India’s Narendra Modi pushes his narrative via propaganda
12:38AM May 17, 2021
India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Picture: AFP
Struck by the global opprobrium of its ruinous bungling of India’s fight against the coronavirus, the Narendra Modi government is frantically making all attempts at salvaging its image, both national and internationally.
The government has been especially affronted by a report in The Australian, republished from the UK’s The Times and headlined ‘Modi leads India out of lockdown and into a Covid apocalypse’, and by criticism by London’s Guardian newspaper.
The Australian article opened with: “Arrogance, hyper-nationalism and bureaucratic incompetence have combined to create a crisis of epic proportions in India, with its crowd-loving PM basking while citizens suffocate. This is the story of how it all went so terribly wrong.”
While the deeply image-conscious government has scrupulously sanitised domestic coverage of events by subjugating India’s mainstream media, it finds it cannot similarly tame coverage in Australia, and elsewhere.
For a government that craves universal endorsement, it has been particularly chastened by a reproving foreign press and international agencies like the UN Human Rights Office, and also by donor countries’ preference to channel medical and financial aid to India through agencies other than the Indian government.
Guided by the adage “good offence is the best defence”, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) IT Cell and assorted demagogues resuscitated two similar sounding English-language newspapers, namely, “The Daily Guardian” and “The Australia Today”, to push their narrative.
Not much is known of The Australia Today. Its Indian origin founder and editor-in-chief Jitarth Jai Bharadwaj gives its location as “Greater Melbourne Area” on his LinkedIn profile, where he describes himself as an “Australia-India Collaborations & Partnerships Adviser” as well as an “experienced producer with a demonstrated history of working in the PR and communications industry”.
The Daily Guardian was started a year ago and is the sibling of the weekly The Sunday Guardian, launched a decade earlier. Both are part of a north Indian publishing group, founded by journalist and former BJP minister MJ Akbar and since 2012 owned by iTV Network, the proprietor of which is BJP acolyte Kartikeya Sharma.
On the emergence of the two newspapers, opposition Congress party MP, Shashi Tharoor, tweeted: “‘Daily Guardian’ & ‘The Australia Today’ are little more than parody websites to spout BJP propaganda, disguised as international media. BJP reduced Indian media to a parody, but here the worm has turned!”
People are also ridiculing the government that while deaths are taking place as much from COVID-19 as from shortages of medical oxygen, vaccines, lifesaving drugs and hospital beds, it is sermonising to the public to be “positive” as “Prime Minister Modi was leading from the front”.
As both The Daily Guardian and The Australia Today have scant readership in India, and perhaps in Australia as well, it was left to BJP ministers and workers to retweet reports they carried that were unabashedly approving of Modi and his government.
On May 12, a report in The Australia Today read: “Besides COVID-19, India is also fighting with vulture journalists, who are spreading more panic and despair than pandemic”.
Sarosh Bana is the executive editor of Business India, based in Mumbai, India.
12:38AM May 17, 2021
Struck by the global opprobrium of its ruinous bungling of India’s fight against the coronavirus, the Narendra Modi government is frantically making all attempts at salvaging its image, both national and internationally.
The government has been especially affronted by a report in The Australian, republished from the UK’s The Times and headlined ‘Modi leads India out of lockdown and into a Covid apocalypse’, and by criticism by London’s Guardian newspaper.
The Australian article opened with: “Arrogance, hyper-nationalism and bureaucratic incompetence have combined to create a crisis of epic proportions in India, with its crowd-loving PM basking while citizens suffocate. This is the story of how it all went so terribly wrong.”
While the deeply image-conscious government has scrupulously sanitised domestic coverage of events by subjugating India’s mainstream media, it finds it cannot similarly tame coverage in Australia, and elsewhere.
For a government that craves universal endorsement, it has been particularly chastened by a reproving foreign press and international agencies like the UN Human Rights Office, and also by donor countries’ preference to channel medical and financial aid to India through agencies other than the Indian government.
Guided by the adage “good offence is the best defence”, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) IT Cell and assorted demagogues resuscitated two similar sounding English-language newspapers, namely, “The Daily Guardian” and “The Australia Today”, to push their narrative.
Not much is known of The Australia Today. Its Indian origin founder and editor-in-chief Jitarth Jai Bharadwaj gives its location as “Greater Melbourne Area” on his LinkedIn profile, where he describes himself as an “Australia-India Collaborations & Partnerships Adviser” as well as an “experienced producer with a demonstrated history of working in the PR and communications industry”.
The Daily Guardian was started a year ago and is the sibling of the weekly The Sunday Guardian, launched a decade earlier. Both are part of a north Indian publishing group, founded by journalist and former BJP minister MJ Akbar and since 2012 owned by iTV Network, the proprietor of which is BJP acolyte Kartikeya Sharma.
On the emergence of the two newspapers, opposition Congress party MP, Shashi Tharoor, tweeted: “‘Daily Guardian’ & ‘The Australia Today’ are little more than parody websites to spout BJP propaganda, disguised as international media. BJP reduced Indian media to a parody, but here the worm has turned!”
People are also ridiculing the government that while deaths are taking place as much from COVID-19 as from shortages of medical oxygen, vaccines, lifesaving drugs and hospital beds, it is sermonising to the public to be “positive” as “Prime Minister Modi was leading from the front”.
As both The Daily Guardian and The Australia Today have scant readership in India, and perhaps in Australia as well, it was left to BJP ministers and workers to retweet reports they carried that were unabashedly approving of Modi and his government.
On May 12, a report in The Australia Today read: “Besides COVID-19, India is also fighting with vulture journalists, who are spreading more panic and despair than pandemic”.
Sarosh Bana is the executive editor of Business India, based in Mumbai, India.
