“Brown sepoys and colonial ghosts: The architecture of attention”, The Sunday Guardian, May 24, 2026
“The problem is the architecture of attention: western outlets applying ideal-type democratic standards to India apply different intensity standards to their own nations.
When Helle Lyng, a Norwegian journalist, shouted at Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Oslo—”Why don’t you take questions from the freest press in the world?”—she was simply playing the part: being confrontational. But that invocation of Norway’s #1 ranking against India’s #157 was more than a question; it was a hierarchising gesture, a way of establishing Norwegian practice as the singular standard for Indian democracy. This small moment reveals the structural machinery through which Western, left-liberal media manufacture India into news—a machinery almost invisible to those who operate it.
The negativity towards India isn’t random, nor is it merely adversarial reporting or a reaction to current policies. It is structurally overdetermined; produced where colonial cognitive frameworks, portable academic templates, commercial economics, and an ideological secularism India never signed up for all intersect……..”
Read full article at sundayguardianlive.com
