The mainstream media in the West seems to be opposed to anybody on the Right. So it’s not just US President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson who are regularly targeted by liberals; even Prime Minister Narendra Modi has to suffer the deprecations and innuendoes. The recent Hindu-Muslim violence gave them an opportunity to not just slam Modi but also depict the country under him as hell for Muslims.
This is not to say that the Modi regime has come out smelling of roses from the spate of violence in the national Capital. The Delhi Police, which is under the Union government, proved to be totally clueless. Indeed the intelligence and law enforcement agencies failed in both anticipating and checking violence. Then there were Union Minister Arurag Thakur and Bharatiya Janata Party leaders like Kapil Mishra who made deplorable remarks.
The cocktail of incompetence on internal security and irresponsible nationalist rhetoric resulted in a spate of violence which left 45 dead and over 200 injured. On February 27, ThePrint posted the list of the dead; at that time the number of fatalities was 36. Out of this, 26 names were known. Of this as many as 11 were Hindus.
But The Diplomat reported, “Several other journalists were abused and intimidated and were asked to prove their religion. They reported extensively on how a clash turned into a riot and then a pogrom.”
By the way, pogrom, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, is “a mob attack, either approved or condoned by authorities, against the persons and property of a religious, racial, or national minority. The term is usually applied to attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”
But how was it that about 40 per cent of the dead were Hindus? Did the supposedly pro-Hindu government itself get the 11 Hindus killed?
The Guardian called the riots “targeted anti-Muslim brutality.”
The New York Times quoted unnamed critics as saying that “the killings were neither spontaneous nor without warning: They were inevitable.” And, of course, there was the mention of the 2002 Gujarat riots, alluding to Modi’s involvement in it: “Some doubt clung to him personally as well. Despite his having been cleared by a court, accusations remained that he was complicit in the massacre of hundreds of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, when he was the state’s chief minister.”
Unproved and unverifiable accusations have more veracity than exoneration by a court of law. The result is that Modi gets maligned and India’s gets a bad name. Is Trump wrong when he accuses the mainstream media as fake news?.
