What India’s foreign-news coverage says about its world-view

The Economist

When Narendra Modi visited Washington in June, Indian cable news channels spent days discussing their country’s foreign-policy priorities and influence. This represents a significant change. The most popular shows, which consist of a studio host and supporters of the Hindu-nationalist prime minister jointly browbeating his critics, used to be devoted to domestic issues. Yet in recent years they have made room for foreign-policy discussion, too.

Much of the credit for expanding Indian media’s horizons goes to Mr Modi and his foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, who have skilfully linked foreign and domestic interests. What happens in the world outside, they explain, affects India’s future as a rising power. Mr Modi has also given the channels a lot to discuss; a visit to France and the United Arab Emirates in July was his 72nd foreign outing. India’s presidency of the G20 has brought the world even closer. Meetings have been scheduled in over 30 cities, all of which are now festooned with G20 paraphernalia.

Yet it is hard to detect much deep interest in, or knowledge of, the world in these developments. There are probably fewer Indian foreign correspondents today than two decades ago, notes Sanjaya Baru, a former editor of the Business Standard, a broadsheet. The new media focus on India’s role in the world tends to be hyperpartisan, nationalistic and often stunningly ill-informed.

This represents a business opportunity that Subhash Chandra, a media magnate, has seized on. In 2016 he launched wion, or “World Is One News”, to cover the world from an Indian perspective. It was such a hit that its prime-time host, Palki Sharma, was poached by a rival network to start a similar show.

What is the Indian perspective? Watch Ms Sharma and a message emerges: everywhere else is terrible. Both on wion and at her new home, Network18, Ms Sharma relentlessly bashes China and Pakistan. Given India’s history of conflict with the two countries, that is hardly surprising. Yet she also castigates the West, with which India has cordial relations. Europe is taunted as weak, irrelevant, dependent on America and suffering from a “colonial mindset”. America is a violent, racist, dysfunctional place, an ageing and irresponsible imperial power.

This is not an expression of the confident new India Mr Modi claims to represent. Mindful of the criticism India often draws, especially for Mr Modi’s Muslim-bashing and creeping authoritarianism, Ms Sharma and other pro-Modi pundits insist that India’s behaviour and its problems are no worse than any other country’s. A report on the recent riots in France on Ms Sharma’s show included a claim that the French interior ministry was intending to suspend the internet in an attempt to curb violence. “And thank God it’s in Europe! If it was elsewhere it would have been a human-rights violation,” she sneered. In fact, India leads the world in shutting down the internet for security and other reasons. The French interior ministry had anyway denied the claim a day before the show aired.

Bridling at lectures by hypocritical foreign powers is a longstanding feature of Indian diplomacy. Yet the new foreign news coverage’s hyper-defensive championing of Mr Modi, and its contrast with the self-confident new India the prime minister describes, are new and striking. Such coverage has two aims, says Manisha Pande of Newslaundry, a media-watching website: to position Mr Modi as a global leader who has put India on the map, and to promote the theory that there is a global conspiracy to keep India down. “Coverage is driven by the fact that most tv news anchors are propagandists for the current government.”

This may be fuelling suspicion of the outside world, especially the West. In a recent survey by Morning Consult, Indians identified China as their country’s biggest military threat. America was next on the list. A survey by the Pew Research Centre found confidence in the American president at its highest level since the Obama years. But negative views were also at their highest since Pew started asking the question.

That is at odds with Mr Modi’s aim to deepen ties with the West. And nationalists are seldom able to control the forces they unleash. China has recently sought to tamp down its aggressive “wolf-warrior diplomacy” rhetoric. But its social media remain mired in nationalism. Mr Modi, a vigorous champion for India abroad, should take note. By letting his propagandists drum up hostility to the world, he is laying a trap for himself. 

Blaming Government for Capitalism's Ills

 

Does Modern Medicine have a Platypus Problem?

By Girish Menon

“Early zoologists classified as mammals those that suckle their young and as reptiles those that lay eggs. Then a duck-billed platypus was discovered in Australia laying eggs like a perfect reptile and then, when they hatched, suckling the infant like a perfect mammal.
The discovery created quite a sensation. What an enigma! it was exclaimed.

What a mystery! What a marvel of nature! When the first stuffed specimens reached England from Australia around the end of the eighteenth century they were thought to be fakes made by sticking together bits of different animals. Even today you still see occasional articles in nature magazines asking ‘Why does this paradox of nature exist?’.

The answer is: it doesn’t. The Platypus isn’t doing anything paradoxical at all. It isn’t having any problems. Platypuses have been laying eggs and suckling their young for millions of years before there were any zoologists to come along and declare it illegal. The real mystery, the real enigma, is how mature, objective, trained scientific observers can blame their own goof on a poor innocent platypus.” Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I wondered if this is the attitude of modern medicine towards primary care physician Dr. Stella Emmanuel for her recommendation of Hydroxychloroquine as a panacea for the Covid-19 virus.

I discussed Dr. Emmanuel's prescription with more than one practitioner of modern medicine and they were all unanimous in their condemnation of Dr. Emmanuel’s self publicity approach of making a film with many white coated authority figures in the background. 'She could have presented her data for scrutiny' and 'her claims will not qualify as level 2 evidence' were some of their verdicts.

Hydroxychloroquine, unfortunately, has become a highly political drug which has divided opinion on liberal v conservative lines. ‘Big Pharma’ has also been accused of trying to destroy a cheap solution to the raging Corona virus problem.

In the UK, modern medicine’s success in combating Covid-19 has resulted in over 50,000 deaths and delayed treatment of all other life threatening ailments. Decision making has been a series of flip-flops and U turns and is best illustrated by Telegraph’s Blowe





I wondered if some of the decisions by modern medicine on the lockdown and thereafter have the same amount of evidence required of Dr. Emmanuel and her panacea?

I am willing to take a sceptical approach to Dr Emmanuel as well as to the science based responses of the Boris Johnson government.

But, I also wondered if modern science and medicine ever consider that they too may suffer from the platypus problem?

Christmas is a face-off between people who are spiritual and people who are consumerist

How do you formulate an anti-consumerist worldview that doesn’t involve becoming a killjoy?

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • theguardian.com, Tuesday 23 December 2014 11.22 GMT

'It isn’t my kids' spiritual wellbeing I’m worried about. It’s the volume of plastic tat I have to throw out every year, to make way for the next tranche of plastic tat.' Photograph: Paul Hackett/Reuters

Christmas is a face-off between people who are spiritual and people who are consumerist. The consumerists never call themselves that, they’re just really keen to let you know that they don’t believe in God. The spiritual ones never call themselves spiritual, they are just very anti-consumerist. It’s the dialectic method of identity building: I hate crackers and piped music, ergo I am deep; I hate superstition and unprovable things, ergo I am fun. It’s like a zero-sum game in which the shops helpfully give the spiritualists something to kick against, and the churches, especially with their midnight shenanigans, give the consumerists something to laugh at.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t leave you much room for manoeuvre if you are both anti-consumerist and an atheist. Pretty much everything you say will deliver you into the hands of the wrong ally. Up until now, I have always just succumbed to one side, in order to avoid getting crushed by the competing plates. Between about 1983 and 2013, assuming myself – on the final throw of the dice – to be more of an atheist than an anti-consumerist, I swallowed the shop-fest whole. I remember standing in Marks & Spencer buying a slipper bag for my uncle, crying with laughter at the scope of the needlessness. Who needs a bag to put their slippers in? It’s like having a special wallet for handkerchieves. Probably, if he’d lived a bit longer, I’d have bought him one of those too. None of this ever struck me as at all obscene; it was all at one remove from obscenity, like a cartoon of someone accidentally chopping off their arm.

But having kids has tipped me over the edge. It isn’t their spiritual wellbeing I’m worried about – they have grandparents for that. It’s the volume of plastic tat I have to throw out every year, to make way for the next tranche of plastic tat. It’s like an anxiety dream, this act: shovelling gigantic, brightly coloured items that have detained nobody for one second longer than the time it takes to render them incomplete or no longer working. They are almost new, and completely pointless. I don’t want to blight another household with them, but I can’t face putting them in the bin, so the whole lot from last year spent six months in a sort of staging post, some inconvenient place while I waited for some other person to throw them out for me. If they’re battery powered it’s 10 times worse, because the added complexity is like an accusation. They are all battery powered.

This is when you’re faced with the question that you should have squared up to 20 years ago: how do you formulate an anti-consumerist worldview that doesn’t involve becoming a killjoy? How do you eschew consumption while still maintaining your spiritual hollowness? The people buying the plastic have annexed the space “fun”, while the people with the baby in the manger have appropriated “thought”. I have no ideological home in this season. But I do love the drinking.

The day the universe changed

Being Different - Rajiv Malhotra