Selective Data On Communal Violence In India: IndiaSpend, English Media Have A Lot To Answer For

https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/selective-data-on-communal-violence-in-india-indiaspend-english-media-has-a-lot-to-answer-for

by 

Swati Goel Sharma

 - Nov 14, 2018

Recently, American daily Washington Post (WP) carried a report on its website that cites data by Indiaspend to say that "reports of religious-based hate-crime cases have spiked in India since the pro-Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi came to power in 2014". IndiaSpend tracks reports of communal violence only in English-language media and WP piece admits as much.

The WP piece isn't an evaluation of English media's reportage of communal violence pre and post Modi, but of communal violence under Modi's prime ministership itself. This is evident from their headline ('Rising hate in India') and the way it narrates select cases to back Indiaspend's conclusion that "Muslims are overwhelmingly the victims and Hindus the perpetrators of the cases reported".

The broad takeaway from the WP report thus is that under the current government, there has been a sharp rise in communal violence, which is increasing by every passing year, and it's mostly the majority Hindus attacking the minority Muslims spurred by religious hatred.

A close look at Indiaspend's data (and thus the WP report), however, reveals that it is deeply flawed and dishonest. The reasons, largely, are these:

1) For its so-called 'hate crime watch' (abbreviated HCW from now on), Indiaspend has chosen its source as the English language media. As is well documented, English media by no means provides a balanced or exhaustive enough reportage to be used for a fair, pan-India analysis. It has also beenshown that English media cherrypicks cases in which the victim-perpetrator equation suits the narratives it has woven all these years, and has disproportionate coverage of some states as compared to others. It thus fares poorly in fairness and scale compared to their regional language counterparts. Swarajya itself has detailed at least three such cases (here, here and here) but perhaps nothing establishes it better than a long-running Twitter thread by author-scientist Anand Ranganathan which has listed over 50 such instances of brazen selectivity and bias.

2) The choice of cases by Indiaspend from an already selective source shows blatant bias. As we will document below, Indiaspend has consistently picked up cases where Muslims are victims and Hindus the perpetrators, but has ignored cases where this equation changes. Such is the bias that even the high-profile Auraiya sadhu murders perpetrated by Muslim cow smugglers has been ignored.

3) Indiaspend's conclusion from its selective data, based on an already selective source, has been found to be dishonest. As we will show, there are cases in their database where names of Muslim accused have been held back to conclude that religion of perpetrator is "unknown" (Chandan Gupta case), and cases where perpetrators have been named as Hindus even when the source they cite give no such identity.

We studied Indiaspend's data for six months in 2018 namely January, February, April, May, July and August. For each month, we have compiled cases picked up by Indiaspend and compared it with cases they ignored from English media as well as cases that English media ignored but appeared in Hindi media.

(click on images to enlarge)

January

February

April

May

July

August

If selective picking of cases from English media isn’t enough, Indiaspend has left out inconvenient bits from the selected cases. For instance, for Republic Day violence in Kasganj, Indiaspend has listed three crimes. The first is about "pushing and shoving" where Indiaspend has named Hindus as perpetrators and Muslims as victims. However, their version is not only one-sided but also does not specifically mention who did the pushing and shoving and who was pushed and shoved. Where did Indiaspend get the religion of the victims and perpetrators then?

There’s more. In the episode, one Chandan Gupta was killed and one Saleem Javed was arrested within a week. More arrests, also of Muslim men, happened over the next week. But Indiaspend tracker mentioned the religion of perpetrators as "unknown" until this correspondent highlighted it on Twitter two weeks ago. They explained this miss by saying that "the religion of the alleged perpetrators was not clear initially, and the arrests were made later". But this is, least to say, surprising because in other cases, like Kathua, they have updated the details that were revealed at least three months after the crime.

Another explanation by Indiaspend, which also doesn’t quite add up, is one offered on exclusion of Auraiya sadhus murder case. As per the website, the crime doesn’t belong to their database as “smugglers are motivated by profit and not by hate”. A ridiculous assumption, given that in the alleged lynching of cow smuggler Rakbar Khan, Indiaspend hasn’t considered the possibility that villagers were motivated by love for cow or angered by loss of their cattle as an economic resource, and not hate towards Muslims. After all, even Hindus have been victims of cow vigilantism. Further, what explains Indiaspend including Junaid Khan’s murder in their database when even the court verdict says it was spurred by fight over a seat in a train compartment ?

In the same pattern, their coverage of Ram-Navmi violence in Asansol in March is skewed. Only one out of four casualties has been listed. A day prior to Sitbulla Rashidi's death (that IndiaSpend has recorded), one Chhote Yadav was killed in Ranigunj but his death has been ignored. Also, the source that Indiaspend has cited nowhere states the perpetrators to be Hindus in Sitbulla’s case.

As readers can see, Indiaspend's hate tracker is tailor-made to show Muslims as overwhelmingly the victims and Hindus overwhelmingly as the perpetrators. However, if the cases listed by Swarajya are added to their database, this equation will turn on its head. That said, Swarajya isn't making any claims on our counter data being exhaustive enough to give a fair picture of the hate crimes in India; it has been compiled only to point out serious factual flaws in the former.

Indiaspend's database is routinely cited by a number of media houses to make a comment on religious hate crimes in India. Other than Washington Post, publications like Newslaundry, The Print, Indian Express and The Quint have published a number of articles and commentaries based on this tracker. Interestingly, when this correspondent pointed out some of the above-listed omissions to author of the WP article, Annie Gowen, on social media platform Twitter, she did not respond to any of it. Instead, Gowen derogatorily called this correspondent a "troll" for asking genuine questions. This shows that publications like WP are too pleased with the narrative presented by Indiaspend to even make an attempt to address its fallacies.

Indiaspend's hate tracker follows a similar database created by Hindustan Timesunder its former editor Bobby Ghosh last year. Called Hindustan Times hate tracker, it was touted as "a national database on crimes in the name of religion, caste, race". The HT tracker, again, was found to be deeply flawed and blatantly biased as shown, among others, by Anand Ranganathan. Later when Ghosh resigned (buzz was that he was forced to resign), the tracker was said to be one of the main reasons behind it. The tracker was pulled down soon after he was replaced. However, no explanations for its bias and the quiet way in which it was pulled down, were ever given by Hindustan Times.

Explanation have now been sought by alert readers from other journalists like Barkha Dutt who recently cited the Indiaspend database in a commentary that controversially concluded that Hindus face no institutionalised discrimination and their claiming otherwise is "nonsense". Unlike Gowen, Dutt refrained from calling critics as trolls but escaped questions on flaws in Indiaspend tracker by saying she would check the analysis.

Similarly, when this correspondent asked Newslaundry's editor-in-chief Madhu Trehan about profiling of crime data based on religious profiles by so-called hate trackers, Trehan replied, "I would have to have access to the source of the data, research and investigate it to give you a serious answer. That editors pick data and stories on what they want you to believe is an old fact. Exclusion and inclusion of stories is subjective, always."

Fair point, but Trehan has not explained why Newslaundry has been routinely citing Indiaspend's data in its reports and commentaries without doing the said analysis.

It is high time media houses do that before further spreading falsehoods. Indiaspend itself has much to answer for.

(With inputs from Madhur Sharma)

Swati Goel Sharma is a senior editor at Swarajya. She tweets at @swati_gs.

Murty’s classical Indian library

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/headon/murtys-classical-indian-library/

January 22, 2015

For those of us whose Sanskrit is not up to scratch, Sheldon Pollock remains an enigmatic figure. Widely lauded as a scholar in Sanskrit, some commentators like Rajiv Malhotra, the US-based author, are harshly critical of his translations, saying they present an Anglocentric view of ancient Indian literature.

That may – or may not – be true. Western scholars of Indology have often distorted Indian religious teachings. But the fact remains that few Indian scholars translate into English the large repertoire of literature in regional Indian languages, as well as in Sanskrit, which is currently inaccessible to a wider world.

Just as the best answer to an offensive book is a book in rebuttal, the best way to counter criticism of Western Indologists is to do the painstaking, meticulous research they do and produce lucid translations as well as compelling, accurate interpretations of ancient Indian literature.

Rohan Murty (who doesn’t like being known only as NR Narayana Murthy’s son, hence the dropped ‘h’ in his surname) is the man behind the new classical library.

The Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI) plans to publish around 5 books every year for the next 100 years. In another 10 years, at least 50 and possibly 70 books, published by Harvard University Press, will be available to a global audience.

They will unearth some rare gems: Bullhe Shah’s works in Gurmukhi, the Akbarnama in Persian and Manucharitramu in Telugu.

“We are giving young Indians a choice,” says Murty. “They read Wordsworth, Shakespeare, TS Eliot. They should also be able to read Surdas and Bullhe Shah. I never had that choice when I was growing up in Bangalore.”

Pollock adds: “We want to represent the extraordinary richness of the Indian classical tradition and celebrate its variety.”

An interesting translation among the handful of books launched last week is Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women. Just as Greek and Latin literature are staple reading in Western universities, classical Indian literature of similar vintage will now be available in high quality books translated into English by distinguished Indian and international scholars.

Classical Indian literature predates much of Western literature. “India has the single most complex and continuous tradition of multi-lingual literature in the world and a lot of it is inaccessible,” says Pollock, the Murty library’s general editor. “These books have the original script as well as an English translation on the facing page. It doesn’t, as Europe thinks, start with Virgil and end with TS Eliot.”

Why would anyone object to an enterprise that excavates India’s classical literary heritage (Murty is funding the $5.2-million project as a philanthropic endeavour) and makes it available to the world? Cost is not a factor. Paperback versions of some of these translated classics will be available for as little as Rs. 225 and therefore accessible to Indian students.

The problem lies with Pollock’s interpretations: his scholarly work in Sanskrit has drawn sharp criticism. As Malhotra says: “Sheldon Pollock, one of the foremost Sanskritists of today, appears to agree with Edward Said in the need to reclaim traditions, histories, and cultures from imperialism (Said 1989: 219). He nevertheless insists that we must not forget that most of the traditions and cultures in question [India is obviously included in this] have been empires of oppression in their own right – against women and also against other domestic communities (Pollock 1993: 116).

“The Western Sanskritist, he says, feels this most acutely, given that Sanskrit was the principal discursive instrument of domination in premodern India. Thus Pollock deftly turns Said’s attack on imperialism into nonsense by insisting that the subjugated Indians are themselves imperialists, as much as the conquering Europeans.

“In Pollock’s view, the trend continues today, and Sanskrit is being continuously re-appropriated by many of the most reactionary and communalist sectors of the population (Pollock 1993: 116). Needless to say, this line of imagining invites many Indian mimics who make their careers as India-bashers in order to prove their usefulness to the Western institutions they serve.”

Be that as it may, Indian scholars need to come up with their own translated works of ancient Indian authors going back 2,000 years and render their own interpretations of these works, some in Sanskrit, some in Pali, some in Persian. If they don’t, someone else – like Pollock – will.

A liberal democracy should be able to absorb all assaults on its heritage – literary, religious, social and intellectual. Just as criticising the caste system in Hinduism is necessary, challenging regressive tenets in Islam or Christianity too is necessary.

For example, nowhere does the Quran say that the image of Prophet Mohammad should not be displayed. The Hadith, a later and secondary text, urges followers to not do so but there is certainly no Quranic invocation forbidding the prophet’s image (or indeed blasphemy).

The sooner religions become tolerant to criticism, the sooner reform will seep into them. This applies to the Hindu caste system, to Sunni extremism, to Zoroastrian close-mindedness and to medieval Christian beliefs such as miracles.

Murty’s classical Indian library, curated and edited by Pollock, may not be perfect but it is an important attempt to open a window to the literary treasures of our past.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.