The Indian Media : A Hostile Force

Indian journalists must be held responsible in some degree for the slow progress India has made in regaining her self-confidence, shattered by centuries of colonization. For Indian journalists are often the worst enemies of India and Indian culture, constantly harping at the negative sides of India, constantly ignoring the greatness of this country. They must also be the biggest Hindu-bashers in a Nation where there are already so many Hindu bashers (Marxists, Muslims, Christians, politicians), having since Independence, made fun in the most belittling manner of Hindu culture. Finally, they must also be held to some extent responsible for the negative attitude that the western press has had since towards India. For towards whom but the Indian journalists will the newly arrived correspondent turn to understand this vast and difficult continent ?

Indian Journalists

Do Indian journalists suffer from an inferiority complex vis a vis the West ? Do they think theirs is a lesser Democracy, afflicted with all the world’s ills ? Does India’s media look down upon its own country ? To a Westerner, it seems very much so. Indian journalists appear to enjoy India-bashing; nothing seems to find grace in their eyes : everything is rotten, the system, the Government, the politicians, the bureaucracy. Nothing works, nothing is possible, everything is bleak, worthless, hopeless.

But the truth is that those Indian journalists who constantly negate India, are ashamed of their country. They always seem to compare their Democracy to Western standards. Their parameters appear to be set by what the West thinks about India, by Amnesty International’s comments on their Nation. They want to apply to India the same norms which are used in the industrialised world. And extraordinarily, many of them ridicule what makes this country unique in the world, what no other Nation in the word possesses : Dharma, true Hinduism; the knowledge passed down by thousands of Sages, Saints, Yogis, Sadhus of the Eternal Truth, that which gives a meaning to this otherwise senseless life and which the West has totally lost : the Wheel of Life, the endless rebirths and ultimately the evolutionary Ascension of man towards the Ultimate Truth.

When the British invaded India, they quickly set upon trying to destroy what they perceived as paganism, but which was in reality India’s many-sided perception of truth, Hinduism, the Santanam Dharma of the Vedic Sages. Fortunately for India, they never succeeded in their task, but they did manage to win over a small portion of India’s elite population. These people, were made to feel ashamed of their own ways and thus tried to become more British than the Britishers, be it in their dress, in their thinking … or in their Hinduism-bashing, and Indian journalists soon became the flag-bearers of this de-Indianisation.

Do not Indian journalists realise that by constantly belittling their own country and seeing it the way the West wants them to perceive it, they are handing over India to her enemies, those who wish her ill ? Those who would like to see her humbled, broken, fragmented ? Does the Indian media want to see their country go the way of Yugoslavia ? Don’t they realise that they are traitors to their own country, to its uniqueness, to its unparalleled greatness ? That ultimately their India-bashing is a colonial leftover ? An unconscious inferiority complex, which has been planted in the minds of their ancestors more than two centuries ago ?

They whipped up the Ayodhya controversy, forcing the Congress and the Muslim leadership to make a stand for the mosque, when actually this disused, ugly structure, in the midst of a wholly Hindu city had no relevance for anyone who has some common sense. It is they who labelled Hindus as Nazi fundamentalists, it is they who called Advani a Hitler but do they have any knowledge of European history : Hitler killed in cold blood 6 million Jews and crores of other people ! It is they who in the aftermath of the destruction shouted themselves hoarse over ‘the end of our secularism’ or ‘the mortal blow to our Democracy’, forgetting in the heat of their self-righteousness that Ayodhya was a symbol. It is they who are still at it today, by portraying the Christian community in India as persecuted, when many of the incidents are the result of jealousies between converted and non-converted tribals, or are even engineered by Muslims, and forgetting how much harm Christianity has done to this country for three centuries, converting by devious means, crucifying Brahmins in Goa, destroying temples in Pondichery .

The Indian Media And Gurus

Westerners have often a deep suspicion of ‘Gurus’ and are wary of anything which has a ‘Hindu’ flavour. It is true that Gurus teaching in the West can be a mixed lot, and some of them might have brought a bad name to Hinduism; but is this a reason to clamp them all together under the same ‘fake’ label ?

Indian journalists unfortunately share sometimes the same resistance to Gurus as their Western counterparts. And one can also understand their misgivings, given the problems there have been in India with certain Gurus having political connections. But these are the exception to the rule. Why then brand all Gurus as ‘Godmen’, a negative and slightly cynical term, as many Indian journalists do ? Or why always ask Gurus the same pointed and devious questions about their opinions on Ayodhya and ‘Hindutva’ ? Isn’t it also strange that Indian journalists do not display the same aggressiveness towards Christian bishops or priests, whom they never call Godmen, but ‘Holy Father’ ? They also like to question ‘miraculous’ powers of Indian Gurus, as it was done in a recent issue of India Today targeting Sai Baba. But is it less rational or Cartesian to think, as the Catholics do, that Mary conceived a child while remaining a virgin, or that Christ came back from the dead and ascended physically to heaven ?

Running down Hindu culture and Hindu Gurus is fine – but a huge majority of the Indian population which, let us remember, is 85% Hindu sees nothing wrong in this culture : Ordinary Indians meditate every morning, do pujas, perform asanas, chant bhajans, or do pranayama. There is no sectarism here, no fake mysticism, no pagan obscure rites. The irony is that this very spirituality on which Indian intellectuals tend to look down, is taking root in the West : More and more sportsmen, for instance, are using pranayama to enhance their performances; ordinary Americans are meditating by the millions; hatha-yoga has long taken Europe by storm and has been copied by all kinds of gymnastics or aerobics . Does India need the West to realize what an inconceivable spiritual inheritance it has in its hands ? A knowledge which once roamed the shores of the world, from Mesopotamia to Egypt, from Greece to Babylon, but which today has disappeared in a world peopled by intolerant churches ?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the founder of the Art of Living, who has also been catalogued as a ‘Godman’ by the Deccan Herald, is doing his bit in propagating this wonderful knowledge, both in India, where it is under threat from globalization and westernization – and abroad, where materialism has often stifled the soul of so many countries. His disciples are promoting as much the revival of Sanskrit and Vedic knowledge, as an healthy ecological concern : Plastic disposal in their ashram for instance, or trying to save the centenary trees which are in danger of being chopped down on the Kanakapura road as it is being widened. His numerous associations prove that he is not only a ‘Guru of the rich’, as he has been accused : His village schools, for instance, do so well that children have a 95% rate of success in exams; his Youth Training Program brings to India’s remotest hamlets in Karnataka or even in Naxalite infested Bihar, Housing, Hygiene, and Human values. His volunteers worked recently during 15 days with their own hands in a village near Allahabad to clear the garbage, clean the sewage infested roads and generally renovate the place.

It is part of the freedom in the Press to be able to criticize anything and anybody. And we must acknowledge that Indian journalists have often played a positive role by highlighting injustice or corruption in public life. But the spitefulness that they sometimes display towards the Saints, Sadhus and Gurus of India seems a little bit unfair. For however much poverty there is in this country, however many problems it is facing, India’s gift to the world in the 21^st century will be its spirituality, this eternal knowledge which alone She has preserved.

An Indian School Of Journalism

In a year or so, a unique and revolutionary new Indian School of journalism, which will be Bangalore-based, is going to be inaugurated. In this school, students will not only be taught the complete art of journalism, but they will also learn to look at India through an Indian perspective, to cast an eye on the world which will carry some of the knowledge and wisdom of a civilisation their own – which is five thousand years old.

They will be taught pranayama, the ancient and unique technique of breathing devised thousands of years ago by Indian Sages, so that they know how to regulate their breath in time of stress and thus control their emotions; they will be taught the royal art of meditation, so that they can get their inspiration from a quiet, strong and silent mind; they will be taught asanas, so that their body is strong and resilient and can endure any physical situation; they will be taught a unique cleansing technique called the Sudarshan Krya, which eliminates toxins and stresses from the mind and body; they will even be taught to sing and dance, so that there is joy and spontaneity in their life and not the dry, intellectual pompousness of the pipe-smoking, Oxford English-speaking journalist, or the chain-smoking pseudo-Marxist. In short, they will be taught the Art of Living .

Sounds preposterous ? But these methods should be applied to ALL aspects of education in India, from the kindergarten onwards, so that schools and universities do not churn out western clones who have no idea about the greatness and the immense wealth of their own country, as it is often the case since Independence. And the FIRST thing which should be taught to all students, whether they are toddlers, or aspiring journalists, is that there exists a Knowledge – spiritual, occult, yogic – still alive in India, which has died all over the world, where only churches and dogmas survive, although this Knowledge was once prevalent in ancient civilisations – in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece etc. They should also understand that if this Knowledge is left to die in India, it will be gone forever from this world which will slowly drift towards pralaya.

This is not to say that Western journalism is better. On the contrary, there is today something perverted and near asuric about a journalism which misuses constantly the enormous power it has, because contemporary politicians always have an eye on public opinion and need journalists. As to foreign coverage of India, barring a few exceptions, it is often discriminatory, condescending, and there is a unanimity of views on everything from Mother Teresa to Sonia Gandhi, which makes it quite uninspiring. No wonder the average western man still thinks of India as a backward country of beggars and fakirs, the abode of the dying people of Mother Teresa. We, the foreign correspondents in South Asia are all guilty of compromising under pressure of our editors, who are still expecting from us a certain negative bias, an anti-Hindu tone.

So what is needed is a new generation of Indian journalists who will be proud of their country without being chauvinists, who will be brilliant without being superficial, who will take the best of the West, without being western clones, who will draw inspiration from the Knowledge alive in this country, without being bigots.  In brief, they will be Indian journalists. This is what the Art of Living School of Journalism will teach them.

(Courtesy : Excerpts from ‘The Ferengi’s Columns’ by François Gautier posted on voibooks.bitbucket.io)

Indian journalists are often the worst enemies of India and Indian culture, constantly harping at the negative sides of India !