Last month, when New York got a new governor, her first order of business was to add 12,000 previously unreported Covid-19 deaths to the official tally. How could 12,000 deaths go unreported in the most advanced city in the world? What were the elites at the New York Times doing? Maybe they were on a mission to shame the poorest states in India. They were on a mission to put our misery on show before the whole world.
Let us first take stock of what is happening in the United States. The country is witnessing the fourth or fifth wave of Covid-19 infections. The seven-day moving average of the deaths in the US is now above 1,500 per day. Adjusted for population, that is the equivalent of over 6,000 deaths per day in India. Away from the statistics, what does this mean for ordinary Americans on a more human level? Hospitals and funeral homes are overflowing with bodies. Many have rented out temporary cooling units to keep the bodies safe until they can figure out what to do with them.
On flagship American media such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, there is barely a squeak about this. The job of bringing out the real reports is left to smaller, local outlets, who do not have the resources to put together the national picture. And above all, there is no questioning of the leadership of President Biden. The American elite have not just abandoned their allies in Afghanistan. They have abandoned their own people at home.
The pandemic has been hard on every country. The US has recorded close to 6.5 lakh deaths, which would be equivalent to 26 lakh deaths in India. So far, France and the UK have recorded 1.15 lakh deaths and 1.33 lakh deaths. To put those numbers in perspective in terms of population, that is like 23-27 lakh deaths in India. Did I mention that the French healthcare system has been ranked number one by the World Health Organization?
But in April-May, when India went through the worst of times, ghastly images of burning funeral pyres were put up for the world to see. Even in times of war, the media has standards of civilized behaviour when reporting on bodies. But all these rules were shredded when covering the second wave in India, so that the “truth” could be “exposed”. What were they trying to expose, exactly? India has nowhere close to the kind of resources that Western nations have. The latter are approximately 20 times richer on a per capita basis.
Even within India, they put their focus on the poorest, most backward states, such as Uttar Pradesh or Bihar. In a situation where New York has to stash dead bodies in freezer trucks and leave them for over a year, what is the administration in rural Uttar Pradesh supposed to do? Yes, they were overwhelmed. And the fact that the Western media relished those images shows that they are the worst people in the world.
We get it. The Western liberal media does not like Narendra Modi. At least not as much as they love the newly “liberal” Taliban, which has now won all hearts by doing a press conference. But did the Western media really need to fly drones over burning funeral pyres? Was there no other way to take revenge against PM Modi for winning the 2019 general election?
If the Western media wanted to “speak truth to power” in India, they crawled before power back home. The governor of New York ordered Covid patients into nursing homes, where it spread like wildfire and 15,000 elderly people died. These deaths were then covered up, and would have remained so if one of the governor’s aides had not let the information slip out on tape several months later in February 2021. They specifically admitted to hiding the data from the people so that it would not damage their party in the November 2020 presidential election. A massive cover up over several months with thousands of victims. And nobody in the liberal media ever caught wind of the story, least of all the New York Times. They must have been busy pointing fingers at Uttar Pradesh.
In fact, the liberal media kept such a tight lid on the coronavirus horrors of New York that the state came to be seen as a model of pandemic management. So amazing was the publicity that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo decided to write a book about his leadership. He made at least five million dollars from it. The liberal media was so taken by him that they came to describe themselves as “Cuomosexuals”. Night after night, they fawned over the governor’s dating and sex life. As it turned out, Governor Cuomo was also a notorious sexual harasser, who had assaulted at least 11 women over the years, including at least one inside his official residence.
That’s New York, the world’s richest city and home of the world’s most powerful newspaper. They speak truth to power, but only in the poorest states in India.
Of course, the Western liberal media would be nothing without its local collaborators in India. These are the people who did the actual legwork. They set up shop in front of piles of firewood. They flew the drones over burning funeral pyres. And after that they must have spent some time sorting the images and selecting the most sensational ones. These local collaborators then wrote columns for global news outlets, hopefully making at least a couple of dollars a word. With the conversion rate, it must have seemed like a lot. They even put some of their images for sale online. I am genuinely curious to know who bought them.
It gets worse when you realise what the Western liberal media was actually up to. They didn’t just want to defame India. The media elites also wanted common people in the West to feel better about the devastation back home. After all, they had to pack the dead bodies of New Yorkers into freezer trucks and leave them there. So their media told them that Indians have it a lot worse. That way, common folks in the West would feel less angry. The ruling political and media elite would prevail.
This hurts. Because we Indians never wish for bad things to happen to any other nation or its people. It’s just not how we think. Why would they put our misery on show? When we hope for a better tomorrow, we wish for prosperity and good health for all. It’s the Indian way of thinking, rooted in our ancient Sanskrit proverbs.
The same goes for our vaccination programme, which was abused, ridiculed and heckled by the same Western media elites. Yes, we did have some problems getting started, but look at us now. Regularly vaccinating over 10 million people daily, without a hitch. Each certificate has its own unique identifier, recorded in a central database along with date and vaccine batch number. Which other democratic nation can manage such logistics on such a large scale with such efficiency? It would make any nation proud. The hecklers should be hiding in shame, but they are not.
What can we Indians do in the interim? We cannot stop engaging with Western media, but we can keep their judgments at arm’s length. And remember that we have as much of a right to judge them as they have a right to judge us.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.)
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