bangladesh almost universally say they believe in heaven and angels, but Indian Muslims seem more skeptical: 58% say they believe in heaven and 53% express belief in angels. Among Indian Hindus, similarly, 56% believe in heaven and 49% believe in angels.”
The gist of it: most Muslims in India are in harmony with people of other faiths in India, share common values in a democracy.
SKEWED COVERAGE OF CAA PROTESTS
When the CAA protests broke out, the mainstream media in the US, including The New York Times and The Washington Post – went berserk; ran frenetic coverage for days on end, attacking PM Modi and the Indian government with a barrage of one-sided biased reportage and opinion columns, decrying what they perceived as religious bigotry in India.
However, in the two weeks since the Pew survey on religion in India was released – arguably the largest such survey of religion in India – not a word has been published on it by either The New York Times or The Washington Post. Or by other usual India detractors in the mainstream media in the US, like The Atlantic, Time magazine and The New Yorker, among others.
Is this ignoring of the Pew survey by the mostly liberal media in the US for fear that their blatantly biased coverage of India in the past would be called out? Also, is it because of their open contempt for PM Modi?
That, more than likely, is the case.
To go back in history, less than a week after the CAA was passed by the Indian Parliament, and protests broke out, the big three of the US media: The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, as if they had agreed in unison over a common newsroom meeting, published the protests on the front page.
The Times ran a same piece by Jeffrey Gettleman and Maria-Abi Habib with different headlines, showing their slanted viewpoint: “India erupts in Protests as Modi Presses Vision for Hindu Nation”, claimed one, while another updated headline for the same story, ran “As Protests Rage, Is India Moving Closer to Becoming a Hindu Nation?” (likely the effect of some ‘conscientious’ editor in the newsroom who decided to temper the blatant bias)
“Critics are deeply worried that Mr. Modi is trying to wrench India away from its secular, democratic roots and turn this nation of 1.3 billion people into a religious state, a homeland for Hindus,” the report stated.
The Times also ran an opinion column by Anjali Mody, with the fanciful headline, ‘India Awakens to Fight for Its Soul’, with another piece by Kai Schultz weighing in with this pompous assertation: “To critics, Mr. Modi is pushing an authoritarian agenda that threatens to erode the country’s secular foundation, shrink space for religious minorities and move the country closer to a Hindu nation.”
Then, as is the usual (and tired) tactic and practice by the Times came a piece by academics, in this case with the nouveau headline, ‘We Are Witnessing a Rediscovery of India’s Republic,’ by Rohit De, who teaches history at Yale, and Surabhi Ranganathan. They wrote, “What is taking place in India is a clash between two different political visions. The Indian state is enacting an authoritarian vision in which political rights are conditioned on the privileges of religion and class and on being obedient subjects.”
Fierce India critic Rana Ayyub of The Washington Post, surmised in her bizarrely biased punditry, “Since his ascent to power in 2014, Modi has been explicit in his agenda for a totalitarian, fascist regime, laying out his blueprint to “other” India’s Muslims from his first day in office.”
For added effect, on her dissection of religion in India, Ayyub added these lines: “We are now moving closer to Modi’s dream of an India where a Muslim will have to walk the streets of his country with his gaze lowered, where democracy will be a privilege some can’t participate in, and Hindu nationalism will replace secularism in this once-glorious republic. The end is near for Gandhi’s India.”
Perhaps Ms. Ayyub was on vacation when the Pew survey came out.
The Post also ran a column by Barkha Dutt with a very filmy headline, “The Modi government’s new citizenship law puts India at war with itself”, with Dutt claiming that “But with the “citizenship” genie out of the bottle, the country may be looking at a turbulent and dangerous new phase of civil strife and social unrest.”
WSJ proclaimed through a headline that “Modi’s ‘Honeymoon Is Very Much Over’ as Hindu-First Agenda Faces Backlash,” while the New Yorker, in a piece headlined “Has Narendra Modi finally gone too far?” by Dexter Filkins, let loose this dire warning, “The new path-to-citizenship law seems to herald a future in which Indian Muslims are accorded second-class status. Since 1947, the Muslims of India have been distinguished by their widespread refusal to embrace radicalization. If the present circumstances carry on, it seems likely that many of them may conclude they have no other choice.”
The Atlantic, in a piece by Yasmeen Serhan, bemoaned that “Modi has sought to transform India from a secular democracy for all of its citizens into a nationalist and theocratic state that dominates its minorities, including its 200-million-strong Muslim population”, while Time magazine, in a piece by Ian Bremmer headlined, “What Happens Next with the Violence Tearing Apart India” failed miserably in his analysis that India “in which hundreds of millions of people belonging to different faiths could coexist peacefully” was “falling to the wayside”.
The fact of the matter is that all these mainstream publications failed to present a fair and balanced coverage of India during those days when the CAA protests were going on, and Pew was going about doing a meticulous job of recording the lives of Muslims living in India.
WHAT WAS MISSING FROM THE CAA COVERAGE
A glaring piece of information and reportage missing from all the CAA coverage was what exactly were the religious persecutions that forced minorities to flee the countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan to the safe haven of India?
The real answer is that all these publications knew what it was, and continues to be. But didn’t deliver it, or their bosses didn’t allow them to report it at that time.
Take this piece for example by Maria Abi-Habib (who covered the CAA protests too), with this headline in the New York Times, from August, 2020, “Poor and Desperate, Pakistani Hindus Accept Islam to Get By”, writing of forced conversions and marriages of Hindu girls in Pakistan.
“Treated as second-class citizens, the Hindus of Pakistan are often systemically discriminated against in every walk of life — housing, jobs, access to government welfare. While minorities have long been drawn to convert in order to join the majority and escape discrimination and sectarian violence, Hindu community leaders say that the recent uptick in conversions has also been motivated by newfound economic pressures,” she wrote in the Times piece.
“At independence in 1947, Hindus composed 20.5 percent of the population of the areas that now form Pakistan. In the following decades, the percentage shrank rapidly, and by 1998 — the last government census to classify people by religion — Hindus were just 1.6 percent of Pakistan’s population. Most estimates say it has further dwindled in the past two decades,” she added.
Farahnaz Ispahani, a former Pakistani lawmaker who is now a senior fellow at the Religious Freedom Institute, a research group in Washington, was quoted as saying that during the devastating floods of 2010 in Sindh Province, which left thousands homeless and with little to eat, Hindus were not allowed to sit with Muslims at soup kitchens, and when government aid was handed out, Hindus received less of it than their Muslim peers did.
In another piece from May, 2020, The Times reported this atrocity with the following headline, ‘Sewer Cleaners Wanted in Pakistan: Only Christians Need Apply’. This story is again by Abi-Habib. She writes, “Although India has outlawed caste-based discrimination with mixed success, in Pakistan it is almost encouraged by the state.”
It’s not that the New York Times, the Washington Post and other publications here cannot connect the dots, give a fair and balanced reporting of India. Instead, they try with ferocious might, at times, to impose their liberal world order, on India too, even if it means skewing the news. For them, Modi is a ‘right wing conservative’, somebody to be prowled and trampled upon, not praised, even when he deserves it.
And the Times has been privy to decades old religious persecution of Hindus among others, in Pakistan.
In April 8, 1964, the New York Times published a piece, headlined, ‘India and Pakistan Confer on Religious Clashes, writing, ‘Hindu and Christian refugees were flowing into India every day and that 200,000 already had crossed the East Pakistani border…The Indian Home Minister Gulzarilal Nanda said in his opening speech that India’s resources had been “taxed to the utmost” by the refugees from East Pakistan since communal rioting in January.”
So, with all this age-old knowledge in their archives, why does Times and other US publications condemn PM Modi for trying to protect persecuted minorities from Pakistan and try give them a decent life in India?
Frankly, it’s shameful, blatantly biased and atrocious reporting of modern-day India.
(Sujeet Rajan is Editor-in-Chief of www.indiaoverseasreport.com Follow him on Twitter @SujeetRajan1)
