How Western media finds India an easy prey for its ‘big lies’

For many decades after Independence, India was a regular playground for external forces and agencies. This is well documented and researched. Initially, India was of limited interest to the two superpowers. India was a new entrant in the global arena and was not a force that carried much weight.

From the mid-1960s, after the residual effects of the 1965 war with Pakistan played out and the effects of the Green Revolution started manifesting themselves, India attracted some attention from the two great powers, with China following closely.

Till the early 1980s, even after we had exerted our weight in the local South Asian arena and crafted the birth of a new nation, we were bit players on the international realpolitik stage.

However, the proxy forces in India of the two international power blocks and China were playing out a no-holds war for the minds and hearts of Indians. Admittedly, the ordinary Indian citizen, the proverbial ‘man or woman on the street’, was a mute spectator.

The warriors who contested the conflict between the two or three contesting ideologies were in the lobbies of power and influence, ranging from Parliament and state assemblies to the maze of the bureaucracy at all levels, business houses, industrial organisations, academia, and media groups.

After the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union, the battlefield did not necessarily see less intense clashes. Only the underlying ideologies changed. From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, India saw the emergence of political forces, groups, and parties that were influenced by or drew their sustenance from this country’s ancient Indian heritage.

In 1998, the BJP-led Union Government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee came to power in the country. The same ideological dispensation continues now in the Centre under Narendra Modi.

For the past ten years and earlier in 1998–2004, the ruling dispensation in India, which can broadly be described as one that is primarily influenced by our Indian heritage, has had to contend with an array of socio-political forces that we will broadly describe and assess. Some of them are indigenous, while others are foreign or non-Indian.

Some important foreign institutions had set up shop in the country as early as the late 1950s or early 1960s. These organisations were ostensibly private entities, like the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, et al., and they functioned outside the official diplomatic umbrella. The others in this category included the British Council, the Fulbright Scholarship, the Rhodes Scholarship, etc.

All these players cannot strictly be described as ‘state agencies’, but they clearly had umbilical ties with their home governments. They were versatile in hiding their true ownership and control structures.

The three Western media organisations—the BBC, Voice of America (VOA), and Reuters—also had a significant Indian presence by the late 1950s and early 1960s. The poor Soviets, with their Radio Moscow, that broadcast in a number of Indian languages, were also-ran, even though their print presence (in a number of Indian languages and English) was much more successful.

In this essay, we will focus on the BBC to start with. Recently, a path-breaking and incisive book on this iconic organisation has been published. The book, BBC’s True Lies (Garuda Prakashan), authored by Binay Kumar Singh and Prashant Pandey, is a true landmark and milestone in Indian studies on foreign media. It meticulously studies this organisation from its birth in Britain, its pivotal role in the life and politics of its homeland, and the long history of its Indian operations.

Readers may remember the dictum of Hitler and Goebbels on the big lie. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. Thus, by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” This applies equally to the big media, whether in the international arena or the domestic one. In the case of TV, people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one. If it is repeated frequently enough, the general audience will believe it sooner or later.

Hitler’s primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong. People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner or later believe it.

Goebbels did describe the big lie in different languages in an article he wrote in 1941, “Churchill’s Lie Factory”, but he was accusing the British of the ploy: The English follow the principle that one should lie big when one lies, and one must stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

In the case of the BBC’s telecasts in India, in Hindi and other languages, this writer has collected a few of the most egregious and dishonest ones that portray India as a country where the main minority community is routinely harassed and victimised. The most glaring and flagrant was a recent interview with the leader of the PFI, an organisation that makes no bones about its intention to set up an Islamic state in India. It has a terrible history of communal violence and terrorist attacks on the Indian Republic.

There have also been reports of the BBC India office having committed some income-tax offences or of having resorted to questionable financial policies in its Indian operations. The official agencies of the Central government have initiated legal action under various legal provisions that govern these offences.

The New York Times is another international media organisation whose entire Indian focus is on negative coverage of the country, its policies, and its public life. Reuters is no longer as important in the news dissemination field now as it was in its heyday, but it continues with its condescension.

Then, there are Internet and print organisations that have declared open warfare against the current political dispensation, as well as socio-cultural institutions that are committed to the cause of Indian civilisation. Readers will be fully aware of the identities of the players that are engaged in this all-out war.

We would not be indulging in hyperbole if we were to say that the Indian Republic may need to strengthen its firewalls much more resolutely than what prevails in the open arena currently.

The author is an analyst and student of economic, financial and socio-political issues. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.