The world media as amplifier of the secularist version

In spite of a very aggressive campaign of lies by a few spearheads of "secularism", the true story was in the public domain for anyone with the curiosity to find out.  Yet, the international media's reporting on the matter consisted exclusively in copying the most mendacious version.  The Reuters despatch for 11 June 2003 is titled: "Dig finds no sign of temple at Indian holy site".  More than 90% of the text rehashes the story of riots and other incidents that have punctuated the dispute.  What little it says about the new findings, is this: "A three-month excavation has found no evidence yet to back nationalist claims of a Hindu temple under the ruins of a mosque in northern India (*) The state-run Archaeological Survey of India has submitted an interim report saying digging so far at the site in Ayodhya town had 'not found remains of any structure that remotely resembles a temple', a source at the Survey said on Wednesday." 

Note that the actual report is not quoted, merely what "a source" at the ASI has claimed about it.  Note also the slanted phrase about "nationalist claims of a Hindu temple", as if there were anything typically nationalist about acknowledging historical facts.  The existence of that temple had been a matter of consensus among Muslims, Europeans and Hindus, both nationalist and anti-nationalist, until the JNU professors issued their fatwa to disregard the evidence and deny history.  Note also that no mention is made of the wealth of evidence extant before the radar scanning and the recent diggings: a fine example of how the public is led by the nose into seeing only a very small selected part of the matter rather than the full perspective which one is entitled to expect from quality media.

And this is BBC News on 11 June 2003: "'No sign' of Ayodhya temple".  Here again, no information from the horse's mouth, only from secondary sources: "There have been widespread reports across the Indian media that the exacavation of a disputed holy site in India has produced no evidence of a Hindu temple, according to archaeologists' reports."  Again, most of the article is but a rehashing of stale riot news, and then one sentence: "In an interim report, the ASI says it has not found any evidence of ruins of a Hindu temple."  Which is a lie, as well as a misrepresentation of the stakes of the present round of digging: ruins normally stand on and above the ground level, what the archaeologists were digging for was the foundational structures.

As we move deeper into the periphery, from the Times of India via the BBC to the local papers in distant countries, we see the last references to the actual findings disappear.  By now, the report has been transformed into a morality tale, with the light-bringing secularists exposing the dark lies of the monstrous Hindu nationalists.  In the Flemish tabloid De Morgen (12 June 2003), Asia desk editor Catherine Vuylsteke calls the fact that a temple had been forcibly replaced by a mosque "an evil fairy-tale".  And this is her version of the news: "The temple, it turned out yesterday, is a phantom.  For three months, experts have dug for traces of it, all in vain.  By the end of the month their definitive report should follow, but for now Rama's home remains unfindable.  Bad luck for the ultranationalists, who had hoped to base their next election campaign on the fairy-tale.  But they still might manage to, some fear.  Yesterday already, the first politicians expressed doubts about the archaeologists' findings.  Other Hindu leaders said, and this is even more dangerous, that the facts don't matter.  What counts is what you believe.  We now know that Rama didn't live in Ayodhya, while Allah did until 1992."

This passage is symptomatic for most of what is wrong with India reporting.  It is totally based on a source which makes no secret of its partisan involvement, indeed of its unreserved hatred for the Hindu nationalists.  But the most striking aspect of this particular instance of distorted reporting is that much of it is purely deductive: from a small core of facts, all manner of seemingly logical assumptions are added to put flesh on the bones of the poorly understood Indian situation, and these speculations are presented as fact.  Thus, it seems plausible to assume that the BJP wants to use Ayodhya in its elections campaigns, which it did in 1989 and 1991.  However, to the frustration of its more activist sympathizers, the BJP has effectively disowned the Ayodhya issue immediately after reaping the benefits in the 1991 elections (when it became the leading opposition party), and has stayed away from it in the campaigns of 1996, 1998 and 1999.  Indeed, the demolition was partly an outcry of the activists against the BJP leadership, whose participation in the ceremony they correctly saw as perfunctory and insincere.  Once the BJP came to power and proved time and again how it was in no mind to build the temple, criticism from the hardliners has only increased.  Given the infighting between temple loyalists and pragmatists, the last thing the BJP now wants is an election campaign focused on the Ayodhya issue.

Second case in point, the first politicians to express doubts about the archaeologists' findings have not been the Hindu nationalists but the Babri Masjid lobbyists.  All through the past 14 years, the secularists have always opposed archaeological research at the site, saying that this would open a "Pandora's box" of similar initiatives at the literally thousands of mosque sites where temples used to stand (and omitting to mention their fear that in Ayodhya itself, this digging was sure to prove them wrong, as it now has).  Yet, because the recent archaeological findings are falsely presented as going against the Hindu nationalist position, distant India-watchers deductively assume that the opposition against the diggings must come from the Hindu nationalists.