It needs a Dante to write about India’s seething purgatory. The second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is a vision of hell that has literally brought India to its knees: never before have people in their bewildered, helpless masses not known where to turn. Stark photographs frame the tragedy—of funeral pyres lighting up the night sky, of hospitals running out of oxygen and of people gasping for breath, then dying in front of hospitals gates. It is an unending horror show. It is also a story that has grabbed international media interest.
Yet, over-sensitive Indians are upset at the harsh, bold headlines and stark images being splashed across the world. Supporters of the BJP and the Sangh Parivar are now decrying the international press for its negative coverage. Is the foreign press biased in its coverage of the pandemic in India?
“Where you stand depends on where you sit,” says analyst Sandeep Shastri . “In the highly polarised society we live in, it all depends on your politics; issues are no longer important.” For admirers of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, anything that damages his image as an efficient leader is a unacceptable. Thus, the foreign media’s coverage of India’s stark tragedy is castigated as being biased. “This applies to the other side too,” explains Shastri. To those who welcome criticism of the government, the foreign press is depicting the reality. “It plays both ways,” he adds.
The Ministry of External Affairs has asked its diplomats abroad to counter what foreign minister S. Jaishankar believes is a “one-sided” narrative in the Western press. Ironically, Jaishankar, a seasoned diplomat and one well-versed in how the free media operates, should know better if such a strategy would work.
When Rupert Murdoch-owned Australian reproduced a piece earlier published in The Sunday Times, London by Philip Sherwell with the headline ‘Modi leads India into a viral apocalypse’, the Consul General of India issued a rejoinder to the newspaper. When it was ignored, the CGI’s tweeted: “Urge @australian to publish the rejoinder to set the record straight on the covid management in India and also refrain from publishing such baseless articles in future….’’
Yet this was not the only unflattering headline. The New York Times published a piece on May 1 that ran: ‘India’s Covid-19 Crisis Shakes Modi’s Image of Strength’. The story quoted the PM’s speech at the World Economic Forum meeting in January, when he said India had triumphed over the virus. It also reproduced Union health minister Harsh Vardhan’s quote from March, when he said India had reached the pandemic’s “endgame”. Then there was the piece by Arundhati Roy in The Guardian: ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’. Scholar Christophe Jaffrelot also wrote a scathing article in France’s leading daily Le Monde titled ‘India’s Second Wave: A Man-Made Disaster?’ When disaster strikes a country of over a billion, the humanitarian crisis becomes world news.
However, as the ravaged sufferers and mute witnesses know, none of this can be challenged. It is revealing that the MEA should then be bothered about upholding India’s untarnished image, hoping they can wish away the mounting death toll and the unending agony.
Importantly, the same kind of ‘negative’ coverage had followed the Covid surges across Italy, Germany, France, the US and the UK—people were struggling for hospital beds as Italy (and later, much of the US, including New York) ran out of ventilators and morgues overflowed. Indians had wondered how this could have happened in the developed world.
As India’s own Covid surge of September-November 2020 ebbed away, Modi prematurely boasted of India’s success in beating the pandemic at the World Economic Forum: “I have brought the message of confidence, positivity and hope from 1.3 billion Indians amid these times of apprehension…. It was predicted that India would be the most affected country from corona …somebody said 700-800 million Indians would get infected while others said two million Indians would die.” He added: “Friends, it would not be advisable to judge India’s success with that of another country. In a country which is home to 18 per cent of the world’s population, that country has saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively.” After this performance, his government deserves to be held accountable.
Smarting at the coverage of the world press, the Modi government is trying to shift the focus away from the mishandling of the pandemic. Author and journalist Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of a book on Modi, is not surprised at this tactic straight out of the Modi playbook. “This is part of the general narrative that Modi and his supporters promote whenever it suits them—an international conspiracy against Hindu India with the support of collaborators within, like the Left, the ‘urban Naxals’, Muslims, those who follow dynastic politics (Congress) and liberals. This is nothing new; it is part of the authoritarian template. Modi uses conspiracy theories. Indira Gandhi did the same and used the bogey of a foreign hand.’’
Indians in general, and Modi supporters in particular, are forever craving for appreciation from the West. A pat on the back for Modi by, say, Time magazine sends his supporters into raptures. The ‘praise’ is tweeted, re-tweeted, discussed and celebrated. Criticism, however, is not tolerated, and negative opinions rattle the government. By now, it has managed to ensure a relatively tame Indian press where trenchant criticism of its policies are rare. The government has now come to expect the same treatment with kid gloves by the foreign media.
Yet, for many educated Indians too, the pictures of burning pyres flashed across the world were deeply abhorrent. Former diplomat Bhaswati Mukherjee was appalled by the Le Monde leader article, which blamed the catastrophe partly on Modi. “Narendra Modi’s lack of prediction, arrogance, and demagogy are clearly among the causes …,” read a section. Referring to the cremation photos, Mukherjee says, “The Christian West is appalled by Hindu cremations; their patronising and arrogant attitude is apparent in their biased coverage. Much of their coverage has been extremely negative. This narrative needs to be fixed,” she adds. Mukherjee believes that the Western media have been unduly harsh on the Modi government. She points to the fact that the health infrastructure of France, Italy and Germany had also collapsed last year under a full assault of the pandemic. India’s second wave is much more virulent, she points out, and with a population of over a billion the infrastructure cannot take the strain.
“The BJP government’s criticism of the western media’s intense coverage of the pandemic is laughable. It is the same government that is looking for endorsement from Western powers,” says author Akshaya Mukul. “What the Modi government forgets is that unlike large sections of the Indian press, the Western media is free and reports what it sees. It is also sheer duplicity to welcome Western aid, but be dismissive of criticism by their media.”
