False narratives spun around CAA
IT IS painful how
several Indian journalists are maligning their own country in the articles they
are writing for the Western press on the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019
(CAA) and the envisaged National Register of Citizens (NRC).
To advance their
destructive agenda, they are distorting or misrepresenting facts and are
attributing the worst possible motives to the government.
Hollow reporting
Thugh not required to
defend the government, they are also not expected to launch a smear campaign
against it. Any sensitive and sensible Indian citizen would have some qualm
about slandering their own government, and, by extension, their own country, in
the international opinion-building AngloSaxon foreign press, but these
Modi/BJP-baiters seem to lack any.
Major damage is being
done to India’s external image by internal anti-Modi forces in league with the
so-called liberal Western press. Having largely failed to counter him
politically in the domestic domain, the objective is to de-legitimise his
agenda internationally as much as possible by projecting him as an anti-
secular Hindu nationalist, authoritarian and as anti-democratic.
A pernicious narrative being
assiduously promoted is that the anti-Muslim Modi government, determined to
impose its Hindutava ideology, is set to take away the nationality of Indian
Muslims wholesale and potentially put millions of them in detention camps, and
that the judiciary is compliant, the press intimidated, and the Indian
democracy itself in danger. Some of the damage caused may not be easily undone
as anti-Modi elements in India and alienated Indian-origin lobbies abroad
continually feed into entrenched anti-Indian prejudices amongst self-defined
Western “liberals” against Hinduism, any consolidating role it might play in
nation-building, the fall-out of that on the minorities, in particular
Christian, and the government’s curbs on foreign-funded NGOs seen as limiting
their ground-level political and religious activities.
India’s show of
independence in foreign policy-making, lingering aversion of Western
non-proliferation lobbies to our nuclear defiance, perceived lack of economic
reforms and market opening in India to meet Western demands are other sources
of antipathy towards India. The Washington Post (WP) and The New York Times
(NYT) excel in India-baiting, with generous contributions by Indian journalists
and writers. The unwillingness of these publications to sift what is patent
propaganda and false reporting exposes their pretension to quality reporting.
The WP bemoans the longest ever Internet shutdown by a democracy without
recognising the unceasing direct challenge India faces of sustained Islamic
jihad by Pakistan whose leadership has called for a bloodbath in Kashmir for
which the social media is a powerful tool.
‘Liberal’ angst
The West knows this well
from its own experience, but in India’s case this measure is seen as an
“excuse”. The WP in its editorial broadside does not acknowledge at all India’s
problem of Pakistan-instigated terrorism in Kashmir, a fact that the US
government does in various documents.
The word “Pakistan” or
“terrorism” is absent altogether from WP’s pietistic assault on India, exposing
the fraudulence of its concerns. For WP to claim that CAA will further
marginalise the Muslim minority shows that its editors, blinded by prejudice,
have not sufficiently applied their mind to understand the scope of the CAA. It
is in response to the situation in one Indian state — Assam — where it seeks to
legalise the status of non-Muslim illegal migrants from Bangladesh, escaping
discrimination and persecution, but not that of illegal Muslim migrants from
Bangladesh who do not fall in that category. That the whole exercise began
under a Congress government and is monitored by the Supreme Court is
conveniently ignored by the WP.
Western prejudice
An NYT column plays
insidious politics against the Indian state by approving the coming together of
Muslims, Sikhs and “secular” university students, supposedly kept “apart for
years” by divisive politics. It speaks of a “contentious citizenship law” that
favours every South Asian faith over Islam (how Buddhism and Christianity are
restricted to South Asia as faiths only NYT knows). The CAA is merely an
amendment to the law, a point that the NYT supposedly impeccable journalistic
standards miss.
A Bengaluru-based Sikh
is quoted as saying nonsensically that “those who want to implement
discriminatory laws want to do a second Partition, as if the millions dying in
the first one wasn’t enough.” When the column says: “And the Supreme Court, in
a case known as ‘Ayodhya’ ruled that a temple could be built at the site where
a centuries-old mosque once stood before a Hindu mob tore it down,” it
qualifies as clueless political idiocy. A Muslim is quoted as saying: “When
Kashmir happened, when Ayodhya happened, no one questioned our citizenship. We
were still first- class citizens. But how much longer do we have?” How the
revocation of Article 370 and the Supreme Court’s judgment on Ayodhya has
anything to do, even remotely, with the citizenship of Indian Muslims at large
only the NYT journalists, acting as an echo-chamber of propaganda against India
to suit the paper’s hollow “liberal” agenda, know.