Media In India/elsewhere -3

[acharya]

Looking through the glass, darkly

Premen Addy

Nothing quite gets up the noses of the Herrenvolk than the sight of the lesser breeds reaching for the skies. The British media’s comfort zone on India doesn’t as a rule extend beyond the prescribed imperial parameters of famines, diseases known and unknown, illiteracy, fecklessness and a range of ‘charming’ eccentricities, heaving mobs, religious or ethnic riots (you can take your pick) and much else besides that tell of the continuing triumph of chaos over order, of abject failure over the seeming insolence of power through achievement.

The Guardian’s man in India, Randeep Ramesh, scolded a Moon-struck country for its vaulting ambitions in space. One must expect an indentured overseer lecturing the natives on right conduct. Except for radical chic addicts his paper limps along disconsolately, in the Darwinian struggle for survival, with its more robust competitors. Its once trusty radicalism has given way, for the most part, to a whimpering defence of Pakistan and Islamist lost causes. India has long been a target for its slings and arrows and this is unlikely to change anytime soon.

A few years ago, on the eve of Mr Bill Clinton’s presidential visit to India, Islamist terrorists wiped out the better part of a Sikh community deep in the Kashmiri hinterland. The Guardian’s front-page story laid responsibility for the massacre at the door of R&AW, India’s external intelligence agency, which apparently ordered the deed so as to tap into the US President’s well of sympathy. It was the fanciful reporter’s cry of Eureka, sitting as he was many hundred miles away watching a TV newscast. But such things are of small moment in the greater endeavour to malign a country in perverse independent orbit.

Across the Atlantic, the sainted New York Times also carried this account of Indian wrongdoing on its front page. This heavyweight publication has many a bone to pick with obstreperous India, whether it be Jammu & Kashmir, the Indo-US nuclear deal or any of a number of kindred topics.

Barbara Crossette, a senior editor of the New York Times, and, until 1991 its principal correspondent in India, told how the Kashmir insurgency of those years (on the basis of a confidential Western diplomatic briefing) would alter the sub-continental balance of power.

It didn’t happen, of course, but hell hath no fury than a woman scorned, even if it be by Clio, so Ms Crossette’s India: Facing the Twenty-First Century, was the purest vitriol and cast in stone. Her Veritatis Splendor was a fevered polemic whose architectonic form incorporated the baroque, the gothic and the surreal. Indian reality was drawn and quartered, then salted and spiced and served up piece by piece for our delectation.

Kautilya and Sudhir Kakar were used as aids to fathom the deeper mysteries of the Indo-Soviet relationship. She was in high dudgeon that a supposed democracy had consorted with a totalitarian behemoth. Washington’s honeymoon with Beijing had clearly slipped through her memory cells.

“The world has seen strange bedfellows before but never in a stranger and bloodier bed,” wrote the American columnist IF Stone of the Sino-US liaison on the Bangladesh liberation war against their common client, the military junta in Pakistan.

No matter, New Delhi was the villain in every regional dispute, a view endorsed by her paper’s editorial in the summer of 1992 castigating India as the greatest disturber of the Asian peace since the World War II.

On the eve of the 1989 general election, The Economist solemnly prognosticated that India would start a war against its neighbours in order to distract domestic attention from the country’s internal woes; it subsequently pronounced that Indians took special pleasure in killing, witness the number of Victoria Crosses they had won in two World Wars.

The early and mid-1990s were India’s time of trouble and British scribes simply went to town, quills blazing. Chris Buckland, of the Daily Express, in Lord Beaverbrook’s day an incandescent India-baiter, opined that India could “make the slaughter in Yugoslavia look like a minor skirmish” and that “India had already started the march towards chaos.” Hence British Prime Minister John Major’s meeting with “India’s lame-duck Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, the subject of many plots to depose him and establish a Hindu dictatorship,” would be a futile exercise.

For the Evening Standard’s political editor, Charles Reiss, “the Indian venture (Major’s state visit to India) remains a gamble”. He told of “an export agreement between British Aerospace and a Hindi aeronautics firm”. He meant Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd, but what’s in a word: Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, does it matter? The Daily Telegraph’s Robert Shrimsley wrote of Mr Major’s trip to the “home of Mr Pandit Nehru.”

Small wonder, therefore, that India’s Moonshot was greeted on the Internet with some truly surreal responses. One zombie answering to the name Colin wrote: “This will be the India which Brown the Clown gave £ 860 million to in overseas aid a few months ago. Is it any wonder that the UK is on its knees when New Labour throws our money away like this?” Another said: “This is a good reason to stop sending them their annual handout.” A third remarked: “One earthquake or monsoon and the begging bowl will be shown to the Western world.”

Quite amazing how the grand larceny on Wall Street and in the City of London has been lost so quickly to the virus of racist amnesia.

Why blame these inconsequential voices when Peter Popham, once India correspondent of the superior Independent, in an early-June (1999) despatch complete with map, reported the great Gujarat famine that never was? Talk of the vaunted Indian green revolution was dismissed as self-serving native poppycock.

British media gurus claim to be hurting on Indian poverty, the looming apocalypse of a regional war over increasingly scarce water resources, and the like. However, there were no expressions of concern for the well-being of Black American ghettos as US astronaut Neil Armstrong bestrode the Moon. Excursions on India’s chronic inability to compete with China — a much loved theme for British scribes — have more than a touch of the usual schadenfreude, refracting a resentment of the deepening Indo-Russian relationship.

The novelist Raja Rao told how his friend Andre Malraux, the French Minister for Culture, had said: “In the Cabinet meetings de Gaulle would never permit Ministers to mention India and China in the same breath. They are not of the same dimension. India is closer to us philosophically, culturally. China is an empire.”

Which explains the allure of the Middle Kingdom.