India’s English-language media is a hub of our mentally colonized, Hinduphobic elites. Their coverage follows a basic thumb rule: suppress/distort if the perpetrator is a ‘minority’; sensationalize and send reporters on the ground if the victim is a ‘minority’.

School student Ankita Singh’s brutal murder by her stalker Shahrukh Hussain has shocked the entire nation. The growing awareness about these type of crimes – which are so routine but would have remained suppressed from national discourse if not for social media – seems to have reached a tipping point with this gruesome case from Dumka, Jharkhand.

All a journalist needs to do is google for the case and they would come across multiple reports naming the accused as Shahrukh. But India Today initially reported his name as ‘Abhishek’ in their story titled “Man who set girl on fire in Jharkhand’s Dumka seen smiling in police custody”.

Incredibly, the India Today report (both original one – archived here – and the current edited version) contains a tweet by a netizen named Akhilesh Jha which clearly names the accused as Shahrukh. Yet, the India Today Web Desk team misreported his name as “Abhishek” multiple times!

Innocent mistake, or deliberate mind games? For those who know our media’s track record, the answer will be obvious.

The latest version by India Today has corrected this shocking ‘error’ and put a bland apology at the bottom, stating:

Corrigendum: An earlier version of this article stated the name of the accused as Abhishek, which has been corrected now. The error is regretted.

Painfully, the report does not name Ankita. It depersonalizes her as ‘girl’, ‘Dumka girl’, ‘woman’ – a tactic journalists use when they don’t want readers to develop recall of a case. But if the story were aligned to their agenda, they would make sure in each article on the topic that they drill the victim’s name into public consciousness – like Tabrez Ansari, Pehlu Khan or Mohammed Akhlaq.

The report also misleadingly states that “she turned down a proposal”, which waters down the reality that Ankita was stalked, harassed and threatened by Shahrukh. Ankita’s father has disclosed that Shahrukh was badgering his daughter to convert to Islam and marry him.

There is no depth to which our English-language media cannot stoop to keep Hindus in a perpetual state of confusion and shame – all in pursuit of our elites’ fetishization of Western liberalism/secularism and borne out of their colonially-bred revulsion for Hindu Dharma.