Hinduphobia

There have been several news reports, analyses and opinion pieces published in important Western media outlets in the past few months about the ongoing elections in India. The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC, Time magazine, The Economist, and National Public Radio are among the news that media that have devoted much attention [...]

At 7:10am BBC Radio 4 broadcasts the religious affairs programme ‘Sunday’, appropriately named because that is the day on which it is aired. Now in this programme we have this delightful installment: “The National Council of Churches in India will hold a day of protest next week against the country’s discriminatory caste system. It follows [...]

Just two days ago the BBC put on its website the ominously entitled “What is India’s caste system?”. A rhetorical question indeed because anyone familiar with the BBC’s constant anti-Hindu bias would already know exactly where that sort of vitriol was headed; blame directly apportioned to Hinduism, Hindu beliefs, Hindu civilisation and especially Hindu texts. [...]

One has to hand it to The New York Times. If you can’t be overtly racist and negative on India, the next best thing to do is to get a disgruntled Indian intellectual, someone cut off from his roots, to do the job. No one can then accuse you of racism. This, in short, is [...]

The recent furore over the controversial BBC documentary ‘Storyville: India’s Daughters’ has now drawn distinguished biologist and militant atheist Richard Dawkins into the fray. The film examines the values and mindsets of the rapists, and interviews the two lawyers who defended the men convicted of Jyoti’s rape and murder in 2012 on a Delhi bus. [...]

India is a target market for many commercial organisations and of course the media is no exception. From being one of Britain’s most well established newspapers, the Daily Mail has pioneered online journalism. Indeed it has a special section for India, and it is here that we encounter the latest offering by that country’s journalist [...]

 The anti-Hindu bias in western media outlets such as the BBC, CNN and Sky have been well-known. The situation was hardly likely to change for the better with Fox News and Al-Jazeera. Indeed it can be hard to differentiate between them. The BBC is regarded as establishment fodder, and with its ideological moorings to the [...]

How comical this scene is but its a reflection on how the Christian religious right-wing see Hinduism as full of demons where the victim needs to be freed, while the left wing see Hinduism as ‘Hindu nationalism’ Hindu far-right supremacy where the victim needs to be freed from proving left and right are two sides [...]

The artist Anish Kapoor was one of the signatories to banning Narendra Modi from Britain. Yet his attack on the now prime minister of India was extreme even by the standards of those who opposed Modi. It was fanatical, venomous and very psychologically imbalanced. On BBC Newsnight on 16 May 2014 Kapoor said Modi was [...]

Gunga Din is a character from a classic Rudyard Kipling poem, and was adapted into a film of the same name in 1939. In that production, Gunda Din is a simple water bearer who sacrifices his life in order to save the white British soldiers from rebel forces of the Thugee. The film is now [...]