 "NYT calls violence against Hindus in Bangladesh ‘revenge attacks’: How Western media gets the India story wrong")
The New York Times (NYT) has caused uproar in India again, with many slamming the American newspaper for its headline on violence against Hindus in Bangladesh amid political upheaval. The publication has reportedly tweaked it after the backlash.
Several reports say that the Hindu minority in Bangladesh, who is perceived to be allies of the ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, was targeted after the embattled leader fled the country on Monday (August 5). The NYT did a piece on the violence against Hindus and members of Hasina’s party, the Awami League. But its headline caused a furore on social media.
This is not the first time NYT has sparked anger with its content. In fact, Western media has often faced flak over its coverage of India. Let’s take a closer look.
NYT under fire
NYT initially titled its report on violence against the minority community as ‘Hindus in Bangladesh Face Revenge Attacks After Prime Minister’s Exit’.
This headline created a stir, with many users lambasting the American newspaper for calling the anti-Hindu violence “revenge attacks”.
NYT changed the headline later by dropping the word “revenge”.
Economist Sanjeev Sanyal shared the before and after pictures of the NYT story published on Thursday (August 8). He wrote on X, So NYT suggests that attacks on Hindus are “revenge” …. In other words they must has done something bad to start it and needed to be avenged”.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsSo NYT suggests that attacks on Hindus are “revenge” …. In other words they must has done something bad to start it and needed to be avenged pic.twitter.com/1917WidfPu
— Sanjeev Sanyal (@sanjeevsanyal) August 8, 2024
Other users on X, including journalists, also hit out at NYT over the report.
They updated after the backlash, ty for speaking up! pic.twitter.com/ntFXvFJDxc
— Neer Varshney (@neer_varshney) August 8, 2024
In its piece, the US newspaper mentioned how rioters in Bangladesh targeted Hindus, “torching their homes and vandalising temples”, citing local media reports.
This is not the first time NYT has outraged people in India. In 2014, the US newspaper published a cartoon showing a man, wearing a shirt, dhoti and a turban, standing with a cow and knocking on the door of a room marked ‘Elite Space Club’ where two bespectacled men donning Western clothes were reading a newspaper on India’s Mars Mission.
The cartoon accompanied an article titled ‘India’s Budget Mission to Mars’.The cartoon, created by Singapore-based artist Heng Kim Song, had generated widespread condemnation, with some calling it “racist ” and accusing it of mocking India.
In October of that year, Andrew Rosenthal, the then editorial page editor of NYT, took to Facebook to apologise for the offensive cartoon, saying a “large number of readers” had complained about it.
He wrote in the post that the “intent” of the cartoonist was to “highlight how space exploration is no longer the exclusive domain of rich, Western countries”.
Last March, the then information and broadcasting minister Anurag Thakur accused NYT of “spreading lies” about India through its opinion piece about press freedom in Kashmir, calling the article “mischievous and fictitious”.
“New York Times had long back dropped all pretensions of neutrality while publishing anything about India. NYT’s so-called opinion piece on freedom of press in Kashmir is mischievous and fictitious, published with a sole motive to spread a propaganda about India and its democratic institutions and values,” he wrote on X.
The NYT’s opinion piece talked about alleged curbs on information flow in Kashmir.
“Some foreign media nourishing a grudge against India and our Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi have long been systematically trying to peddle lies about our democracy and pluralistic society,” Thakur alleged.
Western media’s ‘biases’
The Western media has been accused of biases against India, with its targeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the status of democracy.
In June 2023, BBC termed the ongoing ethnic violence in Manipur as the northeastern state being on the “brink of civil war”.
The West’s coverage of Indian elections has also come under scrutiny. As Vamsee Juluri, a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco, wrote for Indian Express in April, “The charge of “Hindu supremacism,” for example, occurs regularly in Western reports on Indian politics today.”
He mentioned that in Foreign Policy, Ravi Agrawal wrote about the 2002 Gujarat riots, saying the “train caught fire.” “That the whole of India knows (and of course, would much rather not hold it against anyone any more, perhaps), that the train was “set on fire,” still remains too hard a truth for some to swallow,” Juluri wrote.
Amana Begam Ansari, a columnist and TV news panellist, in her article for ThePrint in May called out “West’s hypocrisy” over the media’s coverage of pro-Palestine college protests in the United States and their reports on the 2016 Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) protest.
The university in Delhi saw student protests in 2016 over the capital punishment meted out to 2001 Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru.
“To understand the depth of bias against India or the lack of understanding of ground reality in India, one only needs to examine the headlines from Western media covering the protests in colleges of both countries,” she wrote.
Ansari mentioned that The Washington Post’s headline for the JNU protest read: ‘Indian students called it free speech. The government called it sedition’.
The Post’s headline covering the student protests in Columbia in April read, ‘Secret meetings, social chatter: How Columbia students sparked a nationwide revolt’.
Time magazine came under fire in May 2019 when the cover story of its international edition featuring PM Modi called him ‘India’s Divider in Chief’.
The main headline, accompanied by a secondary one that read ‘Modi the Reformer’, caused an uproar in India.
TIME’s new international cover: Can the world’s largest democracy endure another five years of a Modi government? https://t.co/fTBGDwq06E pic.twitter.com/1Oxu3EEnNb
— TIME (@TIME) May 10, 2019
The May 20 cover ‘India’s Divider in Chief’ had an article titled ‘Can the World’s Largest Democracy Endure Another Five Years of a Modi Government?’, which was penned by Aatish Taseer, the son of Indian journalist Tavleen Singh and late Pakistani politician and businessman Salmaan Taseer.
The cover story came as India was entering the final phase of the 2019 general elections. The article had also criticised the opposition, saying the Congress had “little to offer than the dynastic principle” and described Rahul Gandhi as “an unteachable mediocrity”.
PM Modi had reacted to the story, which asked whether India could “endure” another five years of his government. “Time magazine is foreign, the writer has also said he comes from a Pakistani political family. That is enough for his credibility,” he said at the time.
Weeks later, Time magazine featured an article with the headline, ‘Modi Has United India Like No Prime Minister in Decades’, written by Manoj Ladwa, founder and chief executive of the India Inc Group, a London-based media organisation.
The piece came days after Modi’s historic return as PM for a second consecutive term in 2019.
With inputs from agencies
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