I bet you have heard of the ancient fable of how a podgy frog in a pond was once taunted by his friends on how they saw a bull wandering in the marshes and how it was far bigger than the frog in size. The flabby frog got miffed by the comparison and decided to inflate its size by puffing up more and more till his body could not take anymore and exploded all over.
The sad truth is that while the subsequent pond frogs might have learned their lessons, the vainglorious cocky humans for whom this fable was intended did not, and probably never will. They still puff up in vain, blow hot and cold, try to pass off their cattiness as insight, and eventually spill their vitriol all over. Now, usually, the best way to deal with such wretches is to let them stew in their own bile and ignore them. However, that forgiving approach does not work when their spillage runs over in matters of dharma, public discourse, geopolitics, and policy issues since such pompous riffraff can accumulate, rot, fester, and create a humongous bad will for the community at large, and defile a few impressionable minds in the process. So, from a pure Indian and a Hindu point of view, let’s try and document these deplorables in a rogues’ gallery that the gentle folks can henceforth avail to identify and categorically avoid contagion.
We begin with Debasish Roy Chowdhury as today’s Hall of Shamer, as his career and work mirror the perfect arc of an orientalist coolie. A typical ‘bhadralok’ cad with some vain humanities degree, he represents an entire class of highbrows chased out of their homeland by Communists and Islamists as they languish in overseas colonial hovels – lamenting and bemoaning every step of India’s progress that has passed them by.
You might wonder: Is a post-grad in economics a vain qualification? According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb – an original thinker, philosopher, and best-selling author, “Economists come in two varieties. Those who can’t solve equations and those who solve the wrong equations.” And if that was not enough, he goes ahead to classify them rigorously, “The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist.” Although it’s not a crime for one to have a pedestrian mind, it certainly counts as a jaundiced transgression when such arid intellects combine with malevolent propaganda-media outlets, digital pamphleteers, and state-sponsored PR shops to generate loads of viciously pontifical fiction that victimizes India and Hindus, and yet manages to pass off as some kind of ‘award-winning journalism'(?).
Making of a Master Stinker
It was natural that a swellhead like Chowdhury got to cut his teeth at The Telegraph in Kolkata, which is notorious as a troll amongst newspapers, besides being remorselessly sexist – as the model, actress, and cancer survivor Lisa Ray discovered[1] – and shamelessly casteist to the extent of forcing an obstinately recalcitrant ‘Press Council of India’ to call out its offense[2]. Would you believe – it had compared India’s Dalit ex-President Kovind to Covid? Not to forget, the Telegraph has repeatedly glorified religious conversion and evangelization, which has scarred Bengal’s reputation globally[3]. This orientation in depraved reporting deepened further in Chowdhury’s career with another long stint in ‘The Hindustan Times’ whose biggest claim to fame has been as a pamphleteer for ‘China Watch Daily’ – a Chinese government mouthpiece, for whom it carried multiple sponsored articles whitewashing China’s regressive and repressive occupation of Tibet[4].
Evidently, working as a hatchet man for sullied publications turned out to be a good experience for Chowdhury, who went further East in Beijing and Hong Kong to peddle surliness with another Chinese stooge – ‘South China Morning Post’ (SCMP). This ‘Westward Ho’ migration of our intellectuals is a curious phenomenon – our STEM grads emigrate for bigger opportunities of creating wealth for all, while bourgeois minds like Chowdhury escape because the Indian state produces more entitled elites than it can absorb in its anti-Hindu, anti-India ecosystem. And while the West and the Far East do have their standard-issue highbrow opinion makers, they can always use a brown desi with a gift of the gasbag, who is willing to disgrace his culture, abuse his lineage, and attack his very roots for a few pieces of silver, a couple of sham awards and a bit of validation from his benevolent Massa.
Shouldn’t his ranting in SCMP against Hindus and India be taken with an ocean full of salt, considering the very rag he publishes his sermons in is known to be repeatedly carrying water for the Chinese regime? Chowdhury moans about the so-called Islamophobia in India in the SCMP, which had outright rejected the publication of its Senior Editor Peter Langan’s three-month investigation into human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region in October 2022[5]. A phony skirmish in the Leftist hotbed of JNU in Delhi was hyped up and compared to Tiananmen by Chowdhury in the same SCMP, which had blatantly published an interview with Jack Ma – the founder of Alibaba, the current owner of SCMP and a member of the CCP – in which Ma defended late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s decision to crack down on pro-democracy student protests, saying it was “the most correct decision.”[6]
And the less said, the better about the other outlet – The New York Times (NYT), that periodically allows Chowdhury to vent his spleen on India, Hindus, and PM Modi. In any parallel universe that has a modicum of ethics, an obligation towards humanism, and a sense of proportion, a rag sheet like NYT would have stopped publishing out of pure shame for engaging in journalistic malpractices of peddling Nazi propaganda and humanizing history’s cruelest regime. “For nearly ten years, the New York Times reported many of these stories by simply reprinting Nazi claims, particularly regarding Hitler’s peaceful intentions. There was very little journalistic counterbalance in the Times’s reporting on Germany and even less editorial outrage when it came to the Nazi regime’s early crimes.”[7] The question is: Can a media outlet with such a corrupted legacy be expected to do anything beyond selling its columns to the highest bidder? It was indeed a sellout, considering the payouts of China Daily – an English-language newspaper controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, to various newspapers in the USA, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times [8].
Some of you may have a question: Media entities do get pressured by hostile powers, so why should it cast aspersions on Chowdhury’s reportage? You have to understand that Chowdhury spent almost a couple of years with the biggest culprit in this payout story, ‘China Daily.’[9] Besides, as it turns out, there is no honor amongst media thieves, as a tainted NYT, too, found it fit to mull and lament the SCMP going rogue for its Chinese masters. Yes, “The New York Times stated that Alibaba is steering the newspaper into promoting the PRC’s soft power, and several critical stories about China’s current government have been rewritten in an act of self-censorship by the top editors.” [10]
My point is that can you finally see the interwoven web of deceitful journalism of the Telegraph, Hindustan Times, China Daily, South China Morning Post, and New York Times, validated as per the needs of an invisible master sitting deep somewhere in the bureaucracies of Beijing? And if these are Chowdhury’s alma maters, then his journalism brand is nothing beyond commissioned drivel spewed at the behest of India’s enemies.
Ignoblesse Oblige
Having established the depravity of the media ecosystem in which a deracinated mind like Chowdhury thrives, it is but natural to expect that he will be called upon only to misrepresent the ground reality, convolute the facts, and paint a phantom of a delusion, which is purely a figment of Chowdhury’s morbid imagination. He writes how “Hindu vigilante groups attack Muslims, and their businesses” in NYT’s ‘Modi’s India Is Where Global Democracy Dies,’ [11] adding how all of this is done “while dehumanizing the large Muslim minority, fanning social division and violence .” Ohh, My Gawd, if this is happening in Modi’s India, then the Islamic world must be canceling India and Modi, right? Let’s blacklist India, Hindus and Modi, they must be insisting, right? W-R-O-N-G… Too bad that the Islamic world gives zero credence to this nagging in the White man’s First World rag sheet, masquerading as an opinion piece. And, contrary to what Chowdhury and NYT insist, the Islamic world has gone the whole hog to honor PM Modi. Indeed, out of the thirteen highest civilian awards bestowed on PM Modi, six have been from staunch Islamic countries, from Saudi Arabia to Palestine [12]. Could it be that these Islamic nations had the sagacity to go beyond the paid propaganda and fake news in the NYT and check some actual concrete research that pointed out how 89% of Muslims felt free to practice their religion in India, as did 91% of Hindus, 89% of Christians, 82% of Sikhs, 93% of Buddhists, 85% of Jains and 91% of the overall Indian population? [13]
If NYT had availed of the services of any half-decent Assistant Editor to go through Chowdhury’s piece, the op-ed would have been relegated to the dustbin for the very first paragraph, which highlights the features of India’s Ashoka emblem. “The 21-foot-tall bronze figure — four lions seated with their backs to one another, facing outward — is of India’s revered national symbol. The beasts are normally depicted as regal and restrained, but these looked different: Their fangs bared, they seemed angry, aggressive.” Whoah, a casual reader might feel that Nehruvian India had curd-rice-eating lions, apparently, who are now suddenly baring fangs in the Modi era. He further hyperventilates, “Many across India gasped”. Really, the country gasped – in between peals of laughter at the sheer nonsense peddled by Chowdhury and his ilk in India. A fifth-grader with a cursory knowledge of multiplication can very well figure out that the new emblem is just an enlargement of the original, and the teeth are visible only from a particular angle [14]. All said, the piece implies how low a bar NYT has set for its op-ed writers.
But if this humiliation was not enough for Chowdhury and NYT, they collaborated again on the issue of Manipur violence to raise the bogey of Christian discrimination [15]. Mind you, the Left-liberals very well understand that there’s a limit beyond which the news of Islamic discrimination cannot be harnessed for acrimony in the First World. But the Christians-in-danger ruse has the potential for a longer news cycle and can be exploited to the hilt. Ergo, the entire global Left cabal, including Chowdhury and NYT, patiently waited for weeks and let the Manipur malice go unreported till the news bytes had Christian Kukis as perps. Until the day they found one elusive video that showed Hindu Meitei as aggressors and Kuki Christian women as victims. And even then, they waited for the opening day of the Parliament session to release the video globally and slam the Modi government for the dastardly act. The Parliament and the country were held hostage globally by op-eds like Chowdhury’s in their bid to shame and guilt-trip Hindus worldwide. All this happened despite a counter-video making rounds of how the Kuki women repeatedly saved their Kuki terrorist co-conspirators by swarming the army and threatening to disrobe if they moved in to arrest their colleagues [16].
This is the highlight of most of the reportage of Chowdhury and guys like him. They will patiently wait like a rabid wolf for that one sniff of blood – that one data point in the entire scheme of things that can be conveniently misrepresented to diss Hindus and India. Their brood will hog this single data point while ignoring the rest of the story. They will amplify the malice globally in unison and then simply drop the news byte when the eventual story comes out in its entirety. Remember, Chowdhury played the same dirty game during the COVID-19 vaccination cycle when India briefly paused vaccine exports to cater to its local demand. It’s natural for every country to look out for its own interest first in times of crisis, but Chowdhury went to town blaming PM Modi for all the misfortune he had caused in the world. How dare he stop the vaccine exports, Chowdhury kept grating stridently on primetime TV debates and in a TIME op-ed by quoting a dubious anonymous epidemiologist [17]. We are scouring the world with a begging bowl for vaccines, he wailed in faux distress on primetime TV, despite lacking a rudimentary understanding of the logistics of vaccine manufacturing wherein PM Modi and EAM S Jaishankar were working overtime to procure vaccine raw materials from the US, which had suddenly prioritized them for their needs first, by invoking the Defence Production Act [18]. In retrospect, that phase was a minor blip in India’s majorly successful vaccine diplomacy initiative. But a shrill Chowdhury kept clamoring, “In India’s immediate neighborhood, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka are running dangerously low on vaccines.”
Was India wrong to prioritize its populace first? Absolutely not, if the Bangladeshi editor of Blitz, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, is to be believed. He admits Dhaka was inconvenienced by India’s decision in the short run, but like most countries, they made their alternative vaccine arrangements until Indian supplies recommenced. Why, he adds that Chowdhury’s and TIME magazine’s article “has wrongly played the vaccine card in defaming Narendra Modi and generate political chaos in India when the nation already is suffering.” In fact, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury casts doubt on the very purpose of the TIME article, based on a clear disclaimer absolving TIME of everything. There is a “scope of doubt whether this has been sponsored or paid propaganda content. By publishing a disclaimer, TIME has indicated that the content was not part of the editorial views of the magazine. Clearly, someone is spending cash defaming Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his political party, the BJP, possibly with some evil political agenda” [19].
Of course, some of you might be confused about whom to believe – Chowdhury or Choudhury. To answer that, let me bring you an excerpt from the NYT op-ed on Choudhary, which glorifies him as: “Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, a Muslim editor and commentator in Bangladesh, has a rare virtue — he champions dialogue and decency in a culture hemmed in by extremism and corruption.” [20]
A frog in a well cannot conceive of the ocean
Lastly, one can keep rebutting all the silly arguments by the likes of Chowdhury till the cows come home, and he will be none the wiser. His ecosystem rewards him for peddling falsehoods and for being an ingrate. Their tools of trade are a temperament of complaint, the mentality of permanent victimhood, and the collective and individual propensity for lamentation. Cometh the right moment, Chowdhury will be out again brandishing his prevarications and exaggerations in yet another op-ed featuring another rag of ill repute.
Fortunately for India, Chowdhury’s braying has little impact on the polls in the country, and his work can barely move the needle of general public opinion. Yet his diatribes and his ecosystem’s malfeasance need to be countered at every instance, as they create a lot of muck that might impact the gullible or the uninitiated. We must understand that when debating an issue, facts are only important as long as they can impact at an emotional level. That’s the key difference between the Left and the non-Left. The Left is fighting the culture war, while the non-Left indulges only in the facts war. Unfortunately, in today’s AI, algorithms, and dopamine scenario, their emotion-jacking and memetic warfare have become potent weapons over plain, simple facts.
For a rational person, logic will always beat emotional strawman arguments. But the average person is not rational. They’re emotional. And that’s exactly why muckrakers like Chowdhury need to be countered and their ecosystem shamed at every level for every breach. Period.
After all, every frog you kiss does not become a prince, does it?
(The article was published on Hindudvesha.org on August 27, 2023 and has been reproduced here)
References
[1] Ray, Lisa. 2019. “Lisa Ray on Twitter: “Does anyone else see the irony in using THIS image – instead of an author image provided- for an article about my memoir @CloseToTheBone_ where I talk about struggling as a women with overcoming sexist stereotypes? Just landed …” Twitter. https://twitter.com/Lisaraniray/status/1134323030400819200
[2] Opindia. 2020. “Show cause notice issued to The Telegraph for comparing President Kovind to coronavirus.” OpIndia. https://www.opindia.com/2020/03/the-telegraph-show-cause-notice-ramnath-kovind-covid-ranjan-gogoi/
[3] Opindia. 2021. “The Telegraph uses spread of classical music in Kolkata to glorify evangelism.” OpIndia. https://www.opindia.com/2021/09/the-telegraph-uses-spread-of-classical-music-in-kolkata-to-glorify-evangelism/
[4] Arya, Tsewang G. 2019. “China buying Indian media for propaganda gimmick – Tibet Policy Institute.” Tibet Policy Institute. https://tibetpolicy.net/china-buying-indian-media-for-propaganda-gimmick/
[5] General, Ryan. 2022. “SCMP editor who quit over rejected story on Xinjiang human rights abuses is warned not to publish it.” Yahoo News. https://news.yahoo.com/scmp-editor-quit-over-rejected-232649478.html
[6] Zeng, Vivienne. 2015. “Alibaba in talks to invest in SCMP Group, China Daily says.” Hong Kong Free Press. https://hongkongfp.com/2015/11/09/alibaba-in-talks-to-invest-in-scmp-group-china-daily-says/
[7] Rindsberg, Ashley. 2021. “Ashley Rindsberg in new book details how NYT peddled Nazi propaganda.” OpIndia. https://www.opindia.com/2021/05/ashley-rindsberg-new-york-times-nazi-propaganda-the-grey-lady-winked/
[8] Ross, Chuck. 2020. “Chinese Propaganda Outlet Has Paid US Newspapers $19 Million For Advertising, Printing.” The Daily Caller. https://dailycaller.com/2020/06/08/chinese-propaganda-china-daily-washington-post/
[9] LinkedIn. 2022. “Experience.” LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/debasish-roy-chowdhury-49937516/details/experience/
[10] Hernández, Javier C. 2018. “A Hong Kong Newspaper on a Mission to Promote China’s Soft Power (Published 2018).” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/31/world/asia/south-china-morning-post-hong-kong-alibaba.html
[11] Chowdhury, Debasish R. 2022. “Opinion | Modi’s India Is Where Global Democracy Dies.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/24/opinion/india-modi-democracy.html
[12] WION. 2019. “6 times Islamic countries honoured PM Modi with their highest awards.” WION. https://www.wionews.com/india-news/6-times-islamic-countries-honoured-pm-modi-with-their-highest-awards-245560
[13] PEW. 2021. “Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/religion-in-india-tolerance-and-segregation/
[14] Shekhar, Shakti. 2022. “National Emblem of India: After national emblem cast, ‘Lion Capital of Asoka’ itself fuels row but Modi govt justifies | India News.” The Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/angry-lions-after-national-emblem-cast-lion-capital-of-ashoka-itself-fuels-row-but-modi-govt-justifies/articleshow/92826103.cms
[15] Chowdhury, Debasish R. 2023. “Opinion | Modi’s Hindu-Supremacist Politics Are Pushing India to the Brink.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/opinion/india-modi-conflict-zone.html
[16] Agrawal, Ravi. 2023. “Manipur.” Izlamic Terrorist on Twitter https://twitter.com/raviagrawal3/status/1682751486546288641
[17] Chowdhury, Debasish R. 2021. “Modi Never Bought Enough COVID-19 Vaccines for India. Now the Whole World Is Paying.” Time. https://time.com/6052370/modi-didnt-buy-enough-covid-19-vaccine/
[18] TOI. 2021. “Serum Institute seeks government’s intervention over import of Covid vaccine raw material from US | India News – Times of India.” The Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/serum-institute-seeks-governments-intervention-over-import-of-covid-vaccine-raw-material-from-us/articleshow/81396262.cms
[19] Uddin, Salah, and Shoaib Choudhury. 2021. “Indian PM Narendra Modi faces ruthless propaganda | BLiTZ.” Weekly Blitz. https://www.weeklyblitz.net/opinion/indian-pm-narendra-modi-faces-ruthless-propaganda/
[20] BLITZ. 2003. “About Us | BLiTZ.” Weekly Blitz. https://www.weeklyblitz.net/about-us/
