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US
and them
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_Id=5402256
Indians,
both within India and outside, often cringe at many of the stories about India
in the foreign media – mostly the western press – that show the country in
poor light. There is an assumption, not entirely correct, that foreign reporters
are fixated about India's social maladies such as dowry and casteism, and that
they never lose a chance to write about the sores and pustules of benighted
India.
Anecdotally though, it appears there has been more positive coverage of India
over the past decade than negative writing. Stories of Indian energy,
entrepreneurship, and achievement in areas such as entertainment, science,
engineering, literature and the arts are frequent and copious in the western
press now as the famine and flood stories of the 1970s and 1980s.
Still, Indians never lose an opportunity to fulminate about the occasional
negative coverage and the latest round of religion bloodletting in Gujarat has
had many of NRIs frazzled, when they were not hiding in embarrassment. Indian
officials have expressed (in private) their resentment at the reporting by
western journalists. They are even more incensed that some Indian-American
reporters based here, and sent to India by their papers to cover the events,
have been far more critical in their reportage than their western colleagues.
"They probably know India even less than their western colleagues, who at
least make an honest attempt to learn about the country," one diplomat
fumed after reading dispatches by Indian-American reporters in the New York
Times, Washington Post and other prominent publications. In his mind,
they were doing great disservice to the country of their origin.
In
contrast, Indian reporters are often accused of not reporting on the negative
aspects of American life and society. After
all, one NRI community leader bristled recently, if American reporters can
incessantly describe India as "largely Hindu India" or the BJP as a
"Hindu Nationalist" Party, then Indian journalists should be
describing the United States as "largely White Christian America" and
Republican Party as the "White, Christian, Nationalist Party."
Besides, he argued, the United States has almost every malady India is stricken
with. There are droughts (one right now in much of the East Coast), floods,
hunger, disease (even outbreaks of plague). Planes crash, trains derail, and
there are false alarms over hijackings. There are also similar societal woes,
especially discrimination based on gender and race. So how come foreign
reporters in the US spend so much time and energy covering piffle from the
American entertainment world and what the state department spokesman says?
There is some validity to this criticism. Mostly understaffed and
under-resourced, and largely based on the East Coast or West Coast, foreign
publications (and not just Indian) in the US rarely go out to report on the
hinterland. Out
there in Middle America, there exists discrimination, fundamentalism, violence
and degradation that seldom make it to the front page of newspapers in the
United States, much less outside America.
In a crime as revolting as Roop Kanwar being burnt on her husband's funeral
pyre, a black man was dragged to death in Texas some years back. A gay youth was
shot to death in Wyoming because of his sexual orientation. And gun violence in
schools is endemic.
In one of the more egregious cases of hate crime, a 17-year old girl in Denver
was attacked early this week and the word "dyke" (lesbian) was carved
into her forearm with a razor, according to the Rocky Mountain News.
April Mora was walking to a store through an alley near her house at about 2 pm
last Tuesday when she encountered three teen-age white males in a black Honda.
The teens ragged her, began calling her dyke, and when she protested, they
slashed her face with a razor blade. They then carved out the letters
"RIP" on her stomach and "dyke" in inch-high block letters
on her forearm.
Indian nationalists here say such incidents are as common in the United States
as the burning of missionaries or the raping of nuns in India, which is to say
it is fairly uncommon and cannot be seen as a pattern. Yet there is no human
rights report originating from any other country in the world chronicling such
gristly events.
There is one big difference though between societies such as India and Pakistan,
and the United States. In each of these cases, it is inconceivable that the
guilty parties will get away with their crime. The state does not dilute or
dissemble the gravity of the act. The criminals are prosecuted and justice is
usually swift and severe. Now look back and count how many of perpetrators of
the most horrendous atrocities in our part of the world have been prosecuted.
Perhaps that might answer why the "negative" reporting hurts so much.
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