Bias and facts suppression in 'The Hindu' reporting: A media analysis

A comparison of the report of police action on Malaysian Hindu rally as reported in The Hindu with the report of the same incident in other International News Agencies.

The event:

On November 25 2007, despite ban more than 5000 Hindus –mostly Tamils of ethnic Indian origin- gathered in the main street of Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia, to take up a rally to submit a petition signed by more than 100,000 members the community, to British High Commission urging the British government to compensate the historical wrong done to them by colonial British by bringing them to Malaysia mostly as indentured labourers which in turn has today reduced them to third class citizens under the Islamist rule in Malaysia. The protestors mostly peaceful were attacked by water cannons and later chemicals. Clutching the photos of Mahatma Gandhi the Hindus offered to court arrest rather than give up their right to protest for justice and equality.

The Newspaper:

'The Hindu' is a leading English-language newspaper in South India, with its largest base of circulation in Tamil Nadu. It has a readership of 2.2 million. Worldpress.org lists the Hindu as a left-leaning independent newspaper. There has been of late criticism of the newspaper that its reports have become more and more biased and are intentionally omitting inconvenient facts thus denying its readers the real news. Here we see if there is any truth in this criticism by studying the report that came in ‘The Hindu’ regarding the aforesaid events and comparing it with the reports of the same event by other major International news agencies which include the BBC, the CNN, the Reuters and 'Telegraph' of Britain.

Headings:

BBC reported the event with the heading ‘Malaysian police break up rally’. British newspaper ‘Telegraph’ heading said: ‘Malaysian police halt Indians' protest’. There are two Reuter’s reports. Heading of one report says: ‘Indian protest rocks Malaysia ahead of polls’ and another with video footage says, ‘Police break up protest in Malaysia’. As against such headings which show either the strength of the protest or the police action taken on the protestors, ‘The Hindu’ report states flatly in its heading: ‘Malaysian Indians stage protest rally’.

Regarding demonstration:

• The BBC report of the event says:

  “Malaysian police have clashed with ethnic Indian protesters in Kuala Lumpur, the country's capital. Tear gas and water cannon were used to disperse a crowd of over 5,000 people as they rallied outside the British High Commission.”

• The Telegraph report says:
  

  “Malaysian police attacked thousands of peaceful protesters with tear gas and water cannon yesterday as they attempted to present a petition to the British High Commission in Kuala Lumpur.”

  
  
• The CNN report says:

  “Thousands of Hindu protesters met water cannons and tear gas in Malaysia's capital on Sunday while demanding equal rights and consideration from the government.”

  
  
• The Reuters report says:
  

  “Malaysia's ethnic Indian community staged its biggest anti-government street protest on Sunday when more than 10,000 protesters defied tear gas and water cannon to voice complaints of racial discrimination."

  
  
• Now as against these, this is what ‘The Hindu’ says:
  

  A group, called the Hindu Rights Action Force, on Sunday defied a court order and staged a rally in Kuala Lumpur, protesting against the alleged “marginalisation” of the ethnic Indian minority in Malaysia. Police used water cannon and tear gas to disperse the agitators at one or two places in the city in the morning. The group had mobilised at least a few thousand activists in a rare show of defiance by the members of the community.

It is curious to note how ‘The Hindu’ reporter waters down the violence employed by the Malaysian police which all other reports have brought out succinctly. While both BBC and Reuters put the protest figures at ’over 5000’ and ‘more than 10000’ respectively ‘The Hindu’ saw it fit to write the number of protestors as ‘at least a few thousand’. While every other report spoke of Hindus braving the water cannons and teargases at the streets of Malaysian capital, ‘The Hindu’ saw it fit to mention the police attack on the peaceful demonstrators as having happened ‘at one or two place’.

Nevertheless ‘The Hindu’ report mentions without fail that ‘No exact number of the protesters at Sunday’s rally, some of whom turned violent, was available.’ BBC report never mentions violence by the protestors. Telegraph reported that the protest was peaceful. CNN which mentions the retaliation of some of the protestors to the water cannons also mentions that even they were restrained by the rally organizers not to retaliate. Thus the CNN report says: “Some protesters threw rocks at the water cannon trucks, but others were urging peaceful demonstrations.”

Silence on the violence:

• BBC report quoting Associate Press news agency says,

  ”Some demonstrators were beaten and bundled into police vans, as tear gas and water cannon were fired into the crowd, according to the Associated Press news agency.”

• Reuters report states:

  “Riot police fired at the protesters with sustained volleys of tear gas and jets of water laced with an eye-stinging chemical, but it took more than five hours to finally clear the streets of downtown Kuala Lumpur, by then littered with empty gas canisters.”

  [Online video of the Reuters shows protestors sitting cross-legged before the water cannons and even women demonstrators being handcuffed by Malaysian police.]
  
• CNN report says “The AP quoted witnesses who saw people being beaten and dragged into trucks by police.”
  
• Telegraph says

  “…as a police helicopter flew low between the gleaming sky-scrapers, the protesters were blasted with powerful chemicals that left victims gasping for air.”

  
  
• And ‘The Hindu’ report says nothing about the violence police unleashed on the peaceful demonstrators.
  

The alleged ‘inequalities’:

The Hindu report wherever it speaks of the grievances voiced by the ethnic Indian community puts it within double quotes and qualifies it with the term ‘alleged’. Thus ‘The Hindu’ report has the following terms:

A group, called the Hindu Rights Action Force, on Sunday defied a court order and staged a rally in Kuala Lumpur, protesting against the alleged “marginalisation” of the ethnic Indian minority in Malaysia…. The rally for “equal rights” was actually planned as part of a move to submit a petition to the British Embassy.

(bold font for emphasis - not in the original) ‘The Hindu’ report also carries no statement by any of the community leaders who organized the rally but quotes Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) leader and Works Minister Samy Vellu who is not in favour of the rally and who wants ‘within the system’. Now against this let us see how other international media have reported the grievances of the Hindus:

• BBC report:

  But the BBC's Robin Brant in Kuala Lumpur says the real goal of the demonstrators is to highlight what they see as the unfair treatment of minority Indians in Malaysia. Ethnic Indians - mainly Hindus - form one of Malaysia's largest minority groups. Activists say that many Hindus live in poverty, partly because of policies granting jobs and economic advantages to the ethnic Malay Muslim majority. "Indians are treated like third-class citizens. The community has been suffering in silence for decades," said opposition politician M. Kulasegaran. The government has rejected claims of unfair discrimination.

  
  
• Reuters report:

  "Malaysian Indians have never gathered in such large numbers in this way...," said organizer P. Uthaya Kumar, of the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf)."They are frustrated and have no job opportunities in the government or the private sector. They are not given business licenses or places in university," he said, adding that Indians were also incensed by some recent demolitions of Hindu temples.

  
  
• CNN report:

  The rally --rooted in complaints that the ethnic Malay Muslim-dominated government discriminates against minorities -- was the largest protest in at least a decade involving ethnic Indians, the country's second-largest minority population after ethnic Chinese. Ethnic Indians are generally the most underprivileged group in Malaysia.

  
  
• Telegraph report:

  The government operates an official policy of discrimination in favour of ethnic Malays, or "sons of the soil," who make up just over half of the population. Indians are eight per cent of the population but control just 1.5 per cent of the economy. Another quarter of the population is ethnic Chinese. Access to housing, education, loans and jobs is given to Malays on a preferential basis. The government, which has been led by the same party for 50 years, says the policies are necessary to support the Malay community. The destruction of Hindu temples by the Muslim government has inflamed these economic grievances.

  
  

Conclusion:

How the ideological stand of the editorial board affects the reporting pattern of a newspaper can be seen in the above analysis. The report of The Hindu is contrasted with the reports of other International news agencies. The comparison clearly shows how the left-leaning of ‘The Hindu’ newspaper distorts the news and hides facts. Thus the analysis shows how ‘The Hindu’ prefers to stand by its ideological vested interest and deny its readers genuine facts even when the news involves the welfare of the overseas fraternity of the very society that forms the majority of the readership of ‘The Hindu’ In other words:

Appendix – I : Dear Hindu reader, Caveat Emptor!

‘The Hindu’ also carried a news report of the event in the inside page (p.14) It was a highly edited out version of a report of the event filed by Associate Press. The original AP report is given below. The portion of the report which was edited out by ‘The Hindu’ is given in red color.

Malaysian police fire tear gas, water cannons on ethnic Indian demonstrators
Report by JULIA ZAPPEI Associated Press Writer

The Hindu heading:

‘Malaysian Indians allege discrimination

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) Police used tear gas and water cannons on Sunday to crush a banned rally by more than 10,000 ethnic minority Indians a rare street clash that exposed Muslim-majority Malaysia's deep divisions. Slogan-shouting protesters hurled water bottles and stones at police, who chased them through streets surrounding the famous Petronas Twin Towers and doused them repeatedly with tear gas and chemical-laced water for more than eight hours.

Witnesses saw people being beaten and dragged into trucks by police. Shoes and broken flower pots littered the scene after protesters scattered to hide in hotels and shops.

Police said 241 people had been detained, but that nearly half were released after authorities recorded their personal information. Four policemen were injured, federal police said in a statement, but there was no immediate estimate of injuries among protesters.

The rally rooted in complaints that the ethnic Malay Muslim-dominated government discriminates against minorities was the largest protest in at least a decade involving ethnic Indians, the country's second-largest minority population after ethnic Chinese. The ethnic Indians are generally the most underprivileged.

``This gathering is unprecedented,'' said protest leader P. Uthayakumar. ``This is a community that can no longer tolerate discrimination.''

It was the second street protest in Kuala Lumpur this month. A Nov. 10 rally that drew thousands of people demanding electoral reforms was also broken up with similar force, but lasted only a few hours.

Street demonstrations are extremely rare among the multiple ethnic groups in Malaysia, which prides itself on its communal and political stability. The two protests indicate that Malaysians are becoming bolder about venting their frustrations publicly against a political system that concentrates power and influence in the hands of the Malay ruling elite.
The latest rally was meant to support a US$4 trillion (euro2.7 trillion) lawsuit filed in London in August by the Hindu Rights Action Force, a Malaysian rights group, demanding that Britain compensate Malaysian Indians for bringing their ancestors to the country as ``indentured laborers'' and exploiting them. Ethnic Indians say discrimination continued after Malaysia's independence in 1957 because of an affirmative action policy favoring Malays, who comprise about 60 percent of the country's 27 million people.

Samy Vellu, the government's top ethnic Indian politician, denounced Sunday's protest as ``an opposition ploy to smear the government's image.'' Malaysia has maintained racial peace since 1969, when some 200 people were killed in riots sparked by Malay frustration over the economic clout of Chinese. The violence spurred the creation of programs that give Malays privileges in government jobs, contracts and education.

Associated Press reporter Sean Yoong contributed to this report. (Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

References and notes:

• Write-up on The Hindu based on Wikipedia entry of The Hindu available at the URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hindu
  
• The Hindu report on the Malaysia rally and police action is available at the URL: http://www.hindu.com/2007/11/26/stories/2007112656300100.htm
  
• The Reuters report on the event:
  http://www.reuters.com/article/newsMaps/idUSKLR16504820071125
  
• The BBC report on the event:
  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7111646.stm
  
• The CNN report on the event:
  http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/11/25/malaysia.protests/
  
• Telegraph report on the event:
  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/26/wmalaysia126.xml
  
• [All URL as accessed on 26-Nov-2007 Indian time: 3:00 pm]
  

Romila Thapar’s Double standards and Half Truths

This is with reference to Prof. Romila Thapar’s article ‘Where fusion cannot work — faith and history’ (The Hindu, 28-Sep-2007).

While every scholar is entitled to his or her own views on the historicity of Sri Rama it comes as a shock to see a scholar of Prof. Thapar’s repute set double standards for Indic Divinities, as against those from other traditions - particularly non-Indic and/or Abrahamic. For example, she states that in the case of Sri Rama, the variant versions of the story is, in itself, not evidence of historicity and that if the variants contradict each other as they do, this may create problems for those who believe that only one of the variants is true.

In the case of Jesus narrative variants have been ruthlessly suppressed. Now scholars are discovering ancient narratives which contradict synoptic Gospels at every major point – like the family life of Jesus, role of Magdalene, the supposed betrayal of Judas etc. Even the accepted Synoptic Gospels present invented genealogies of Jesus (which have no common names for 14 generations) because the authors wanted Jesus to be hereditarily linked to David To crown it all no external sources have been discovered to date outside the body of Gospel literature (both Gnostic and Synoptic) to ascertain the historicity of Jesus. Even Dead Sea scrolls are silent on Jesus. Also unlike in the case of Sri Rama where His actions turned out to be trend setting examples in the mythological and devotional literature of South Asia, every supernatural act ascribed to Jesus in Gospels had their precursor in the past mythological Divines. From turning water to wine (Dinoysius) to his resurrection from the death (Tammuz), Jesus had mythological ancestors popular in Judaeo-Roman-Hellenistic traditions. Yet our learned professor has no problem in declaring the historicity of Jesus whom she also qualifies as Christ – the Anointed one – a Christian claim based on what many Hebrew scholars consider as misinterpretation of verses from Jewish scripture.

Coming back to the claims on the historicity of Ramayana, most historians who have no ideological vested interests accept the historical kernel of Ramayana. They may differ and debate on the details. Thus Dr.B.B.Lal the eminent archaeologist who excavated the Ramayana sites concludes that Ramayana is not a figment of imagination but based on historical events which were popular in the memory of the people which Valmiki composed into an epic narrative. Dr.B.B.Lal dates Ramayana events to 700 BCE. The unfortunate tendency of certain historians who put ideological vested interests over objective scholarship resulting in suppressing the conclusions arrived at by Dr.B.B.Lal after the Ramayana project, being presented in the ICHR meeting of 1988 has been explained by the eminent archaeologist in the very pages of ‘The Hindu’ itself (‘Facts of history cannot be altered’, July 1 1988).

Hence when ASI stated that Ramayana has no historical basis it was simply indulging in ‘suppressio veri suggestio falsi’ game.

That Ramayana in its general outline known today, was also known to people of India even prior to Sage Valmiki, is well attested by varied literary evidence from across the nation. particularly from the South. Like for example from ancient Tamil Sangham literature which mentions an event related to Rama that goes unmentioned in Valmiki wherein Sri Rama plans the military strategy under a banyan tree in Rameshwaram and the birds whose sounds disturb the meeting fall silent as Sri Rama commands them to be quiet (Aham: 70:15).

The mention of Rama here makes it clear that the lore of Sri Rama coming to the south and winning in the battle against the demon of Lanka is not something that originated in the North and later spread over to the South but that was as strong in the south Indian tradition as it was in north India even during the period historians usually attribute to Sage Valmiki Ramayana, that is around 200 BCE.

This is also roughly the time attributed to Sangham literature. In fact the Sangham mention of Sri Rama also hints at Rama’s divinity as his words not only had a supernatural effect on the birds but also the lines speak of his words as being scriptural in nature (‘Aru Marai’'வெல்போர் இராமன் அருமறை').

Even stranger is the claims that Prof.Thapar makes about the Buddhist Jataka variant of Ramayana that it does not mention the abduction of Sita or Sri Rama’s war with the demons. Historian Himansu Bhusan Sarkar explains this particular aspect of the Jataka tale variant of Ramayana thus:

“The non-mention of southern topics does not, of course, prove anything., as the Jataka-stories were framed only with limited objectives and had no compulsive motive to narrate the whole story but by the third century AD the story had assumed its present features, because, in a Chinese collection of some Jataka stories which were translated by a Sogdiana monk between AD 222 and 280, the episodes of Rama’s exile , the abduction of Sita by Ravana, the duel of the latter with Jatayu, of Sugriva and Vali, the construction of a bridge to Lanka, the ordeal of Sita have been drawn in outline.” (pp 103-104, The Ramayana traditions in Asia, Sahitya Akademi 1989)

Equally amusing is her claim about Jain Ramayana ‘variants’ as she calls them. From Puama-cariya of Vimala-Suri (end of 3rd century CE) to Rama Charitha of Devavijaya-ganin (1596 CE) one finds the theme of Rama-Ravana battle in Jain Ramayans. Also Prof. Thapar claims in her article that in the Jain version ‘Ravana is not a demonic villain but a human counter-hero’ But in Puama-cariya considered the earliest Jain version of Ramayan, Ravana is mentioned as leader of demons (PC: 3:9) More relevant to the issue in hand, the Jain Ramayan specifically mentions the Vanaras building a bridge to Sri Lanka. (PC: 3 v.12)

Another great Jain monk who hails from the southernmost part of India, Saint Illango in his immortal Tamil epic ‘Chilapathikaram’ (usually dated as 200-300 CE) compares the leaving of his epic hero Kovalan of his hometown to Sri Rama leaving Ayodhya.

And in the epic he mentions how Tamil shepherds were singing and dancing the praise of Sri Rama destroying the demons of ancient Lanka and in through their song the Jain monk praises Sri Rama as the incarnation of Maha Vishnu and laments that the ears that hear not His praise exist in vain.

Clearly by 200 CE if not before, Sri Rama going to Lanka and killing the demons there and veneration of Sri Rama as the avatar of Vishnu have all become part of the Tamil devotional tradition and day to day culture.

There is also the strong possibility that many popular devotional aspects of Rama tradition –like the squirrel helping the Sethu Bandhan which finds first literary mention in Thirumalai: 27 - that are found throughout India may have originated and spread from South India itself.

Clearly it is not only ASI which has been playing the ‘suppressio veri suggestio falsi’ game.

That said one cannot but agree with Prof. Thapar when she states that a search for a non-existent man-made structure takes away from the imaginative leap of a fantasy and denies the fascinating layering of folk-lore. While rejecting the literalists, one is at a loss to understand why Prof. Romila Thapar fails to see the cultural dimension of the natural formation that inspired the imaginative leap of not just fantasy but also devotional literature of a nation and the fascinating layering of the same by folk-lore and transforming it into one of the centres of national integration as acknowledged by none other than Mahatma Gandhi in his ‘Hind Swaraj’. In India, the whole national integration has been achieved through immersing the nation in such sacred geographic features associated with epic narrative, mythology, devotional literature and folklore.

With regard to the objection that Ram Sethu should not be destroyed not only for ecological and economic reasons but also because it has a cultural and spiritual dimension in the heritage of India, Prof. Romila Thapar asks rhetorically: “Has the idea become the heritage?” Perhaps our JNU Professor who is also, U.S. Library of Congress appointed first holder of the Kluge Chair, has been answered long back by a half-naked Fakir when he stated in such simple but forceful words thus:

“What do you think could have been the intention of those farseeing ancestors of ours who established Setubandha (Rameshwar) in the South, Jagannath in the East and Hardwar in the North as places of pilgrimage? You will admit they were no fools. They knew that worship of God could have been performed just as well at home. They taught us that those whose hearts were aglow with righteousness had the Ganges in their own homes. But they saw that India was one undivided land so made by nature. They, therefore, argued that it must be one nation. Arguing thus, they established holy places in various parts of India, and fired the people with an idea of nationality in a manner unknown in other parts of the world.” (Hind Swaraj, Chapter 9)