A portent of hard times for the foreign media to report freely on India, or a long overdue reaction to distorted portrayals of India? Whichever it is, the warning signals for the Delhi-based foreign media have begun to flash.
It might have been all of five years ago, but the memory of both Indian and foreign journalists of the beatings they received while covering the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya remain fresh. "I do not know whether it was the RSS or the kar sevaks who were hitting us with lathis and breaking our cameras, but I do remember clearly that the policemen were doing all they could to avoid helping us—some of them even asked us to give the mob our cameras and films," remembers Baldev, photographer for Sygma, a French agency.
As the debates about the extent of influence the RSS wields over the BJP-led government gather momentum, so do concerns about the interference of the saffron crowd in various spheres of daily life. The reason for the current sensitivity is what appears to be a highly organised campaign to flood Western newspaper offices with official complaints about India-based correspondents.
When The Times Delhi correspondent Chris Thomas filed his regular story on Indian politics on February 27 this year, he was unprepared for what followed. An RSS supporter from Birmingham filed a case with the Press Complaints Commission in London accusing Thomas of having called the killer of Mahatma Gandhi an RSS man although Thomas had only referred to Nathuram Godse as a 'supporter' of the organisation—an oft-used description. Although The Times has decided to back their correspondent, a Commission decision that does not go in favour of the accused can cost the writer his job.
And when The Guardian newspaper's Suzanne Goldenberg used the words "Hindu extremists" and "fanatics" in articles about the RSS and the BJP, the UK president of the Overseas Friends of the BJP reacted sharply by saying that she was either ignorant of the facts or there was "a more sinister and deliberate campaign of disinformation afoot". One reader accuses her of a "superiority complex" which echoes "outdated sentiments of the duty to civilise other nations". Another calls her writing "gobbledegook"! According to Goldenberg, while she gets lots of such mail at the newspaper's head office, only a few of these letters are passed on to New Delhi. "Usually, when the letters are purely abusive, the Guardian just throws them away," she said.
"They (the correspondents) manage to write interesting stories about complicated issues in developing countries, but there is an underlying laziness when they write about a big complicated country like India," says Dr Gautam Sen, lecturer in international relations at the London School of Economics, who has recently taken over as spokesman of the Overseas Friends of the BJP in London.
In another case, the Overseas Friends of the BJP in New York City have threatened to file a defamation suit against Newsweek for calling members of the BJP "Muslim-bashing thugs", who are threatening "to make life tougher for foreign investors" and who "plan to arm India with nuclear weapons", unless the magazine publishes a correction for the 'deliberate misinformation'.
The saffron offensive, however, does not stop there. Late night telephone calls to individual correspondents have become an unpleasant fact of life. One British journalist talked about how she had begun getting frequent calls at 3 am from someone who wished to discuss one of her articles. "I had called him (Nathuram Godse) an RSS activist in my copy, but the sub had changed it to RSS member," she claimed.
The result: another case filed with the Press Complaints Commission. Although the case was later thrown out, the newspaper got an avalanche of mail. One letter alone had 168 signatures. Her story, said a reader, was "scurrilous", and "written in the style of the The Sun (a British tabloid)". "You see, the whole Gandhi assassination thing was the biggest public relations disaster for the RSS," explains the correspondent.
The BJP says that the stories often misrepresent reality. "These articles are often incorrect and full of innuendo," claims Sudheendra Kulkarni, of the BJP's media press cell, New Delhi. "The Western press as a whole is still not familiar with the BJP...and unfortunately they have not done their homework properly," he says.Kulkarni believes that foreign reportage is ridden with "preconceptions and prejudice" but has faith that all this will change now that the BJP is in the government.
REFERENCES to the nexus between the RSS and Nathuram Godse is a touchy subject and gives the letters to the editor a monotonous sameness. "While many of the top functionaries of the BJP may have come from the RSS, they don't take any dictates from the RSS—but the foreign press makes it out to be like it is one and the same," complains Kulkarni.
Criticism of journalists is nothing new. Although it has to be said that no other Indian political party complains about foreign press coverage to the same extent as supporters of the BJP. The last batch of complaints went out over a BBC sitcom entitled Good Gracious Me which poked fun at the 'havan' ceremony by substituting bits of melted cheese and special herbs for the traditional ghee and described how bits of bread and meat could be dipped into this concoction. Rajinder Chopra, who heads the Hindu Cultural Society in north London, had complained to the Broadcasting Standards Authority that this episode "shocked British Hindus".
Hundreds of copies of the complaint went out to the Broadcasting Standards Authority from Birmingham, Leicester, Croyden, Wembley, Ilford, Manchester, Oxford and other places. "Of course we wrote to our friends and asked them to complain," said Chopra. "And why not?" Most members of the Hindu Cultural Society, he said, were supporters of the BJP.
John Stackhouse of the Toronto Globe and Mail says his newspaper has received identically worded letters through the Internet when he writes articles critical of the Indian scene. "Which makes me sure that these people are very organised." One foreign correspondent said that he was surprised to find that his stories were being selectively faxed to RSS members in Delhi from one of the Indian missions abroad. "Little does the Indian taxpayer know how his money is being used," he said.
Some foreign reporters openly express doubts about their future under a BJP government. "The difficulty will come when things go wrong—when reports about the future of foreign investment is not favourable to India—then you will find, like all conservative governments, they will blame the messenger," says the German correspondent for Stuttgarter Zeitung, Willi Germund.
The BJP lobby's anger at what they see as misrepresentation in the foreign press has been exacerbated by what is claimed to be an effort to censor justifiable complaints. According to Dr Sen, not a single letter written by them about any incorrect or unfair report has ever been published in the British papers. That, he said, included letters over obvious errors like picture captions describing Vajpayee as L.K. Advani.
But other letter writing campaigns have had some success. A senior executive of Zee TV, London, apologised following letters of protest and a demonstration over a portrayal of Krishna in a programme. The Guardian too published a light regret after a letter campaign over a report which suggested that Hinduism promotes gambling. Well, after the Guardian episode Chopra phoned in during a live radio interview with the author of that report on another subject. "You remember me, you apolo-gised to me over your report," Chopra said. "Now don't do it again."
