Reader's Forum
Opinion: Propagandists twisted report on Bangladesh
By An Observer
Thu, 28 Jun 2007, 13:32:00

Are Bangladesh media, intellectuals, the Bangladesh government and its Embassies going to protest at the pack of lies and disinformation published in International Herald Tribune in a report from the India based American news agency Associated Press.

IHT has published cunning "report" with some interesting twists worthy of propagandist. Every paragraph is full of images all culled from Hindu Fundamentalist RSS, VHP and BJP pronouncements over the years. India has hardly been quiet about the barbed-wire fence but still cunning and inaccurate propaganda language is used: " India quietly ringing Bangladesh with barbed-wire, cutting off former neighbour". Does its not sound like a deliberate insult? Once again the high reputation of an American owned newspaper is brought low by Indians disinformation using AP journalists.

The headline sets the scene and cunningly sets the theme. IHT report lies when AP journalist propagandist says "India quietly ringing Bangladesh with barbed-wire, cutting off its former neighbour" in its headlines. The fencing has been reported for many years, weekly and monthly in Indian media which the IHT and AP should have checked. Bangladesh could not care less what Indians do inside their territory ; although Bangladesh, Europe, Asia along with the UN and world's Human Rights community have shamelessly closed their eyes to endless carnage of native peoples by Indian Army. However, when Indian Army regularly kill, rape, steal money, food and equipment, kidnap, smuggle petrol, act as conduits for lethal weapons & drug dealers, encroach on Bengali territory, Bangladesh cannot remain quiet and let an unruly India continue its "Wild West" ways. Time after time the brave & disciplined Jawans and farming communities of Bangladesh have displayed patience and forbearance with the criminal, undisciplined and unruly & corrupt Indian Army. Indian Army provocation is a daily fact of life along all of South Asian borders, including Bangladesh.
What makes the IHT and AP report particularly comical is that there has been no rail or river access between India and Bangladesh for most of the last 60 years after the end of British rule. The road and river access are heavily controlled by both countries. Bangladesh has cut off India, not the other way round, due to terrorism and civil war raging inside India for most the last 60 years; and also political distrust between all the neighbours. By the way India's relationship with all her neighbours including China, Bangladesh, Burma, Bhutan, Sikkim (now under occupation), Pakistan, Nepal & Sri Lanka is fraught with dis-trustfulness and hatred verging on racism. There is little or no rail, road or water connection between any of India's surrounding neighbours. India is cut-off from all her Neighbours. This must be unique in the entire world. IHT should ask why. IHT should be ashamed for publishing Indian lies and distortions in its distinguished newspaper.
Utterly cunning and dishonest display to for the AP journalist to include phrases like: "the fence felt like an insult, as if their country was a plague that needed to be quarantined", " growing fears in New Delhi about illegal immigration and cross-border terrorism", "some experts estimate as many as 20 million Bangladeshis are in India illegally, most crammed into large cities or in shantytowns just over the border", "India's US$730 per capita income looks pitifully low by Western standards, but it's a decent income to many in Bangladesh, where some 60 million people live on less than US$1 a day"....And yet every single phrase has been repeated by Indian media and fundamentalist Hindus in their vernacular and English language media for the last 20 years in one manner or another. Indians know facts can be made by repeated lies and distortions. It has not helped that Bangladesh chose to ignore Indian propaganda. The belief in Bangladesh that truth will prevail has proved to be a sham.
IHT and its readers should know that Bangladesh does not object to a troubled India making its borders effective to prevent the violence and wars spilling over in her territory. As any one knows India's neighbour Bhutan was forced by India to use Bhutan Army recently to remove India's own terrorists using its territory to fight Indian Army but without much success. Similar attempts have been made with Burma, also without success. Sri Lanka and India have similar issues with cross border terrorism by Hindu Tamils. Indian active support for Hindu Tamil guerrillas against the Buddhist Singhalese state is a source of real concern in Asia.
India is no United States. India is a desperately poor country where 750 million people lives on less than a $1 a day. Recently it was reported that some 200 million Indians live on less that 13 cents (US) a day. The brutal of poverty in India is unimaginable to most civilised Asians, Europeans, Africans or Americans. The Hindu caste system blights the lives of 75% of Indian people deemed to be Hindu. The lives of 250 million Untouchables (also known as Dalit, Harijan) is beyond human understanding. Not even Apartheid South Africa or the old South in the USA can match India in its evil. 250 million Untouchables have a lower status than a monkey, a cow or a rat. Yes, change is happening but at a snails pace. 50 years of United Nations charter and 59 years of independence from the British has passed but still Untouchables plight remains neglected. There is a major Maoist led war going on inside India in which Untouchables form a major core. The world know more about Dafur and Congo but nothing about India's own Dafurs. What other excuse can India have? Muslims have become the Jews for all Indian shortcomings.
Muslims are at the bottom of humanity in India today, lower than Untouchables. Divide-and-Rule is the way. India cannot hide facts, and has been forced to admit that Muslims are at the bottom in all spheres of life in India. In the Indian state of West Bengal, a state apparently run by Communists, Muslims are at the bottom. Even though they form 30% of the population of West Bengal Muslims have little representation in government jobs, higher education, political representation, economic activity even after 59 years of Indian independence. Discrimination is rife but silent, silent even in the media. Muslims are prevented from migrating to the few urban places in the state where jobs may be found. [Untouchables form 26% of population; and tribal people form 6% of West Bengal population. Vast bulk of the West Bengal Hindus of caste belong to Sudra caste.]
In the past week it was reported in The Guardian newspaper (London) that many tea garden workers of West Bengal are dying of starvation. It is a desperately poor state with 90 million people. Compared to Maharashtra's $700 per capita, West Bengal's comes to a mare $300. The lies Indians are told about Bangladesh are just tragic . Our per capita of $510 in 2007 is rising. Indian economy is rising by 8% and Bangladesh by 7%. If investments take off and tourism industry lives up to expectations, as they bound to, Bangladesh will grow by up to 15%. It is a moderate, liberal Islamic nation and a democracy (the interim government is not a military run as heavily promoted by India). By the way Bangladesh was an industrial giant of the world and Asia 250 years ago. That fact alone makes India anxious and fearful. That alone should tell the Western and Asian world why India should use so many devices to undermine Bangladesh.
Western or Asian readers will realise how pathetic it is to talk about India being paved with gold when it's filled with abject destitution. India is a hell-hole but imagines herself to be America. By the way Mexico' s economy is bigger than India's. Mexico's per capita is over $3,000. India's is just $700. The hype and propaganda has got Indians spinning tales about joining the "rich man's club". And worse still India is no China. China's per capita is over $2,500 and raising by the day. But China does not hype or brag or lie, it's astonishing rise is there for all to see. China is one nation, India is an artificial construct like the USSR.
When Muslims of India face degradation, starvation, discrimination at every level, denial of education and jobs, harassment and death at the hand of police (Muslim make up a large proportion of jail population in India) why would Bengali people want to go there? To commit suicide? In Bangladesh even the poorest can gain basic education and bring up their children in their faith. The infant mortality rate in Bangladesh is a lot lower than India. Yes that is correct. When India's own people starve, suffer indignity, have few jobs how would a Bangladesh immigrant survive in such a god forsaken land? It's stupid and bizarre. India's friends should slap her out of her stupidity. India has long tried to create facts out of lies and fabrications by consistent repetition. This trick was tried by the Nazis against the Jews, Slavs and Roma people of Europe. And the results are well known.
One has not mentioned Uttar Pradesh (UP) or Bihar where some 320 million people live. Their lives are even more blighted than those of West Bengal. According to the TIME magazine in an article in 2006 Uttar Pradesh has a per capita less than $200. Only last month the London based Times newspaper reported that India contains largest number of the most destitute people in the world whose condition is worse than those of Sub Sahara Africa or Ethiopia.
Sadly one is forced to give the ugly facts on India because of India's crude misrepresentation of Bangladesh. It does not make one feel superior but immoral. Whole of South Asia is desperately poor even after freedom from the British 59 years ago. The political elite of India, dominated by the Brahmin Hindu gods ( 2.5% of Hindus), bear a particular responsibility for creating distrust between neighbours. Keeping each other down has meant that the poorest majority have remained a broken people in all the countries of South Asia. The borders between the nations are often arbitrary with villages and towns cut in half. Families on the border areas marry, have families, trade with each other as they have done for hundreds of years despite everything. Borders cannot cut off blood ties in any part of the world.
British may have left the region 59 years ago but all the problems have remained and even multiplied. Hunger, racism, casteism, religious hatred (all fanatics of all faiths, including Muslim, Sikh, Hindu are to blame), Hindu persecution of Untouchables, regional discord, riots, fake history writing have added to the blight of the Indian sub-continent. India could have been a force for good in the region. Instead India is a source of instability in the whole region. Hindu-Buddhist religious hatred, Singhala-Tamil racial war in Sri Lanka has an Indian active hand. In Nepal India is the single most hated country thanks to its destabilising influence. Buddhist Sikkim was illegally taken over by India thanks to the Dalai Lama being held hostage and never being allowed to protest. And the sagas of the other regional nations and India's relations are known to all in the West and Asia.
India has been lucky in that America and UK chose to set-up Call Centres in India, despite India having very poor in electricity supply, hardly any phone lines, few roads and primitive airports. Can you name one other country where the West has been so generous in its investments (yes, its not a huge amount of investments when compared to East and South East Asia)? It's a miracle of Western generosity that India was given a telecoms infrastructure, roads, electricity supply and establishment of software houses even though it had almost nothing before.
India being paved with gold attracting millions of Mexicans. A very sick joke. It's an fanciful analogy used in Indian media for some years, and now reproduced in IHT through publication of AP report. And now India has come with another novel theme: Israel and its creation of barrier in Palestine. India creates a barrier with Bangladesh like the Israelis. These are just Indian tricks, fooling no one.
Facts are so very different. Actually India has been trying, for 30 years, to get Bangladesh to help India open up the road, rail and water routes so that India can have easy access to Assam, Tripura and Nagaland for its Army and looting of North East India's natural resources . Bangladesh knowing the unstable situation prevailing in India has refused to allow any such privileges. Bangladesh has refused to allow gas pipeline from Burma to run through her territory into India. Further Bangladesh refused India's attempt to get the Eurasia Highway routed to its convenience. So you see India's need to promote lies. Bangladesh is not some landlocked country. It is india which feels herself locked out. It's India which has no access to any of her neighbouring countries. The invisible barrier is against India, an unreliable and unstable neighbour to all the surrounding nations.
Now look at India's continued blocking Bhutan and Nepal's attempt to have direct road, rail and sea link to Bangladesh. Nepal is 12 miles away and Bhutan 50 miles from Bangladesh. Year after years of attempt to have India allow access roads from the landlocked nations to Bangladesh remain blocked. Such is the unruliness of India every year goods rot on the India-Bangladesh border because of one Indian excuse or another. And yet there is an UN Charter on landlocked nations and their right to access routes. India has been a bad example to the world. And now the world must take action or else a terrible and forbidding future beacons for Asia and beyond.
Indian media, Hindu fanatic BJP and even "liberals" have been talking about 5, 10, 15, 18, 20, 22, 25, 30 million Bangladesh citizens inside India for many years. Bangladesh is a short-cut and less loaded way of saying MUSLIM. It is ISLAMOPHOBIA at the heart of Indian lies. If racism is an ugly disease than India is at the heart of the virus. And this same India protests about racism against her at every forum in the world. India has no excuse for spreading lies, even using elements within its 25 million economic migrant elements living is places like UAE, Kenya, UK, Uganda and USA..


© Copyright 2003 by ittefaq.com