Responding to the media opinion attack on India
Responding to the media opinion attack on India
Phase III of narrative dismantling of India has started with slanted opinions on India. How should we respond?
You may have read the slanted pieces from the Freedom of Press Index, Human Rights Watch etc., ranking India at almost the very bottom. These were Phase II of the narrative dismantling of India. Phase III in this process is the opinion attack. That has started. Here are a few takes:
America’s Bad Bet on India - By Ashley J. Tellis
Ashley Tellis, a person of Indian Origin (PIO) holding Tata chair for strategic affairs at Carnegie, wonders if India will attack China or open another front against China in case the US goes to war with China.
Learnings from Three Revolutions - Fareed Zakaria
Fareed Zakaria, another PIO, believes India engages in a “persistent persecution of 200 million Muslims”. (Reality is the other way around).
Opinion: The world just tilted in India’s favor by Frida Ghitis
India’s democracy is far from perfect. In recent years, it has been backsliding. Freedom House rates the country “Partly Free,” noting the rise in discriminatory policies against Muslims and harassment of journalists and government critics.
Tactics used in the opinions attacks.
The narrative war has many flanks. The best attacks, as you may have noted above, are those that couch the unproven, biased and suspect data, analysis and opinions within a language of praise.
They use what is called subliminal programming. If we expose the population to negative slants, after a while, the population becomes familiar with its presence and acknowledges it as a shortcoming.
This is not the end, just Phase III of the narrative war against India. In Phase IV you will see celebrities and social media influencers make noise about these narrative opinions.
Does that mean that there is nothing wrong in India?
Absolutely not. However, a misdiagnosis using unproven, biased and suspect data, analysis and opinions definitely does not help.
For instance, if I diagnose my weakness as caused by genetics, Indians being inherently weaker than Europeans (bias), then I may never uncover my protein deficiency or nutritional lacunae.
Similarly, using the tired tropes to criticise India without factual backing lets the government off the hook on REAL issues.
But how do we deal with these attacks?
There are a few ways to deal with this.
IGNORE: Certain surveys and opinions of anti-India commentators can be ignored. You will always have some weirdos like Rana Ayub or Arfa trying use falsehoods. Then you have Fareed Zakaria-types, who misuse or use wrong data to slant opinions against India. You can ignore these commentators.
RESIST: There are certain surveys and data created by UN agencies, World Bank and others that have serious drawbacks. These data and findings feed into our sovereign ratings and thus have a direct bearing on the investments in India or India’s potential in general.
COUNTERACT: We need to improve Indian data collection and data analytics. We need to develop these skills not just for India but also for SAARC and then expand to ASEAN and Africa, and then the world. Indian agencies should be able to create advanced data sets to counter the narrative fraud that is being perpetrated across the world.
In Sum
The wise say, as much as we crave the praise of our friends, much more should we rejoice in the slander from our foes.
As we grow and become more aware, we must focus on developing better data, analysis, research and opinions to know where we are and how to improve. Let us create something better, grander and more scientific in this field.
Notes:
Phase I of the anti-India narrative started with Indic studies in foreign universities. Here the basic research foundations of the anti-India narrative were laid. This includes discourse on caste, women's oppression etc.
In this clip Sanjeev Sanyal discusses how surveys and opinions. You can see this 8-minute part starting from 1:10:01
Opinion, even by experts, is just that, an opinion. Our global world has been constructed for us to look to others for their opinion so that we may know what we "should" be thinking. A decade ago, I wrote a blog post called The Spectacle of the Real - https://edbrenegar.substack.com/p/the-spectacle-of-the-real . In it I wrote the following,
"Fueled by a 24/7 news cycle, actual news - a statement of "facts" that an event, an accident, a death, an agreement, a visit or something has taken place, described in the traditional journalistic parlance of "who, what, when and where" - is transformed into a spectacle of opinion and virtual reality driven by the images of faces speaking words of crisis, fear, and self-righteous anger. Televised analysis - more important than the "facts" of the story- drives the news through the ambiguity of the visual image and is its source of validation. ...
These televised events aren't conversations seeking truth, but, rather, people talking at and past one another in a game of leveraging images for social and political influence. We are drawn to the image on the screen of these "experts" having something to say that is meaningful, hoping that at some point some sense of the moment will be revealed, bringing reality into view."
These opinion "leaders" are characterized as being "influential." This is the currency of leadership today. Being influential. After almost four decades of working with leaders, I'd say that influence is no longer leadership because it is intended to suppress real leadership which is to be "a person of impact." Do actions speak louder than words?
Yes, I believe they can. But we must not be influenced to be passive and fearful, when there are so many situations within our reach where we can make a difference that matters. Be a person of impact and tell that story. Genuine influence will result.