April 13, 1998

North Block proves American economist Arthur Laffer wrong.

Tavleen Singh

Our Prime Minister, you will be happy to know, has finally been given a clean, "secular" chit by Time magazine. This should come as a great relief to us since no foreign publication is more widely circulated in this country than Time. But what is most interesting about the certificate of good behaviour are the reasons for Atal Bihari Vajpayee's transformation. According to the article, Vajpayee is absolved of his Hindu nationalist past because he enjoys an occasional drink, likes music and even has (Allah be praised) a few Muslim friends.

I have to tell you that I read the piece twice to make sure what I was reading was, in fact, what I had read. I then realised the writer had probably confused Hinduism with Islam and India with Pakistan. Well, so what? One heathen religion must seem pretty much like any other heathen religion, one chunk of south Asia much like any other if you are a North American Christian.

Errors of this kind could have been dismissed as mere ignorance if the entire foreign press had not, through the general election, portrayed the BJP as some kind of saffron incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. By inference, this means that those Indians who voted for the BJP are little more than a bunch of "Muslim-bashing thugs" -- to borrow the words of another foreign publication.

Now, that is when things start to get more worrying. If those who get their entire information on India from foreign newspapers and magazines are going to be constantly told that our country has moved backwards into some kind of Hindu dark age, then we could be in real trouble. The very foreign investors whose concerns foreign publications try to reflect would be frightened away more surely than if swadeshi became the mantra of the new Government.

As someone who worked for many years for a British newspaper and who is an Indian journalist writing in Hinglish, I always had a sneaking admiration for Delhi's foreign correspondents. They wrote so much better than us. Proper English and all that, no dropping the definite article when it should be there and putting it where it should not.

They travelled so much more easily than mean, old Indian newspaper proprietors would let us. They seemed so much more professional with their laptop computers and fax machines. They also seemed to have more access to our politicians (specially Indira and Rajiv Gandhi) than we ever did. So it has taken me some time to recognise that the foreign media's coverage of our recent general election has, by and large, been illiterate, ill-informed and prejudiced. I first noticed this during a trip to Europe just after the recent election campaign had begun. I had left India with the distinct impression that the BJP was in the lead, despite Sonia Gandhi's sudden advent. From my own travels, I had gleaned the main reason why it was in the lead was because the average Indian voter felt it was the only party that had not been given a fair chance at ruling India. Also, people seemed to think Vajpayee was the most credible candidate for prime minister.

Imagine then my shock when I learnt from the few reports that appeared in International Herald Tribune that Sonia Gandhi was making huge waves across the country and could well end up as India's next prime minister. That others were equally fooled can be seen from the fact that The New Yorker, one of international journalism's most revered publications, sent a well-known India expert hotfooting it down to Delhi for a profile on Madame. It was only when the results started to come out that he had to seek an interview with Atalji in order to balance things.

It is not the first time that the foreign media has got a south Asian election wrong. It was equally wrong about Pakistan in 1997. If you followed that election in the western media, you would have concluded the fight was essentially between Benazir Bhutto and Imran Khan. Newsweek, in fact, put Benazir on its cover just before the results came out. In the end, there was a landslide victory for Nawaz Sharif and not even one itsy-bitsy little seat for Imran.

To come back to our own election, I notice that the foreign press is busy trying to make the case that it is being hounded by BJP supporters for describing the party as fanatical and Hindu extremist. I sympathise with these journalists up to a point. This is because I have often had the BJP's hound dogs after me and they can be a real nuisance. I have a whole bunch of abusive letters to prove that these hound dogs do the BJP more harm than anything any journalist could ever have written.

Having said that, I would also like to point out that it is more than time that Delhi's foreign correspondents started to reconsider either their sources of information or their analytical abilities or both. They may discover, for a start, that Vajpayee does not need to have a drink, listen to music or have Muslim friends to prove he is not communal. They may also discover that the Congress has been losing elections mainly since Muslims (and Sikhs) discovered it was not as secular as it claimed to be.

They could also discover that Nathuram Godse, a man who clearly fascinates them, was not just once a member of the RSS but also of the Congress -- and that he was a member of neither when he killed Gandhiji.

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