The New York Times is at it again. A week before India celebrated its 77th Independence Day, it came up with another alarmist article, titled “India Is On The Brink” (9 August 2023). The latest provocation was the violence in Manipur.
The article, written by Debasish Roy Chowdhury, a Hong Kong-based Indian author, is deeply problematic and propagandist. It says that the “fuse for the current unrest in Manipur was lit by the politics of Hindu supremacy, xenophobia and religious polarization championed by his (Modi’s) Bharatiya Janata Party.” It’s ironical to see a Hong Kong-based author criticising democracy in India!
It continues, “In Manipur, Christians are bearing the brunt as the state’s BJP government stokes the insecurities of the majority ethnic Meitei, who are predominantly Hindu. State leaders have branded the Kuki who populate the hill districts and who are mostly Christian as infiltrators from Myanmar, blamed them for poppy cultivation intended for the drug trade and evicted some of them from their forest habitats.”
Even a cursory look at the history of violence in Manipur, including the current one, would show that it’s a battle between two ethnic groups of Manipur, and the religion aspect is peripheral. The mischievous attempt to project the violence as a Hindu-Christian battle, in which Christians, which tribal Kukis have converted into in the last one century, are facing the persecution of the worst kind is to give the rising, new India a bad name globally. It fits into the vastly jaundiced Western narrative, of which NYT is a prominent flagbearer, showcasing India to be currently passing through a nightmarish majoritarian phase.
While reading the NYT article, one would assume that a particular community (read “Christian Kukis”) is at the receiving end of violence. The truth is that both communities (“Christian Kukis” and “Hindu Meiteis”) have been grievously hurt and brutalised, with one set of atrocity dwarfing the other. Also, to give the ongoing Manipur crisis a political colour is to turn a blind eye to a long history of violence in the state; in fact, since 2014, the situation in the region has seen a discernible improvement. For the first time in 75 years, it finds itself in the mainstream of the Centre’s development initiatives, and not on the margins. There was a time when the Manipur valley would find itself being forcibly blocked and cut-off by insurgent groups from the rest of the country for months at a stretch.
As for poppy cultivation and large-scale infiltration from Myanmar, especially since the tumultuous resumption of the military rule in that country, these are open secrets in Manipur and have been confirmed by several independent, non-partisan sources. The fact is that the current violence in Manipur was the result of a court ruling in favour of granting Meiteis a tribal status and thus the resultant benefits that have long been enjoyed by the Kuki and other hill tribes. This, in itself, is a vindication that the violence isn’t a majoritarian project. The NYT, by brushing aside these obvious realities, brandishes both its ignorance and inherent anti-India bias.
As for author Debasish Roy Chowdhury, he has had a palpable anti-India, anti-Modi predisposition for a while now. Last year, when there was no crisis in Manipur, he still condemned “Modi’s India” as a country “Where Global Democracy Dies”. And in his 2021 book, To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism, co-authored by John Keane, he refused to call India the world’s largest democracy. “India is the world’s largest case of endangered democracy,” he wrote disdainfully. Worse, he, among other equally ludicrous things, tried seeking Indian democracy’s legitimacy through the statement of Periyar EV Ramasamy, Tamil founder of the so-called “Self-Respect movement”, who wanted Brahmins to be “driven away from this land (Tamil Nadu)”, directed his followers to “burn the pictures of Nehru and Gandhi and the Constitution of India”, and also advocated the “beating and killing the Brahmins”, besides “burning their houses”.
The all-pervasive Islamo-missionary-Western narrative, blindly swallowed and pushed forward by Left-‘liberal’ Indian intellectuals, of diminishing religious freedom in India needs to be countered head on. First, let’s go by numbers — and numbers never lie. The growing minority population in India exposes the big majoritarian lie being pedalled by mythmakers of the West and their Indian field agents. While the Muslim population in India, between 1951 and 2011, grew by 4.4 percentage points to 14.2 percent of the population, Hindus declined by 4.3 points to 79.8 percent. Even in Gujarat, the so-called laboratory of Hindutva, the numbers have not seen any dip. In sharp contrast, Hindu population in Pakistan and Bangladesh has seen a sharp decline in the past seven-and-a-half decades.
The reality is there’s no country in the world that has been culturally and civilisationally so welcoming and accommodative — and legally and constitutionally, since 1947, so tilted in favour of minorities. Historically, India has provided refuge to all persecuted communities — from Zoroastrians to Jews — that have not just retained their traditional way of life but also flourished in the Indic ecosystem as never before. Post-Independence, too, the minorities have officially received equal, if not the preferential, “first claim on resources” treatment.
In India, this “first claim on resources”, especially for the largest of minorities, is government agnostic; in fact, it continues with a greater zeal during the current Hindutva government at the Centre. Numbers again don’t lie. So, in the last eight years of the Modi government, the Muslim community, comprising just over 14 percent of India’s population, received 31.3 percent houses under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, 33 percent of funds under the PM-Kisaan Samman Nidhi Yojana, and 36 percent of loans under the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana. Then there is a PM Shadi Shagun Yojana, exclusively for Muslim girls, under which they would get Rs 51,000 if they complete graduation before marriage. To add to them other monetary benefits for minorities, from scholarships for Muslim students to monthly stipends for moulvis, and the appeasement cycle becomes all-pervasive.
Appeasement is still fine. But what’s truly unsettling are the legal-constitutional discriminations against the majority community that continue unabated during the so-called majoritarian government in India. While India’s minorities are free to run their religious and educational institutions unhindered by State interference, Hindus having no such freedom find themselves being constitutionally-legally mandated to be treated as the ‘second-class citizens’ in their own country — Anand Ranganathan calls them the “eighth-class citizens” subject to “state-sanctioned apartheid” in his just-released book, Hindus in Hindu Rashtra.
So, why does NYT fail to see what’s so obvious, statistically and otherwise: That there is no discrimination, far less persecution, of minorities in India. In fact, if anything the majority community has been at the receiving end of political appeasement in favour of Muslims as well as legal-constitutional discrimination against Hindus. But, as the NYT logo suggests, the American newspaper prints only those news reports and analysis that it thinks are “fit to print”. No wonder, it was unabashedly pro-Hitler in the 1930s, “serving as a sturdy fount of Dr Goebbels’s propaganda”, or accusing Poland of starting World War II by invading Germany, or, worse, downplaying the Nazi Holocaust, as Ashley Rindsberg writes in The Gray Lady Winked.
The NYT management, in the name of printing “all the news that’s fit to print”, chose to conceal the brutal, inhuman side of Nazis in the 1930s and ’40s. Following the same template, it today prefers an autocratic Xi Jinping over a democratically-elected Narendra Modi. For it, Chinese hegemony is another name of democratic benevolence, and Indian pluralism is nothing but the worst of Hindu majoritarianism on display.
(This is Part 1 of a two-part series. The second part will analyse how India’s majority community has been legally and constitutionally discriminated against in the past seven decades.)
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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