Did You Just Call the Indian Prime Minister the “N” Word, Sir?

Racism and Hinduphobia in Western News Media Needs to End, NOW! Vamsee Juluri Follow May 23, 2019 · 6 min read

The Title of Foreign Policy’s Story on Prime Minister Modi (date corrected- 2014).

Does this phrase sound distasteful: Catch a Barack, by the toe? Of course, it does. It’s disgustingly racist. Vilely and violently racist. No decent person would utter it, nor would a respected newspaper or journal go within a mile of it. That’s the way it should be.

Now imagine the phrase Catch a Modi, by the toe. Does it or does it not sound vilely, violently, appallingly racist to you? If it does, rest assured your conscience and your intellect are at work. If it doesn’t sound that way, and if you are a person who likes to think of himself or herself as liberal, progressive, and anti-racist; stop and ask yourself why. Your integrity as a human being, and your future as a human being who is indeed truly anti-racist, depend on it.

If you are White, and you are an editor of a major journal respected around the world, would you or would you not find it unimaginable to publish something hinting that the way your publication really sees a man of color, a man of a non-Western, formerly colonized faith, a man of a poor, marginalized social caste background, and a man who has just now and for the second time in just five years won a massive mandate from his people, is simply as an “N” you gotta catch by the toe?

Shame on you, Foreign Policy. SHAME.

Eeny-Meeny-Miney-Mo-di? Really? Is that the best you can do, and for an article by a bright young foreign affairs expert and son of a respected former Indian foreign secretary at that?

I don’t know if Foreign Policy will apologize for this, but an apology is due I think, not just to Prime Minister Modi, but to all Indian people, and indeed, to all people of color. You do not go poking into the world of a postcolonial democracy with your preconceived condescension, arrogance, and turgid privilege like that. Not any more sir, not since the last colonizer was sent packing from Africa and the Indies a century ago.

The 2019 Indian election’s significance quite frankly is not simply about a contestation over the meaning of India (“Secular v. Hindutva” as the foreign propaganda paradigm claimed ad nauseum, or “Inclusive Development and Nationalism v. Corrupt Nepotism and Hinduphobia” as Modi’s own actions and words seem to suggest). Given the grating, incessant, menacingly desperate manner in which Western news media hammered home fear and falsehood for months and years now, it seems like the 2019 Indian election is going to play out really on a global scale as a mandate against global colonial racism. I don’t have to exaggerate or make this up. It’s just a fact that the way some poor women and men stood in line and voted in some small village or farm in far-away India for a man they liked is bringing out the toxic, innate, seething racism inside people working in privileged institutions in first-world metropolitan centers like Washington, New York, and London.

When you think about it, it’s really incredible. A political figure in India slogs for five years promising toilets and roads and such (and even risks alienating his own base by saying he prefers toilets to temples), as grounded, local, pro-poor and un“divisive” as it gets (though the NYT did offer a theory once about how Hindus and Muslims take their sh_ts differently, and that of course led to Hindus spreading disease towards Muslims etc.), and virtually the only thing that Western news media find to say about him is that he’s a divider, and that he’s using “bombs” to cover up his failings? Yes, that was the claim in Bloomberg one day ago! What does it matter that the reference was actually to his having talked about a bomb attack on Indian troops by Pakistani militants? As long as you have a target you can stick with the word “bomb” it is fine, apparently.

And of course, the N word.

I have been studying the media depiction of Hindus, Hinduism, and Hindu public figures like Narendra Modi and America’s own Tulsi Gabbard in recent times very closely. What is obvious, first of all, is that there has been a near complete abandoning of journalistic objectivity and integrity here. Much of the coverage of the Indian elections in recent months in the New York Times, BBC, and even in the once slightly more measured National Public Radio has been one-sided, evasive, and propagandistic to the extent of looking like a regime-change marketing campaign rather than journalism; vital facts omitted, terms mistranslated, whole groups of people silenced or demonized as “mobs.”

Weary Indian citizens have coined a term for all of this: “paid media” (there are worse terms too, but as a media professor, I still have respect, and hope, for my object of study). I do not want to insinuate that this is what is happening, nor do I propose conspiracy theories. But if one were to look objectively at what the US/UK news media has been doing in their approach to Hindus, it would fit the definition of every kind of media racism, bigotry and unprofessionalism one can think of.

The root problem, as I have written in the context of the smearing of Tulsi Gabbard recently, is that Western academia and media have been in entrenched denial of their Hinduphobic racism, which they pretend is not racism at all, but some imagined hurt feelings espoused by white “Aryan” descendants pretending to be colored and calling themselves “Hindus” ‘cos there was no Hindus before the British coined that word. This systemic, persistent, illogical, outdated, and utterly preposterous pretense of White first-world elites calling people of color “Hindu Nationalists,” and “Nazis” and such, while cheerfully enabled by the participation of nominally brown collaborators in said privileged ignorance (or Tarantinoesque Stephenses), is precisely the sort of neocolonial oppression that people in India are voting to reject again and again.

Stephen says it’s okay to call Hindus the N word, but it’s not.

The one billion dark skinned dark haired dark eyed women, men and children of India of whatever caste or community do NOT need your nutty theories and crooked politics to save them. They have offered that mandate to Narendra Modi, and whatever hope, decency, and sense of cultural and ethical representation he stands for to them. You can disagree with it, or debate it, but what you cannot do is keep going around and blabbering racist garbage like the planet still exists for you to do a Columbus or Vasco da Gama on it (and we’re still cleaning up the trash on it from your last visitation and the mad idea of “progress” it left us with).

It’s incredible that even in the midst of a heated campaign, Narendra Modi never called his opponents anything remotely close to the racist N word. But you racist lot in Washington and London media, with no interest in your profession, reputation, or decency, and no interest in learning from reality and its expression in the voices of the silent billions of the planet, you lot just went and did that to him. And to all who have borne the pain of that word you have evoked for him. Unbelievable!

Apologize.