Another day, another hitjob: Why American media loves to hate democratic India

When an American newspaper with a known bias towards India comes up with an “exclusive” report, ‘An assassination plot on American soil reveals a darker side of Modi’s India’, one is as much reminded of its timing as of the entrenched notion of Western exceptionalism in the white world.

The world’s largest democracy is currently holding the national elections, and the timing of the report condemning it cannot be accidental. Incidentally—and, again, it may not be accidental—this “exclusive” report, unlike other articles in the Washington Post, is not put behind the paywall. Why is the Washington Post management suddenly so generous with its readers?

This, however, is just one of the many hitjobs in recent times by the Western media against India and particularly the Narendra Modi government. The Guardian, this very month, came up with its own “exclusive” story claiming India’s hands in as many as “20 assassinations” in Pakistan since 2020. Even when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Washington DC for a state visit in June last year, he was greeted with a New York Times article, ‘In Hosting Modi, Biden Pushes Democracy Concerns to the Background’. At that time, the Time magazine went a step further as it wrote: “India’s Worsening Democracy Makes It an Unreliable Ally”.

Coming to the allegation about India’s role in extraterritorial killings/attempted killings in the West, it has to be taken with a pinch of salt till official investigation is over. The Indian government has denied its role and despite that, like a responsible nation, it has agreed to support the probe. Instead of praising India for its cooperation, even when it doesn’t agree with the content of the investigation, the Western media and the vested interests have gone ahead maligning the image of the country, hoping it may impact the prospect of the ruling party in the ongoing elections. Now, if true, and this seems to be the case when one finds this “exclusive” report to be not behind the usual paywall, this is an awful act, especially from those who never miss a chance to swear by democracy, rule of law and liberalism.

Maybe that is the dubious nature of the Western ‘liberal’ order: They are liberal, democrat and a free speech enthusiast only when it suits them. So, they would caution India to treat its farmers with care even when it became obvious that the farm protest was largely the handiwork of a toolkit gang. But when a similar agitation rocked their land, they imperiously seized the bank accounts of the protesters and used other undemocratic means to crush it. When a top Indian educational institution echoed the noise of azaadi and tukde tukde, they lectured India to constructively engage with the protesting students, but when the campuses in the US saw similar chaotic scenes on the issue of the Israel-Hamas war, the American State didn’t blink in suppressing them; even professors couldn’t escape the police’s wrath. As for democracy, all hell broke loose in the West when a lower court in India convicted an Opposition leader in a criminal defamation case, but the US democracy remained strong and vibrant when a former President, a frontrunner in this year’s presidential elections, was pushed into a criminal trial that was widely seen as a witch hunt.

Branding someone a “terrorist”, a nation a “rogue one", or an alliance “an axis of evil” is its exclusive monopoly. It may also think that only white elites have the right to wage a war and go for an extraterritorial killing even when that leads to civilian casualties. For, these casualties can be brushed aside—and under the carpet—in the name of collateral damage.

Look how Barack Obama, otherwise a ‘liberal’ hero, subverted the global norm in the name of fighting terrorism. In 2009, when he became the President of the United States, he immediately did away with the previous dispensation’s torturous interrogation process of terror suspects, but adopted the use of drones for the extraterritorial killing of terrorist suspects, with renewed gusto. In fact, the very next day after the revocation of the Bush-era interrogation process, Obama authorised two drone strikes in northwest Pakistan, which reportedly killed one terrorist and 10 civilians, including 4-5 kids. Obama became such a drone enthusiast that while Bush, in his term, authorised about 50 drone strikes, the former pushed it 10-times to take the number to 506!

It would still have been fine had the American drones met the terror target. But according to Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, as per their Foreign Affairs article (July-August 2011), ‘Washington’s Phantom War: The Effects of the U.S. Drone Program in Pakistan’, “less than two per cent of those killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan have been described in reliable press accounts as leaders of Al Qaeda or allied groups”.

For his services, Obama was awarded a Nobel peace prize—an award which only 110 other individuals have received so far! And he remains the hero of the Western liberal world.

Indeed, another specimen of Western exceptionalism on display! And, like the Ku Klux Klan of the yore, the white boys of the day usually gang up against those they think are others.

So, when a US drone killed Ayman al-Zawahiri—an “Egyptian surgeon”, as Al Jazeera would address him, but a dreaded Al Qaeda terrorist, as per the Western media—in Afghanistan in July 2022, the West joined in to laud the Americans. Even Justin Trudeau, a Left-‘liberal’ icon, couldn’t stop himself from congratulating the Biden administration, forgetting his much cherished advocacy for human rights and international norms. “The death of Ayman al-Zawahiri is a step toward a safer world,” he thundered.

The same Trudeau has, of late, opened a warfront against democratic India, accusing it of killing Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Khalistani terrorist, on its soil. (The Americans are paying him back for the previous support by joining in his Khalistani diatribe against India.) While the Khalistanis, true to their calling, have openly threatened to target the India mission in Ottawa and consulates in other cities in that country, the Canadian media, in coordination with their Western counterparts, have been busy sanitising Nijjar’s criminal past and projecting him as a “temple leader”. One newspaper has gone to the extent of calling him a “fatherly figure” who would do temple works “with his own hands”.

The truth is there has been a flourishing Khalistani ecosystem in Canada (and in other parts of the West, including the UK and the US) since the 1980s, when Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre, was at the helm of the country’s affairs. In fact, the 1985 Kanishka Air India bombing, which was the deadliest terrorist attack before 9/11, wouldn’t have happened but for Canadian complicity. Ottawa simply refused to arrest and extradite Talwinder Parmar, the mastermind behind the Kanishka bombing, even when he “promised to ‘kill 50,000 Hindus’, swore that ‘Indian planes will fall from the sky’ and schemed to make that happen,” as Canadian journalist Terry Milewski writes in his 2021 book, Blood for Blood: Fifty Years of the Global Khalistan Project.

No wonder Osama bin Laden… Ayman al-Zawahiri… Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi… are “terrorists” who have to be hunted down howsoever. But Talwinder Parmar… Hardeep Singh Nijjar… Gurpatwant Singh Pannun… are “activists” who deserve to be protected even when they threaten to unleash “terror from the sky”, “kill 50,000 Hindus”, and attack the Indian Parliament. The tagging of “Sikh” with “activists” is quite mischievous—as we see in most Western newspapers and magazines—as it attempts to project India as an anti-Sikh state. So the Washington Post writes how Sikh activists are merely “seeking to revive the push for a sovereign Sikh state called ‘Khalistan’, in today’s northwest India”. Yeah… right… just the way Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi were merely seeking to revive the push for a sovereign Khilafat state in the Middle East!

It’s unfortunate that the Western media, a self-appointed vanguard of democracy and liberalism, has become a tool in the hands of toolkit gangs and vested interests. Partly, it’s due to the misplaced conviction in the white world about supposed Western exceptionalism when it comes to terrorism and extrajudicial assassinations. To add to it is the growing culture of wokeism in the US, which has in recent times been flooded by the Qatari-Saudi-Chinese money, especially in the media, think tanks and academia—the result is there for everyone to see as American campuses have today become a Leftist-Islamist hub.

The West needs to realise that India is a vanguard against the authoritarian/autocratic worldview currently pushed and promoted by Xi Jinping’s China. New Delhi may not exactly be a traditional ally of the US, on the lines of, say, the UK, but the very liberal, democratic temperament of the two makes them natural friends. The time is ripe to further bolster this relationship, and this would be possible only when hitjobs, of the kind we are witnessing in the American media, are substantially reduced, if not completely curbed.

The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views