Mumbai Bias

Visiting the sites of recent tragedy, one is always struck by how life goes on. In Mumbai, train passengers wait in crowds at the station, couples walk hand-in-hand on Juhu Beach, rickshaws honk incessantly and refuse to acknowledge lane indicators, customers haggle with street vendors, and the smell of spices and dust fills the air. In a word, all is normal.

Reading the Mumbai papers, however, one gets an entirely different impression. The press has filled in the gaps in the city’s understanding of its recent attacks with a narrative of imminent danger and Pakistani aggression. This coverage, tinged with bloodlust, is at fever pitch—and it is incessant.

Announcing on the Times Now news channel that Pakistan was refusing to acknowledge captured terrorist Ajmal Amir Kasab, for example, a reporter stated with grave certainty that “in their heart of hearts” Pakistanis knew Kasab belonged to them. And despite government officials’ heated debate over whether to issue an ultimatum to Pakistan, many journalists raised the war whoop when Pakistan responded by redeploying troops to the Indian border.

This behavior has not gone uncriticized. In Mumbai’s Daily News and Analysis newspaper, Media Development Foundation chairman Sashi Kumar chastised television journalists, asking: “Did they really have to cry themselves hoarse about the enemy at the gate? They were all sabre-rattling in the direction of Islamabad.” Or as the New York Times put it, more delicately, the Mumbai attacks have “prompted bellicose outbursts from the Indian news media” against their Muslim neighbor.

Media hawkishness is nothing new, of course. There are more than passing parallels between Indian news coverage of the Mumbai attacks and American coverage from the rubble of the World Trade Center. In India, the attack is already referred to as 26/11, mirroring America’s 9/11. And the rhetoric as a whole is eerily similar to that used by the American media preceding the invasion of Iraq.

The link doesn’t completely hold, though, and that’s because an Indian newspaper has a slightly different notion of what an article should be than an American newspaper does. Reading a piece in The Times of India (the world’s top-selling English language broadsheet, with a circulation of two and a half million) is like listening to a very informed, very opinionated friend chattering into your ear. Reporting is a chummy business—and a biased one. Take, for instance, the lede of a recent Times top story: “Pakistan on Friday was back to its intransigent ways, batting aside India’s demand for action against perpetrators of 26/11 and putting paid to any hope that it might bend under international pressure.”

That this sort of writing—which the Washington Post might run in a controversial op-ed—is regularly published on Indian front pages with nary a raised eyebrow, certainly makes for more interesting media. Even Americans used to Bush’s chats with Bono might be shocked by the spectacular and celebrity-saturated character of Indian journalism. Opinionated, snappily-written news stories are a central part of this culture.

But this very chumminess, this congenial and unabashed insertion of a viewpoint, is what makes the Indian media’s warmongering ways so risky. The ideal of true journalistic objectivity, fact firmly squared off from value judgments, may be just that—idealistic. But newspaper readers in India and elsewhere deserve an account of the attacks that hasn’t already settled on Pakistan’s complicit “intransigence.” Anything more opinionated should be left to the editorialists.

These considerations aren’t just nitpicking. In the immediate wake of the attacks in Mumbai, the first reaction was grief, accompanied by the pride of a nation that would not be forced to its knees by a few rogue terrorists. The second, from intelligent pundits who remembered the horrors of previous wars, was relief: “At least India’s not seeking revenge on Pakistan.” That relief may have come too soon. Certainly few things can pull together such a huge and diverse nation like tragedy. But surely there are better ways to unite it than to call for blood.



Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House.