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Covering terrorism in India

July 12, 2006 9:15 AM

ABC News Now anchor Hari Sreenivasan blogs:

If you watched some of the cable networks in the United States, you might think that terrorism just reached India -- that somehow post 9/11, post Madrid, post London, India was getting a wakeup call. It reminds me of the old adage if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, did it really fall.

Do you remember hearing about the Diwali blasts in India last year that killed almost 60 people, how about the time terrorists attacked the Indian parliament and engaged police in a gun battle, or how about when a bomb went off at the stock exchange at the city then known as Bombay? Then again, if you listened to half the newscasts in the U.S. or even saw an Associated Press wire story, you'd notice many of the stories still calling the city by the old name. The name is Mumbai by the way - and it has been for 11 YEARS!

While the covers of Foreign Affairs, The Economist, even TIME magazine have begun to put the hackneyed "call center to the world" story to bed and begun featuring India as an up and coming global power, people don't read too much beyond that headline. There has been a significant disparity in the coverage that India gets for its economic prowess and the security challenges it faces.

Leave it to Sumit Ganguly, the Tagore Professor of Indian Cultures and Civilizations, and a Professor of Political Science at Indiana University to put it bluntly "India is as much a victim of terror as Madrid, or London, the world can't pretend that brown lives are not worth the same, terrorism is seamless regardless of where it happens".

India is a country that has managed in fits and starts to be engaged in an incredibly fragile peace process with Pakistan -- two countries cleaved apart on a drafting table as a side dish that came with independence as the main course almost 60 years ago. There have been 3 bloody wars between neighbors after a partition which caused as much heart ache and bloodshed as any family torn apart in the West Bank or the Gaza strip -- over a spectacular piece of earth named Kashmir, but that sort of history and context isn't part of the diet of information served or consumed here.

Politics are no different in India -- except that the largest democracy on earth deals with more than a billion people instead of the 300 million which the most famous democracy on earth tries to represent. The prime minister has spent a tremendous amount of his political capital on continuing to engage Pakistan in peace talks; the explosions on the rails provide a fine opportunity now for politicians in Mumbai and other parts of the country to take advantage of this tragedy to support hawkish agendas.

Business can be just as punishing as politics. The stock markets have already assigned Indian owned companies traded on global exchanges more than a slap on the wrist. Call it the terror or security premium, but now bombs in Mumbai affect bank books in Minneapolis.

Ultimately not learning about what matters to India, or the politics of South Asia will cost Americans. A democratic nuclear power sandwiched between two non-democratic nuclear neighbors, with a revved up economic engine, and a track record for dealing with terrorism in close quarters for decades, still probably won't get the sort of coverage you saw from Madrid and London.

July 12, 2006 | Permalink | Share | User Comments (2)

User Comments

Posted by: Rachel | Jul 13, 2006 6:20:58 PM

Posted by: Srilata | Jul 19, 2006 2:29:50 PM

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