In the light of the various doom and gloom articles about the Indian elections in The Economist, TIME, and the New York Times released over the second half of the polling period, I recently had the pleasure of appearing on the Carvaka Podcast to discuss the perceptions of Indian politics in the international media and the ill-fitting use of left-right labels in Indian politics.

In it, among other points, I argue that the average Indian voter is a lot smarter than media elites credit them for, and that they understand how to vote in their self-interest better than any editor of an English-language newspaper or magazine. Also, the articles in such publications are aimed for domestic consumption among their core readership in the US and UK, or to validate the feelings of wealthy urban Indians who see themselves as future US or UK citizens, with little to no impact on actual voting patterns in India.

The results that have come out this week only prove to validate this theory, although it is not a particularly complex concept, as those Indians willing to pay for a subscription to The Economist and those Indians willing to line up to vote on a 40-degree day form a Venn Diagram with very little overlap in the first place.

And then, this week, we saw a fascinating set of articles come out within hours of each other in the New York Times – one which alleged that Narendra Modi’s track record on issues is akin to Bernie Sanders’ left-wing policy platform, and the other which compared him to right-wing demagogues such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Now, most voters know that the truth is a lot more nuanced than that, but why do we not see a reflection of this nuance in international coverage of Indian politics and elections?

The Reality Behind International Media Coverage

At the moment, the current understanding of Indian politics globally is incredibly superficial. In fact, the current understanding of politics outside of the US and UK among the English-language media suffers from this problem, whenever there is reporting on any country outside of the Anglosphere.

Journalists and editors working in the western media are generally not paid to make nuanced documentaries on other countries, or be balanced in their reportage about countries which their audiences barely ever think about.

When a newspaper, television channel, or radio station in the US or UK chooses to pay attention to elections or politics in the rest of the world, and this could be in wealthy developed countries in their backyards, like France, Germany, or Sweden, or emerging markets like Russia or Serbia, or postcolonial countries like India or Indonesia, it is not to give their readership a political education into the history of each candidate or political movement in these countries – it is to apply the US/UK paradigm of left-centre-right onto these countries, so that their audience knows who the “good guys” are, who the “bad guys” are, and who “our guys” are. So that they superficially know if they should feel good or bad when the results come out, even if they never intend to visit the country in question.

So, we see a common trend of using outdated, ill-fitting paradigms to explain the politics of countries like India, which have a very different socio, economic, and political context to that of the US or UK.

They treat a country like India as a blank canvas, on which they can project a lot of the problems in their own society, which they are either unwilling or unable to address back home.

This is not to say that we do not have problems of our own and that these publications are 100 per cent wrong 100 per cent of the time – as a postcolonial, developing country in the Global South, we do face massive challenges. Our country’s politics, society, and economy are by no means perfect.

We do indeed have political parties which are based on regional, parochial, caste, or linguistic identities, we do have a law and order problem and a violence-against-women problem, we are trapped in a infinite growth model that pits economic growth against ecological sustainability, we are economically still a very unequal society, and these are themes that many Indian voters not only admit themselves, but actively vote to address. It is not inaccurate to say that these problems exist, be it by the Indian electorate or by foreign observers.

What is important to note, however, is that when The Economist, for example, endorses one candidate over another, saying Rahul Gandhi is the “better” of the two choices, it does not mean that they have exemplary insight or expertise into what is good for ordinary Indians or not, it means they think this candidate is better for their readers, their values, and interests. Especially, since the vast majority of Indian voters can’t even afford a subscription to The Economist to read such an article in the first place.

“Heads I Win, Tails You Lose”

Over the past five weeks of elections, we have seen reports on Indian politics which portray Modi as an “illiberal” equivalent of Trump, Netanyahu, or Orban. Or portray Rahul Gandhi as some sort of “progressive” Indian Justin Trudeau. They call the BJP a “right-wing”, “Hindu nationalist” party to associate it with right-wing Republicans or white nationalists, while calling the Congress a “centre-left, liberal party”, associating it with neoliberal, centrist Democrats.

There was even an article this week in The Nation, which called Yogendra Yadav, who is not even standing for elections this year, “India’s most prominent democratic socialist”, as the leader of the “left-wing Swaraj India Party” (which does not even have any seats in Parliament), and compared him to Bernie Sanders.

The simplistic analogies of this kind descended into a farce that very same day, when the New York Times featured an article by Ruchir Sharma (not me, the one from Morgan Stanley) saying that he had hoped Modi would be an economic conservative like Ronald Reagan but was disappointed to have seen that he had turned out to have more in common, policy-wise, with the left-wing agenda of Bernie Sanders – possibly the US politician that the NYT editorial board loathes the most after Trump.

And then, within a few hours, the same newspaper ran an article by Jeffrey Gettleman portraying Modi as an amalgamation of every right-wing demagogue, from Donald Trump to Viktor Orban to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to even Scott Morrison, the kind of leaders their readership abhors.

For those craving positive coverage of India in the international press, let this be a wake-up call. It does not matter if India’s Prime Minister is left-wing or right-wing, liberal or conservative, patriarchal or feminist, whenever he or she acts in the nation’s self-interest instead of the economic or geopolitical interests of the other countries, they will attract criticism from the international media no matter what they do.

This was true of Nehru for supporting the Non-Aligned Movement, it was true of Indira Gandhi for supporting Bangladeshi independence, it was true of Morarji Desai believing in swadeshi and Gandhian socialism, it was true of Atal Behari Vajpayee for conducting nuclear tests at Pokhran, and it was true of Manmohan Singh for India’s negotiating stance on climate change.

Editors and journalists in the international media don’t write articles to make Indians feel good or India look good, they write what sells well among their audiences and reflects the views of their editorial board and financiers. From the perspective of hegemonic imperial states such as the US and UK, media coverage of any rising power challenging their geopolitical monopoly will always negative, be it Japan during the 1980s, Germany in the 1990s, Russia in the 2000s, or China in the 2010s.

This is proven by this week’s New York Times double-whammy – a classic case of “heads I win, tails you lose”, as the western media uses one hand to criticise Modi for being too left-wing and pro-poor and wish he were more like the conservative icon Reagan, slashing taxes and regulation for big companies, while the other hand criticises him for being too right-wing and illiberal, and wants to teach him “tolerance”.

After all, the western chattering classes claim to be experts at tolerance towards vulnerable groups – even if they only gave themselves that certificate to feel better about their track record of being either unwilling or unable to stop a ban on Muslims entering their country, or prevent 15,000 migrant children from being separated from their families and detained, or their police and justice system brutalising people of colour, or their politicians and policymakers saying that rescuing asylum-seekers drowning in the Mediterranean only encourages more immigration and then not only choosing to turn a blind eye to the drowning of 18,400 vulnerable men, women, and children of colour escaping conflict and persecution over the past five years, but even criminalising priests, professors, firefighters, and local politicians who try to help them.

If even 1 per cent of this was done under the leader of an African, Asian, or Latin American country, we would hear editorials on a weekly basis about how the “secular fabric of the country was being destroyed”, “minorities living in fear of the state”, or the “state destroying dissenting voices and institutions such as universities, churches, and civil society” and there would either be articles about the “coming of age” of some obscure opposition politician whose party has 8 per cent of seats in their legislature, or support for regime change or a coup d’etat. Perhaps, it would look something like this.

Yet, these doyens of tolerance feel that diverse, pluralistic, and multilingual societies in the Global South need to learn tolerance and multiculturalism from their countries, who are tearing their societies apart as they find themselves unable to process that the concept of equal rights also can cover those who do not look like or pray like them. All their lip service to liberal values and human rights does not disguise the fact that these countries, as many of their own more perceptive citizens have put it, “went from barbarism to decadence, without civilisation in between.”

“The Idea of India”, The Cult of Macaulay’s Children

Sometimes, the editors of international publications show some degree of self-awareness, and know that they can’t get away with writing lazy, xenophobic, Orientalist stereotypes about “savage Indians” needing western values to civilise them. And that’s when they weaponise their token writers of colour, who are often wealthy London, New York, or Washington denizens of Indian origin, working for an investment bank that begged for bailouts in 2008, a middle-rung university looking for fee-paying Indian students, or a think-tank funded by the oil, gas, and tobacco industries.

Or, who are the most westernised (and by extension, “trustworthy”) Indians in the leafy streets of Central Delhi. Leaving the Ring Road means entering a world a bit too hot and dusty for the newspaper’s India correspondent’s comfort, after all. The hardship allowance only goes so far.

This is made easy by the fact that many postcolonial countries have an elite today which has adopted the language, culture, and mannerisms of their former colonial masters. And when western journalists, academics, or companies come to India, they work together with these people, who they see as more western than Indian – and thus more credible, reliable, and easy to work with. These elites are often educated through western paradigms, and often share and validate the same opinions on India that a western observer would have.

As Prime Minister Morarji Desai said in an interview on Thames Television in 1977: