New Delhi: Freedom of expression is “valuable, inalienable” and no country in the world has respected this more than India, but there is a need to disallow “free fall of doctored narratives to run down our growth story”, Vice-President Jadgeep Dhankhar said on Wednesday, a day after the Income Tax department carried out surveys in BBC offices in Delhi and Mumbai and a BJP spokesperson targeted the media company for its “venomous” and biased coverage of India.
To be sure, the Vice-President did not name any media company.
“… If India is on the rise, sinister designs are there to set afloat a narrative by free fall of information, we have to be alert. This is another way of invasion. We have to boldly neutralise it. We have to instil in us [a] spirit of nationalism,” Dhankhar told a batch of Indian Information Services probationers at his residence.
“We no longer have the luxury of delayed response,” he told the information service officers who act as government’s spokespersons.
Referring to the need to counter “doctored narratives”, the VP cited the example of narratives being spun over India’s handling of the Covid pandemic and the vaccines that were made here. “In the last decade or so, a narrative was set forth by a global news house that seeks to lay claim on its reputation, and the narrative was that someone was possessed of weapons of mass destruction and therefore, there is a just cause in favour of humanity to take call… Things happened, no weapons of mass destruction…” he said about the Iraq war in a likely reference to the New York Times, which carried several reports on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, prior to its invasion by western forces that found none. NYT subsequently admitted its mistake in a note to readers, saying that it found “a numer of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been”.
The VP added: “Everything can be whitewashed and can go down the drain if people are not vigilant against such tendency.” He also said when reputations are examined, you will find that they are not firm. “Those reputations have failed humanity in recent years.”
The Union government last month barred social media platforms from sharing posts in connection with a BBC documentary on the 2002 Gujarat riots, claiming that it was “propaganda” and a reflection of “bias and a colonial mindset”. The two-part documentary was based on a hitherto unpublished report of the British foreign office on the riots which happened when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was chief minister of the state. Several courts, including the Supreme Court, have said there is no evidence of Modi’s involvement in the riots.
Describing India as a country that is “on the rise as never before”, Dhankhar said if the information mechanism is not strong, the messaging can be muddled. “Just imagine an ecosystem of growth, affirmative government policies, that have enabled every young mind to fully exploit his and her potentials, there are no constraints. India, therefore, is rightly reckoned in the world as the land of opportunity and land of investment. But all this can be muddied, if our information mechanism is not strong.”
Comparing the inflow of information to the practice of dumping, Dhankhar said there is a tendency to believe information that comes from abroad without analysing it. “… A vicious tendency has grown particularly amongst so- called intelligentsia in our country that anything coming from outside is sanctified, elevated coming from minds that have to be respected. We have to question it.”
He went on to say: “How come Indian mind immediately absorbs something, does not analyse — what if you compare vicious mechanism designed to afloat a narrative to run down the growth story of this country, all in the name of freedom of expression.”