Almost all Indians who saw The Atlantic magazine article on India’s response to Covid-19 were offended at the way the Indian National Flag was denigrated. The blue colour wheel at the centre of the flag was replaced by a graphic representing coronavirus of the same colour.

That should not be a surprise because the author of the article, Vidya Krishnan, has written with a bias which often exuded outright hatred against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

While Krishnan indulges in such unrestrained propaganda against India, we see a worrying trend among a section of Western media in reporting India's response to Covid-19.

On 14 March 2020, All India Hindu Mahasabha (AIHM) conducted a cow-urine drinking party in the national capital. A picture of the virus, displayed at the event, was depicted as an incarnation of Lord Vishnu. The media didn’t waste any time to pounce on it after which detailed reports started emerging.

The AIHM is a fringe Hindu organisation, which cannot be compared to the pre-independent Hindu Mahasabha, which faded out in 1950s.

The amount of media exposure the fringe organisation got was disproportionate, and surprisingly very high. But the coverage helped reinforce the distorted stereotype of Hindu cow veneration as superstition.

A case in point is a report by Reuters about the event. A line in the article says, "the leaders from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party have advocated the use of cow urine as medicine and a cure for cancer".

On 25 March 2020, Foreign Affairs published a lengthy article titled, "A Vulnerable Population Braces for the Pandemic", which was also written by Krishnan.

She paints the usual dismal picture of the Indian health scenario – the ‘credit’ for which should go mainly to the Congress party that ruled India for six decades since 1947, but is of course ignored.

Then comes an interesting subtitle: "Hindutva in the time of Coronavirus". Here, Krishnan enters into an unsubstantiated rant against the ruling BJP and Modi. The following rather long passage from the article shows the amount of bias in the report which has no proper facts: