“Bengaluru priests sit in vessels filled with water while performing puja. Internet dies laughing,” writes the Twitter operator for Mail Today, a “joint venture of India Today group with Daily Mail, UK” and others.

“Priests sit in aluminum vessels to pray for rains, get trolled by Twitterati,” is the Times of India’s headline for the same story.

(And of course, the “rationalists” aka epistemologically stunted civilizing missionaries were also out to protest this, apparently, according to this report here).

This mocking tone towards an event related ultimately to a very serious political and ecological issue, that of thirst and drought, needs to be understood as one of the many ways in which Hinduphobia functions to silence the real-world, material concerns facing the poor and the living planet (to be fair, the ToI report does a slightly better job than the rest despite the flippant headline). How has journalism (and maybe I should take some responsibility for my profession too, and add media education generally), reached a situation in which large-scale historic social prejudices are normalized as in-house practices that silence the voices of the lives at the core of a report? How do editors and reporters become oblivious to the harsh realities of thirst, drought, heat waves, and human and animal suffering, to such an extent that the only thing their minds seize upon here is a chance to assert their sense of civilizational superiority to anything Hindu?

The Daily Mail tweet actually makes for a teachable moment as far as these questions go. It is interesting that the report there follows a now common genre of assembling social media reactions as news. To an extent, this may be understandable; for example, Daily Mail also has a tweet on its feed about how the internet loves some new celebrity fashion trend or the other. But what is appalling is the unexamined normalization, it appears, of the “internet” as an accurate representation of the lives of the planet as a whole. The “internet” laughs at Brahmins, the “internet” drools over Bollywood; but what of the world itself? Wasn’t journalism supposed to be about that too?

Rural Poverty Coverage and Hinduphobia

I remember the vivid picture of rural poverty that P. Sainath brought to the readers of The Hindu in the 1990s, and how this was rightly commended as a brave statement in the wake of the growing commercialization and trivialization of the news media. Unfortunately, much of the discourse that has emerged since then about the lives of those outside “the internet” (metaphorically speaking here, in the sense of the lives of the one billion less privileged who cannot take water and other basics for granted), has fallen short in representing their lives because of the simple reason that it is dominated, distorted, and severely curtailed by Hinduphobia. The South Asian and South Asianist academic-journalistic establishment has gone so far inward into its preconceived colonial-era beliefs about Hinduism being an elite project that the poor must somehow be “saved” from, that it fails to see the human suffering it claims to be so good at addressing behind the so-called Hindu “superstition” smear it imposes on the actions of the people that don’t make sense to its epistemic framework.

Questions for Readers and Journalists

Here are some elementary questions that readers might ask themselves before succumbing to the mindless desire to laugh at something of consequence to the silenced lives of the planet:

- When was the last time you struggled, actually struggled, to find water to drink? Have you known thirst, even if for a few hours?

- Have you ever had to walk to a well or a community tap and then carry water home?

- Have you seen a person suffer or die from dehydration?

- Have you thought about how all the “hydration” products you get to buy with movie star or cricket player mugshots on them (colas, juices, “packaged water”and the like) represent the vanishing of water to someone somewhere because you are privileged to be in a section of the economy with the purchasing power to get that into your hands from some remote village well or lake?

And if you are working in the media, and you have to come up with a headline or a tweet on a story like this, ask yourself these questions too:

- Have you ever fasted, or observed any other discipline of austerity and sacrifice like these priests you decide to mock routinely undertake?

- Is your mockery coming from a position of greater understanding and compassion for the world than them, or is it just a reflex action you picked up mindlessly from your school, college, and workplace?

- Have you understood why your workplace ideologies use certain frames in reporting over other frames? Why is it that a harmless act of thinking about the welfare of others such as chanting mantras for rain provoke such a violent reaction from so many media producers and consumers?

- Have you heard of the expression “let them eat cake”?

- Did your professors in college ever talk about something called “epistemicide” when they perhaps talked to you about imperialism, colonialism, “brahmanical” oppression and so on. You can read more about it in this brilliant post on epistemicide by Indumathi Viswanathan here.

The assumption that anything indigenous in India (or Hindu, to use a more popular word) equals superstition and oppression is perhaps the most oppressive, anti-poor, and anti-environmental dogma that is operating in the canons of journalism, activism, and academia today. The attacks on the Akshayapatra children’s meal schemes is one well known example. A less widely covered story, though in an equally or perhaps even more appalling way, is the attack on an Ayurvedic milk outreach to village children as an attempt to “experiment” with pseudo-science on Dalit children by a section of activists. Read more about this in Aparna Krishnan’s post, here.

If praying for water (whether it works or not), preparing meals for school children (whether it has dead animals or not), or giving protein-deficient village children milk with traditional herbal supplements, are all being reviled under the misguided banner of Hindu superstition or oppressiveness, then perhaps it is time to confront Hinduphobia more directly.

The Media-Development-Hinduphobia Complex

Interestingly, the Times of India article on the Bengaluru priests actually does some open-minded reporting after its gratuitous headline and digs, and what we learn about the reasons for the priests sitting in the cooking vessels is profoundly depressing. The reason the priests are chanting their mantras in a cooking vessel (leading to nasty jokes about boiling Hindu priests alive by some characters inevitably) is not because it is some quaint Hindu custom, but because the water-bodies once available near the temples have gone. There are no lakes left because of the same model of greedy, short-sighted consumerism and growth imposed on us by colonialism and neo-colonialism that has also given us this epistemicidal-genocidal commercial media culture.

A violent image about boiling a Hindu monk alive tweeted by the official Congress party handle a few years ago

I hope media professionals will take the insidious role of Hinduphobia in their own professional cultures more seriously, and not dismiss charges of Hinduphobia as mere vanity-appeals for cosmetic changes by over-sensitive Hindu elites. Hinduphobia is the same ideology that has put poverty in India, destruction in India, and appalling cruelty to the lives of others, human and non-human, in the planet.