And this triggers an important question: 70 years after Independence are western journalists & correspondents still biased against India – & Hindus in particular, a country they are supposed to report honestly about so that their readers who are mostly ignorant get enlightened?
Well, from a western correspondent himself, the answer is.. YES…
There are four reasons for that sad fact:
There are four reasons for that sad fact:
1)India is never in the news in the West, unless there is some major catastrophe, or huge elections. Thus, if you want to write and be published, you have to find alternate stories, that often border on the sensational, the marginal, or even the untruthful…
2)Your editor in New York, Paris or London, has often set ideas on India, even though most of the time he or she has never set foot here. You need to toe the line, otherwise you may not be published, which is tough if you are a freelance, that is paid per piece.
Most western correspondents thus rein in. I had one guy like that in Paris, Charles Lambroschini, in LeFigaro.fr, who believed that the RSS was the most dangerous outfit in India…
3)Three, or even five years, which is the usual period that foreign correspondents are posted (as well as diplomats) is not enough for understanding a country that is so vast, so diverse, so contradictory sometimes. In fact one needs to go beyond the appearances in India.
Indeed, the western sense of the hygienic and the esthetical, is very different from India’s and the first contact of dirtiness, slums, or poverty, often scars the perception of many western correspondents who then refused to go beyond that barrier.
The same ideas and clichés are heard in parties and embassies’ cocktails and repeated ad infinitum till every foreign correspondent thinks they are the gospel truth: ‘secularism minorities, Hindu fundamentalism human rights in Kashmir, right wing saffron’ etc
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