The Western Media and India

 The Western Media and India.


The Western media hated Nehru for his leftist policies although he was Eaton and Cambridge graduate. They hated Indira Gandhi for splitting Pakistan into two. They made fun of India for its slow economic growth in eighties and nineties and coined the phrase of Hindu growth of 3.5 to 4%. This was institutionalized by the British media with the help of a few anti-Indian personalities in India itself (Lutyens). It was them who fed their misleading analysis. The British enjoyed their feedback. 


The Americans disliked India for being pro Russia/Soviet. Also, a few economic liberalization moves in nineties were not appreciated by them. Americans were China focussed, hence they could not care less.


The Indian victory over Pakistanis in1965, 1971 and 1999 wars were termed as unnecessary. Some authors even criticized India for not handing over Kashmir to Pakistan. 


The left oriented rule in India except for a short period 1998 till 2004, continued till 2014. That is when a centre-right party won a landslide victory with a slogan of corruption free India with License Raj vanished. Also, the last governments were not religious enough.


The right wing party leader extended a hand of friendship to the West, which they liked for a short duration only. Modi as a new leader put an end to the black money economy, dealt firmly with corruption, modified the tax code and reinvigorated the slow moving bureaucracy. The results began to show immediately. He also decided to put an end to money induced religious conversion to Christianity and asked states to end the Muslim practice of love Jihad. 


All this was a right wing agenda. Support for this new agenda was phenomenal. He was re-elected with a bigger majority, five years later. India, except for the pandemic years, began to register high growth (9%). More foreign money began to pour in, setting the stage for India to become an industrial economy. A year back, it’s GDP data bypassed the British GDP and money is reserve for bad times was all time high of $700 billion. Any lay person would expect that the West would laud India’s effort. 


No sir, not true. They searched and invented new topics to be critical, the Brits were unhappy as they had lost much of their captive market in India in 1947. Also, their European Market experience was bad. 


The Americans were still unhappy with new government in place for a variety of reasons. Before that, they hated India’s pro Soviet/Russia policy, now their unhappiness spanned a number of reasons including preventing or banning money induced religious conversion in india, not supporting them enough on Afghanistan issue, still sourcing Russian military hardware to supplement previously sourced hardware, etc. On many other issues, there was a huge confluence of interest but they could not care less. They also were not paying enough attention that a growing Indian economy would be an alternative to China.


Recent India’s unhappiness with the new American Administration included President Biden holding off on critical raw material supply to make Covid vaccine in india for three months. It was restored after a huge hue and cry. In the last little while they have made implementation of CAATSA on Indian contest a priority. India has sourced S-400 missile system from Russia. India did this to protect itself from the joint action of Pakistan and China. US have not announced their sanctions but these will be unwelcome. Issues like that are a big headache in Indo-US relations. There was a glimmer of hope when QUAD was reinitiated after 10 years, but hopes died sooner than later. India needed QUAD until India could builds itself to hold off joint action by China and Pakistan. It is again in a slow mode.


Hopefully if handled smartly, and US based news reporters are held in check then these irritations will go away. It was very unpleasant to see American media publishing the funeral pyres burning at a cremation ground last year all due to high Covid casualties. It was a respectful necessary ritual but for American media it was something to laugh at. It irritated india.


Unless US meets halfway, no issues will be solved.

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