Over the top

Reporting on Southasia in German prints focuses mainly on the ongoing war and conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

By Gabriele Köhler

Germany is blessed with a rich print media landscape: numerous multi-paged dailies – some of which are read across the nation – and several political weeklies. The culture is one of investigative and in-depth journalism, and readers often become followers of a particular flamboyant political commentator. As in other countries in Europe, each newspaper has its particular political slant. At the same time, the media are the platform for opinionated public discourse. For example, on divisive topics, the weekly Die Zeit has developed a format of its own: it will often publish two – as opposed to one – lengthy editorials filling its entire front page, editorials which diametrically contradict each other, arguing the pro and contra, respectively, on a particular stance – a sort of a Hegelian approach in search of the synthesis view. The sports pages have extensive editorials on the politics and economics of games. During the FIFA World Cup matches last summer, the sociology of football as a global sport, and the psychology of each match made for page-length articles before and after each game.

Overall, the focus of the print media is on domestic politics, economy and social trends – domestic mainly in the sense of Germany. Where it affects German policymaking, domestic policy discussion is led by decisions (to be) shaped in Brussels. The remaining newspaper space is shared between the US, China and the rest of the world, in that order.

So, what does Southasia look like from Germany? Is it understood as a region that, like Europe, is trying to forge a common identity? To what extent are Southasia’s path-breaking social policies – the microcredit schemes, the public works, the social security, the right to food discussions, the universal school meal programmes, the right to information, the affirmative action efforts – reflected in German prints? These policies could conceivably be of interest to Germany, seeing that it too is seeking to re-design its poverty and social assistance programmes, create jobs and incomes for the chronically unemployed and underemployed, and find ways to ensure that the 10 percent of Germany’s children who grow up under the national poverty line have a proper meal every day.

Judging by a random and unsystematic reading of selected German newspapers – such as the large dailies Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and the weekly Die Zeit, – Southasia seems to have collapsed into two war- and crisis-ravaged countries: Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Granted, Bangladesh is covered from time to time in connection with reports on the despotic work conditions in factories supplying garments to German clothing outlets. The strikes by women workers in Dhaka for fairer wages were reported extensively. India appears occasionally, mainly when there are Maoist attacks. Nepal, despite its historic challenge of building an independent, rights-based republic, has made it in German newspapers once in the past six months, only to report on Prime Minister Nepal stepping down from the government in June. Since then, no follow-up as to where the governmental or constitutional processes stand has been done. Sri Lanka – now that the horrifying war is over – does not appear to merit any reporting. Bhutan is relegated to the tourism section, featured as an idyllic destination for travellers seeking high, beautiful mountains and deep Buddhist meditation. While the political divisions and dysfunctions in the other Southasian countries are reported in some detail, Bhutan enjoys a mystique image. There is never a mention of the expulsion of Lhotsampa that began about twenty years ago.

Roots of biases and prejudices

The interest in Afghanistan is fed by the fact that Germany is politically involved and highly exposed there. The German government chaired the Bonn process after the end of the Taliban regime. German soldiers are stationed in Kundus, Afghanistan, and the current German centre-and-neoliberal coalition government, in office since autumn 2009, has had the courage to admit that there is a war going on in Afghanistan – earlier governments had defined the situation rather vaguely as a conflict. This has a lot to do with German history. After the fall of Hitler fascism and imperialism, Germany had committed to never send soldiers outside of German territory again. The Constitution was amended only a few years back, to enable German forces to become a part of NATO military interventions.

The articles on Afghanistan are (understandably) primarily concerned with the safety of German troops, and on a second plane, then with the justification of the engagement of the ISAF forces there. The airstrike in Kundus last year, when the German command called in an American fighter plane that bombed and killed many civilians, is in the news often. And the Afghan survivors of the air strike are taking the German government to court.

The Taliban movement is the second topic of the numerous pieces on Afghanistan. Its genesis: the ideological support in parts of the population. There are newspaper debates on for and against intervention in Afghanistan, and on military versus cultural and developmental engagement. There are also soul searching articles on how to reach the population.

Some of the discourse is driven by domestic security considerations. For example, Joshka Fischer, former Foreign Minister and former head of the progressive (and originally pacifist) Green Party, asked in a recent editorial whether it would be wise to pull out of Afghanistan. Wise for whom? For Germany. The article was not about how the international community might best assist the vulnerable and the poor in Afghanistan and ensure their human rights, such as their right to food, education, and employment. It was about how the “West” could assure its own safety and security.

The reporting on Pakistan in the past months has been driven by the Indus flooding disaster. There is sympathy with the ordeals of the poorest segments of the Pakistan population, struck by the horrendous flooding. But this is always paired with a critique of corruption, government mismanagement, and the fear of fundamentalism. That the Islamist NGOs were the speediest to respond to the crisis is a big worry.

Die Zeit is somewhat more diversified. These past few months have seen a serial on poverty and the middle classes in India, including the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education adopted this year. The Indian government’s effort to issue identity cards is discussed in some detail with a combination of awe at the size of the endeavour – 1.2 billion people – and the fact that Germany itself is conducting a census in 2011. Right now, this decision on census faces considerable opposition as Germans fear that the state is intruding in their private sphere, and amassing information that is none of its business. A background piece prepared by a senior member of a research institute analysed the Afghanistan challenge as one revolving around the need for development and employment.

Occasional insights

The most insightful writing on South Asia comes from Zeit correspondent Ulrich Ladurner, who is the only writer to view the region from inside and expose the biases, prejudices and self-interest of German discourse on Afghanistan and Pakistan. ‘They don’t know how to do democracy’ is the headline in which he sarcastically mimics German public opinion on an article analysing how Europe is betraying the human rights of the Afghan population, and blaming Afghans for what he sees as the destructive impact of the West’s misguided militarist approach to the region (Ulrich Ladurner, ZEIT, 23 September).

And indeed, some reporting on South Asia compares the Afghanistan and Pakistan situations with that of post-war Germany: the human rights challenges, the total physical destruction, the lack of political and social cohesion. As an example, one interesting article calls for a Marshall Plan for Pakistan to combine disaster relief and post-flood reconstruction with nation building (Andreas Zielcke, SZ, 22 August). Such reference to the post-war Marshall plan perhaps offers one explanation for the press’s focus on the conflict-ravaged countries. Despite all its economic success, the horrors of World War II – the genocide against the Jewish citizens, against the Roma, against political opposition, the deaths of millions of civilians and soldiers, the huge exodus of displaced persons, as well as the destruction of the country itself – remain etched into public memory. And possibly, this is why the media relate so selectively to the countries in Southasia.

Gabriele Köhler is a development economist based in Munich, Germany.

–Guest Blogger Sushma Joshi

I eat god,
I drink god,
I sleep on god…

It is the first day of the Jaipur Literature Festival and Girish Karnad, who is supposed to give the keynote lecture, along with heavyweights like Wole Soyinka and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., are missing in action. They are possibly lost in the Delhi fog, or the traffic, or maybe they didn’t even depart their home cities and countries in the first place. The roads, you know, says one of the organizers. Apparently this is a good enough explanation and the crowd asks no questions and asks for no explanations—we start off the day with a remarkably serene and unhurried shift to readings of Kabir instead. The day is beautiful, the sky is blue, there are long runners in pink, yellow and orange fabrics above our head and two dhol-players are causing a tremendous ruckus and making us all feel invigorated. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is on stage and goes from Kabir to Arun Kolatkar with effortless ease. And that is why, instead of a lecture on “Entertaining India”, we are listening to a lovely poem that eats god and sleeps on god and talks about how the poet hopes his mother-in-law (plus all his other in-laws) would drop dead so he could be alone with his lover.

So starts the day. I have never heard of Arun Kolatkar but I am ready, at the end of the reading, to run out and buy his book. The bookstore is full of books by the authors who are present at the event, but first a writer should look around and check out the people who are present—a colorful assortment of women and men dressed in drop-dead gorgeous Indian fabrics, and where the Westerners look rather plain and pale unless they invested in some Indian fabrics and trinkets. No doubt the place is teeming with literary celebs—the problem with spotting them is that everyone looks the part, right down to little girls who carry their books around like devoted readers and writers. I spot is a group of local Jaipurians who are looking at the schedule with deep concentration. I savor this scene for a while—locals immersed deeply in their own literary event.

Then a minute later I realize why people are concentrating so hard on the schedule—basically, half the speakers are absent, there has been a drastic change of plans and nothing is going according to schedule. The people who have arrived early are asked to be on panels, and before long I find myself listening to Vikram Chandra (scheduled to present on the last day) talking about his latest book about the underworld, as well as the banality of evil. He talks about criminals and murderers that he met. The most horrific thing that he came to learn, he said, was that most people who did these terrible things were ordinary people like you and me. They were not monsters. They were religious, god fearing men who kept shrines at the back of their homes, and yet they were able to commit horrific acts that the ones that occurred during Partition. “The frightening thing is to realize that the people who are murderers and criminals are not so different from us,” he said.  “There’s two degree of separation between criminals and people in the audience.” I had met Vickram Chandra when he was teaching at the Breadloaf Conference in 2002. I noticed that eight years in the United States seem to have trained him to become more charitable to the world than condition of the rest of the world allowed for.

Claire Tomalin (scheduled to speak on Saturday) gave her talk on Jane Austen promptly and with joy. There is nothing more delightful than a Jane Austen scholar who loves the writer and treats her with the greatest respect. Claire talked about the conditions of Austen’s life—her poverty, her lack of money, her lack of publishing success, her ten years of depression and being unable to write—all of which added up to a literary phenomenon. Austen talked about taboo topics that other writers didn’t touch, she said. Tomalin gave her talk with humor and intelligence, and the audience responded in kind. Jane Austen appeared to be required reading for women in India, from the questions—half of the questioners also insisted that Claire MUST see “Bride and Prejudice”, which was the final word on the book. Claire insisted, politely but firmly, that she did not see these adaptations. ““Bride and Prejudice” made me realize a lot of things I hadn’t learnt from the book,” gushed one reader enthusiastically. I belched. One reader, however, did add an interesting tidbid—Austen’s horrid Mrs.Norris had been reincarnated as a cat in Harry Potter.

Then we went on to see Geoff Dyer and Amit Chowdari, moderated by Amitav Kumar, talk about “Visible Cities”. Geoff talked about his latest book on Venice and Benaras, and read a short chapter about a monkey who steals a man’s sunglasses in Varanashi and holds it hostage, while the man tries to get it back from him by bribing him with bananas. All would have been well and good and we’d have thought it was just a good piece of comedy if he’d not read about how the monkey could “evolve” (be careful with that word, writers!) as a species if he gave back the sunglasses, and if he didn’t, he’d always be a monkey. Then he talked about “history”, just a line or two but enough for an audience member to wonder if he didn’t know, as a smart man of the twenty-first century, how colonial culture categorized Third World peoples as “monkeys”…Hmmm… this bit of monkeying around was possibly smart of him, or maybe it wasn’t. Not in a tent full of people who are too aware of post-colonial criticism. Amit Chowdari read about Calcutta—a beautiful and evocative piece. Then he referred to Susan Sontag’s “Under the Sign of Saturn,” and how Walter Benjamin had talked about how he was a man born under this sign, therefore he never finished any of his projects, and this was the line she’s picked up and written her essay on. A literary throwaway aside, kind of like strolling through the streets of an old city as a flaneur.

The afternoon ended in the front lawn with the delightful Mr. Alexander Mc.Call Smith talking about his “#1 Detective Agency” and how he came up with this idea. He and William Dalrymple, who was interviewing him, had a good laugh at the expense of the Scots, who apparently indignantly protested the ten thousand pounds allocated by the Scottish government for the festival—the money, suggested the critics, could have been better spent on fighting illiteracy in Scotland. “There are actually Scottish secret agents out there in the audience, dressed in kilts, trying to keep track of this money. They think we don’t see them, but we do,” chucked the writer, as he burst out in a fit of laughter.

Sushma Joshi blogs at www.sushma.blogspot.com and www.sushmasfiction.blogspot.com

It’s interesting how the recent Fox News footage (of Glenn Beck) created a furor about insulting India. Nobody should feel insulted by Fox, but if they should, I think it’s an insult to the whole developing world, of which rising powers like Brazil, China and India are the new strong voices. Over the top has already seen a very good post by Vijay Vikram on this topic.

I am most interested in the response of New Delhi and Bombay’s well-informed and critical middle class. The kind whose progeny slobber at the mention of American higher education and Subway. Remember, this is a class that lethally combines a post-colonial hunger for Western approval with an almost unmatched intolerance for irony and sarcasm in the English language…
There has never been any doubt that the social base of the Republican Party comprises of moose-hunting neo-Palinites whose primary political impulse is centered around childbirth and gun control rather than relations with rising Asia.

Personally, I think that Fox News should be ignored and if possible ridiculed. Not only Fox, but there many other (some say almost all, and I happen to agree partially) American media beat around the bush in order in order to keep the audience from concentrating on “the issues.” Some sections of the American liberals have expressed worry about the situation and guessed that without proactive actions, soon there would be no mainstream liberal media outlet left in the States.

Back to the topic. This piece of video raises many questions.

• Notice the tone, laugh, and facial expression of the anchor as he uses certain words, like “India.” He calls Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Zimbabwe (and Copenhagen, if I heard correctly, though it’s not a country) “stupid countries.” He even says that the river Ganges sounds like a disease.
• For such a great country and people like America, I wish they had something/someone better to represent them in front of the International audience. With a decreasing American might, un-winnable wars and economic crisis, Beck and Fox certainly don’t help change the rest of the world’s perception of Americans as stupid.
• Talking of stupidity, the most ridiculous part of the video is when Beck goes to the board to compare Indian and American income levels. He compares the income of just-out-of-college Indian doctor with a well earning American doctor. He’d better got back to school and understand that such comparisons based on USD or exchange rates are very inaccurate. Comparing in terms of Purchasing Power Parity, one can perhaps have a better quality of life in India with $5000 than with $150000.
• Becks suggests that the high cost of health care in America is because of its high-tech hospitals, good doctors and all. Sure they have excellent manpower and facilities, but is an analysis of US health-care system complete without mentioning how much the private insurance companies keep for themselves? He doesn’t fail to mention though that a reason for high costs in US is because of the payments for laborers. Instead of comparing with a developing economy like India, one can get a better perspective by comparing the costs with some countries with comparable level of technical and economic progress. These charts compare the costs of private health-care plans of the US with other industrial countries like France and Germany.
• Becks should probably be thankful to the goods and services he gets from the developing world including India and China that have helped his country cope with an economic crisis that was aggravated by the “best of managers” who went to Harvard and Yale.

Right wing American media’s similar derogatory depiction of South Asia, its heritages and culture isn’t new. India, China and other countries happen to be at the receiving end because of their rising stature. All of Southasia and the developing world share the brunt of such tactics.

How do you think the Southasians need to deal (or challenge) with it? Please let your views be known in the comments.

---

Edited: The first few words of the second last paragraph were: “American (and Western in general) media’s… ” I edited after reading Joseph’s comment (2nd comment in this post).
Here is my response to his comment.

---

This is a follow-up to my earlier post. I wanted to see what kind of news about Nepal were covered, mainly by the BBC. I have gathered some quick Google results (Google web search and Google news search) for a set of different search queries about Nepal. The queries were made on the 4th Dec 2009, 11:49 (Nepal time). Though this is not an exhaustive research, and the results don’t produce anything even close to ‘conclusive,’ I hope it can give some hints, and justify my reasons in the earlier post.

Numbers to the right of the colon (”:”) are the total number of pages returned for the search query given at the left of the colon. Sources (either BBC or all) are written inside braces.

‘nepal’+'gadhimai’ returned 931 pages from bbc.co.uk on google web search

“nepal”+”karnali” returned 25 pages from bbc.co.uk on google web search

Google Web:

• “nepal”+”christian”+”conversion” : 42 (bbc.co.uk) picture
• “nepal”+”christian”+”death” : 286 (bbc.co.uk) picture
• “nepal”+”road accident” : 50 (bbc.co.uk) 50 picture
• “nepal”+”karnali” : 25 (bbc.co.uk) picture
• “nepal”+”karnali”+”food” : 4 (bbc.co.uk) picture
• “nepal”+”gadhimai” : 931 (bbc.co.uk) picture
• “nepal” : 31,300 (bbc.co.uk) picture

”nepal”+”christian”+”death” returned 1740 results on google news search

“nepal”+”christian”+”convert” returned 194 results on google news search

Google News:

• “nepal”+”karnali” : 1040 (all) picture
• “nepal”+”hinduism” : 1700 (all) picture
• “nepal”+”christian”+”death” : 1740 (all) picture
• “nepal”+”christian”+”convert” : 194 (all) picture
• “nepal”+”karnali” : 135 (BBC) picture
• “nepal”+”hinduism” : 29 (BBC) picture
• “nepal”+”christian”+”death” : 7 (BBC) picture
• “nepal”+”christian”+”convert” : 2 (BBC) picture
• “nepal”+”christian” : 72 (BBC) picture
• “nepal”+”tibet” : 508 (BBC) picture

I leave it for you to decide what is the defining characteristic of Christianity in Nepal: death or conversion? The figures speak for themselves on what kind of coverage did Gadhimai receive and what really are the pressing issues of Nepal.

Thanks for your comments

---

Searches executed on Google Web Search and Google News Archive Search

---