The Scary Rise of Hinduphobia in Indian Media and the Group of Elite Journalist Influencing it

Hinduphobia is the dislike of or prejudice against Hinduism or Hindus, especially as a political force – So how can it be a problem in India where the population is approximately 80% Hindus? Simple, although the majority of Indians are Hindu by birth or spiritual faith; majority of Indians are divided by divisive politics and power hungry political parties. Unlike many nations, India doesn’t have 3 or 4 political parties – instead India is made of more than 300 regional parties where many of them hold significant power in regions where the language/religion/community they represent are based.  However, in the last 30 years, 2 major alliances of many parties have formed. One being the NDA (National Democratic Alliance) led by the BJP, the other being the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) led by the Congress. When looking at these alliances from a 10,000 foot view of an average Indian, many see the NDA as leaning towards more Hindu, poor families and national interests, whereas UPA is seen as leaning towards communism, dynasty families, elitist privilege and even Islamism.  Add India’s strong culture of drama, emotion & debate and therefore, many Hindu are more likely to align themselves with a political party first and their religious identity second. Unfortunately, this division of political identity significantly breaks the Hindu-Indian population into various groups at the expense of the Hinduism faith being the core target or criticism, hate and even extreme bigotry. Now comes the Media’s role in furthering these groups even more.

India is a news hungry nation that is addicted to politics and has one of the largest number of TV news outlets in the world. Many of the media are controlled by large, for-profit corporations which reap revenue from advertising, subscriptions, and sale of copyrighted material. India also has a strong music and film industry. India has more than 70,000 newspapers and over 690 satellite channels (more than 80 are news channels) and is the biggest newspaper market in the world – over 100 million copies sold each day. Most importantly, it should be noted that India’s major news outlets are led by a very small group of journalists who have become national celebrities at par to many Bollywood celebrities. Some of these celebrity journalists include Rajdeep Sardesai, Barkha Dutt, Sagarika Ghose, Arnab Goswami, Rahul Kanwal, Rana Ayyub, Tarun Tejpal and Sonia Singh.

Over the years, it has become blatantly known that many of India’s celebrity journalists are well aligned with the Community Party of India and Sonia Gandhi’s Congress party, who both have connections with the UPA political alliance. Due to this fact of political relationships, whether by cause of ideology, funding, family or just favor, many of these celebrity journalists put significant effort to show the opposing political parties in bad light – and this bias clearly shows. Now, the elephant in the room is the BJP and NDA alliance as it represent everything that the Communist and Congress party do not. Mix the fact that they have been steadily growing their vote share and state seats in parliament, and you get an amplified response from the elitist group of celebrity journalists to show poor and average indian families as backwards and silly. This is where Hinduphobia truly begins.

Now, ask yourself how you can break the morale of the estimated 300 million proud Hindus who are mostly middle class or rural-based families and influence them to vote for the Communist or Congress party, who have a long history of implementing oppressive anti-Hindu policies as well as some of their top political leaders making hate speeches targeting Hindus. That’s right – start debates blaming alienating the faithful Hindus, only highlight issues that show Hindus in bad light, oppress cases where Hindus are targeted and simply just always blame Hindus and their faith. This frightening trend of bigotry driven by many leading Indian journalists is a growing trend and often blamed as the leading factor & influence in communal hatred between different religious groups. Some political critics have even blamed communal riots targeting Hindus because on the insensitive and hate-filled statements by some journalists. It should also be noted that many leading journalists have been accused of starting rumors, which have also led to violence against Hindus in rural parts of the country.

Here are some recent examples of Hinduphobia on Twitter from Indian celebrity journalists themselves (of course there are too many to display, but this is a start!):

What can you do? The best thing to do is call out such bigotry and the insensitive mockery against one’s faith or identify on Twitter or by emailing the media outlet’s public relations contact. The next step would be to email the marketing teams at India’s leading advertisers who sponsor these media outlets and their bigoted journalists.

By Sunny (a regular-joe Indian who enjoys Hindu festivals and likes to see fairness in the world)