An article from a Frenchman...
>From The New Indian Express - 21.10.2008 Edition
Be aware of your roots
Francois Gautier
First Published : 21 Oct 2008 12:40:00 AM IST
AS a Frenchman, I was coached right from childhood that logic, what we
in France call Cartesianism, is the greatest gift given to man. Thus,I
taught my students in a Bangalore school of journalism that the first
tool of a good reporter is to go by his or her own judgment on the
ground, with the help of one's first-hand experience - and not by second
hand information: what your parents thought, what you have read in the
newspapers, what your caste, religion, culture pushes you into.
Yet in India, logic does not seem to apply to most of the media,
especially when it touches anything Hindu.
One cannot, for instance, equate Muslim terrorists who blow up innocent
civilians in market places all over India, with angry
ordinary Hindus who burn churches without killing anybody.
We know that most of these communal incidents often involve persons of
the same caste, Dalits and tribals, some converted to Christianity and
some not.
Then, however reprehensible the destruction of the Babri Masjid, no
Muslim was killed in the process.
Compare this with the 'vengeance' bombings of 1993 in Mumbai, which
killed hundreds of innocents, mostly Hindus. Yet Indian and western
journalists keep matching up the two, or even showing the Babri Masjid
destruction as the more horrible act of the two.
How can you compare the RSS, a bunch of harmless daddies, with the
Indian Mujahideen, a terrorist organisation? How can you make of
Narendra Modi a mass killer, when it was ordinary middle-class, or even
Dalit Hindus, who went out on the streets in fury when 56 innocent
people, many of them women and children, were burnt in a train?
How can you lobby for the lifting of the ban on SIMI, an organisation
which is suspected of ha ving planted bombs in many Indian
cities,killing hundreds of innocents , while advocating the ban of the
Bajrang Dal, which burns churches when an 84-year-old Hindu swami and
his Mataji are brutally murdered?
There is no logic in the perspective of journalists in this country when
it comes to minorities. Christians are supposed to make up two per cent
of the population in India, but last Sunday many major television
channels showed live the canonisation ceremonies of sister Alphonsa, an
obscure nun from Kerala. Union minister Oscar Fernandes led an entire
Indian delegation to the Vatican ceremony along with the Indian
ambassador. It would be impossible in England, for instance, which may
have a 2 per cent Hindu minority, to have live coverage of a major Hindu
ceremony, like the anointment of a new Shankaracharya.
What was NDTV, which seems to have deliberately chosen to highlight this
nonevent, trying to prove? That it is secular? But it is absolutely
disproportionate. Some might even call it antinational.
The hea dline, 'India gets its first woman saint', in many newspapers,
Indian and western, is misleading.
India has never been short of saints. The woman sage from over 3,000
years ago - Maithreyi, Andal, the Tamil saint from early in the first
Millennium CE and Akkamahadevi, the 15th century saint from modernday
Karnataka, are but a few examples.
What many publications fail to mention in this story is that this is the
first woman Christian saint, not the first Indian woman saint.
Such a statement is OK when it comes, for instance, from the BBC,which
always looks at India through the Christian prism, but when it comes to
the Indian media, it only shows their grave lack of grounding in Indian
culture and history.
The same thing is true of Sonia Gandhi, who seemed, even though the
Congress should by all means have already collapsed with 12 per cent
inflation, scandal after scandal, a nuclear deal with the US that leaves
India vulnerable to the Chinese and Pakistani nuclear threat, and bomb
blast after bomb blast, still ruling India with an iron hand. Yet
newspapers and TV channels keep praising Sonia Gandhi.
And the question must be asked: how is it possible that a nation of a
billion people, with some of the best minds on this planet, allows
itself to be governed by a non-Indian lady, who, however sincere she may
be, is actively overseeing the dismantling of whatever is good and true
in India? It would be impossible in France for a Hindu woman, or for
that matter a non-Christian person, who is just an elected MP, to govern
our country from behind the scenes like an empress. Why is it allowed in
India and why is the Indian press so selfrighteous about it ?
Finally, when will Indians start being proud of themselves and their own
culture and stop looking down on their own society ? This inferiority
complex, as expressed by NDTV's live coverage of the canonisation of
sister Alphonsa, is a legacy of the British, who strove to show
themselves as superior and In dian culture as inferior (and inheritor of
the 'White Aryans', a totally false theory).
Is it not time to institute schools of journalism, both private and
public, where not only a little bit of logic is taught, but where
students are made aware of Indian history and the greatness of Indian
culture, so that when they go out reporting, they use their own judgment
and become Indian journalists, with a little bit of feeling, pride and
love for their own country?
.
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