News of the ‘Hindu’ World

(UK) The furore over the phone hacking scandal which has led to the closure of the long-running tabloid News of the World, James and Rupert Murdoch being questioned by a parliamentary committee, the death of the journalist whistleblower, resignation of two senior police officers and a criminal investigation which is only in its beginnings has revealed a culture of dishonesty, illegality and corruption at the heart of the British media which has made gutter reporting and yellow journalism that much more putrid. For Hindus this is nothing new having been used as the convenient punchbag for social frustrations to be relieved and diverted in a manner disturbingly resonant of anti-Semitism.

In 2006 Yasmin Alibhai-Brown commented, without a shred of evidence, in the Evening Standard of how the “cutely names Hindu Human Rights Group” fulminated against Muslims and admired Hitler. When challenged the paper was less than cooperative, especially at how a stereotypically placid community could dare to challenge a journalist and stature such as Alibhai-Brown, rather conveniently ignoring at how it was owned at the time by the Daily Mail which in the 1930s had praised Sir Oswald Moseley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, with the notorious headline Hurrah for the Blackshirts! After the inaccuracy was pointed out to the Press Complaints Commission who upheld the complaint as valid, the Evening Standard not only publicly apologised but also invited HHR to present a talk on Hinduism.

But one would be wrong to think that this was just a conspiracy of the “right-wing press”. The Guardian invited writers of various backgrounds to put forth their views. But a Hindu perspective is notoriously absent. One finds generous space provided to Inayat Bunglawala, founder and chair of Muslims4UK, for example. Then we have the eclectic mix of anti-Hindu writers. Priyamvada Gopal is typical of her Marxist academic clique from India , having a Stalinist intolerance for any dissident opinions. Hence there is ample space for her to portray Hindus in the worst light unhindered by even less freedom to respond than Saddam Hussain allowed at the Baath Party annual congress.

Another prominent anti-Hindu fanatic given pride of place is David Griffiths, South Asia officer of hatecore Christian fundamentalist outfit Christian Solidarity Worldwide. Even a left-leaning newspaper allows the worst colonialist style missionary bigotry and hubris, just as long as it is dedicated to attacking Hindus. And who do we have on the Hindu side? Well at one point the Guardian allowed Anil Bhanot of Hindu Council to express his dysfunctionally illiterate opinions on subjects he obviously knew little about, and written in the same riveting manner as ‘George’, the dim-witted pink hippo character from classic children’s television series Rainbow. It speaks volumes that while anti-Hindu writers are given the red carpet treatment, Bhanot was even less convincing as a sop to objective opinion than the black homelands were in South Africa under apartheid.

The general coverage over the death of Hindu holy man and philanthropist Sathya Sai Baba was overall negative. In this the BBC took a leading role. Not only did it pointedly ignore HHR’s protests back when the programme Secret Swami was aired in 2004, that is within the time period allowed for complaints, but smugly dismissed complaints more recently over its coverage. This was seriously rubbing salt in the wounds when the original journalist from the aforementioned programme, Tanya Datta, decided to rake up the very same muck she had created in the first place by allowing her to pen yet more hate in 2011 after Sai Baba’s death. This ignored the fact that her star witness had not only withdrawn his US court case years before but later on his alibi for another case failed to save his drug dealer friend from receiving 30 years in prison. . Yet again the BBC ignored HHR’s complaints. Can anyone imagine any other religious tradition being demeaned in such a manner?

The recent phone hacking scandals surrounding a once important appendage Murdoch’s media empire shows that journalism in a civilised developed western democracy can easily slide down the slippery slope of Third World despotism. Here we are certainly in another world where only utter corruption and incompetence hinders petty dictators and bureaucrats from enforcing an Orwellian state on the powerless and passive millions.

In 2005 India ’s news channel NDTV (which is not free unlike many others such as Sky and BBC) showed the HHR demonstration outside the French embassy in London over the use of Hindu iconography of Minelli shoes. But the report was on the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. When HHR complained, NDTV’s pathetic response was that they needed something ‘Hindu’ to go with the report. The fact it was an outright lie did not matter as long as the ‘proles’ watching it were convinced. Al-Jazeera is regarded as the most professional news channel from the Middle East . Yet its report on caste reflected the anti-Hindu bias of such coverage. Again HHR complaints for a balanced story were brusquely ignored with even less acknowledgement than when Saddam sent his own Baath Party subordinates to the firing squad. Brit Asia TV brings Third World ‘bread and circuses’ to Britain as it beams out is brain numbing broadcasts from Birmingham . Broken Silence claimed to break the mould in discussing taboo topics. It did not take long to realise that these once again had the same latitude in freedom of expression that Chairman Mao gave during the Cultural Revolution. This was most evident again when discussing the issue of caste. The very presenter Sanyya Gardez egged on the leaders of Castewatch and Voice of Dalit International to blame Hindu religion and sacred texts for all caste issues. No Hindu representative was present and the bland claim that Hindu Council, an organisation more dysfunctional than the family life of Fred and Rose West, was invited should be taken with scepticism.

This latter point is enhanced when we consider that an earlier pilot programme on caste for Brit Asia was conveniently shelved when the Hindu speakers became too ‘assertive’ such as questioning the issue of the caste system being three thousand years old because such a viewpoint was the direct offspring of the racist and white supremacist Aryan Invasion Theory.

This article began with Murdoch’s media empire and ends with it. Sky News was the pioneer in satellite television and also Murdoch’s important foray into the broadcast media from just tabloid and broadsheet journalism. And here again we have the demon of anti-Hindu prejudice once again raising its ugly head. Sky’s business presenter Dharshini David hosted the screening of Michael Lawson’s India’s Forgotten Women in Leicester Square on 1 July 2010. Now Lawson has produced several films aimed at portraying Hindu Dharma as the most oppressive system in the world especially in relation to caste. In this he brazenly uses the same racist ideas of an Aryan race which were so central to anti-Semitic propaganda of the Third Reich. Now after the film was shown David took questions yet pointedly ignored any ‘inconvenient’ ones from Hindus that did not fit in with the hatecore Christian missionary and racist agenda of the event. Shocking perhaps, but entirely in keeping with the media bias which treats Hindus on a lesser par than other communities.

This article was contributed by HHR

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the The Chakra website and staff.