An absolutely well worded, and deserved rebuttal to the Economists acrid articleI Give You Narendra Modi. A Must Read, I feel. The Economist’s Foulest Mouth Offensive, racist, and still unable to come to terms with the loss of Empire (actually even about losing America!). This is our reply to The Economist article on Modi at Madison Square Garden. Please share it, tweet it, let people know. What is it about foreign correspondents that makes them believe they are the ultimate authority on India, because they happened to have lived here for about three-four years? Is it because the sun shines through a certain body part of their pearly anatomy more clearly than it does through that of their ‘native’ counterparts? Or, because too much Indian sun invariably leads to incontinence and chronic indigestion in delicate constitutions? This has reference to one ‘P.F’’s salacious story in The Economist on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appearance at New York’s Madison Square Garden, earlier this week. India’s rocket scientists did, indeed, send a mission to Mars for the cost of ‘less than a rickshaw ride’, a statistic that wasn’t worked out by The Economist, but by Indian industrialist Mukesh Ambani, at the recent Make In India conclave. But our editorial team needed neither a degree in space technology (or, even in proctology) to get on to The Economist’s website and learn that P.F. stands for Patrick Foulis. Foulis has been the magazine’s New York Bureau Chief since earlier this year. Before that, he had spent four years in India, setting up the Mumbai bureau for the ‘viewspaper’. Who more ‘authoritative’ than P.F., was obviously the thinking at The Economist’s London HQ, to cover the Modi meeting at Madison Square Garden (MSG)? Any Brit worth his fish-and-chips-and vinegar would be over the moon being sent from muggy Mumbai to Manhattan’s first-world heaven. But the drastic change doesn’t seem to have suited Foulis’ incontinent constitution. In the opening lines of his piece, Foulis called Narendra Modi, the elected Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy, a ‘pain-in-the-ass’. It is only after readers protested that an Economist editor hurriedly attributed it to a hapless NYPD cop, adding a footnote that Foulis didn’t think Modi was one at all. Why then, was the police officer not quoted in the first instance, by a professional correspondent of one of the most respected magazines in the world? Or, maybe The Economist, too, like most other international media concerns, now hires cheap labour, not writers who base their stories on documentation and fact? Be that as it may, Foulis has been in New York for barely a few months. His article made it painfully obvious that he knows precious little: either about Manhattan or India. At the outset, let’s admit that Modi’s MSG turn wasn’t the greatest show on earth. It was gaudy, kitschy, loud and clichéd. Both the Star-Spangled Banner as well as Jana Gana Mana were sung shrilly, badly and flatly. But. Whether we are NRIs or resident Indians: criticizing a politician we voted for or whose campaign we supported, or whose policies we push through the US Congress, it is not our sole prerogative. Even this racist Economist employee hiding behind his initials—and now behind the skirts of his editor when the going got tough, yes, he has the right. But surely the least we can expect from The Economist is that it should make a point built on reason, not based on some bad experience with cab drivers in Mumbai (We can put out a list tomorrow on bad experiences with cab drivers in London, New York, Toronto, Amsterdam, Nairobi, Naples, Kinshasa, Dubai, Shanghai, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Tierra del Fuego). Here are excerpts of the piece, before it underwent a hasty editorial colonoscopy. Let’s demolish PF’s points one by one. He doesn’t know New York “YEAH, go that way,” yells a frazzled cop guarding a security cordon outside Penn Station. Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister, is the pain-in-the-ass who is snarling traffic around Madison Square Garden”. This is not only slanderous, but also shows that the author is wholly clueless about New York City. Some of us on this editorial team have lived and worked in mid-town Manhattan for years on end. No, not in a laundry or a sweets-shop in Jackson Heights or Queens, but as well-paid journalists in mid-town Manhattan. The annual General Assembly session at the UN in September, where the arrival of heads of government of—currently—193 countries—along with their entourages, cause crushing gridlock across mid-town Manhattan every year. This has been the case for 69 years. The area around MSG and 34th Street Penn Station—the rail hub connecting Manhattan to Long Island and other suburbs (and the cop who PF quotes is outside Penn Station—is also a massive shoppers’ paradise of cheap stores and illegal peddlers on sidewalks. All tourists through the year and massive entourages of visiting diplomats who come to the UN in September, head there to shop. As do New Yorkers, especially between September and December. Much like in India, these are the months of North America’s biggest festivals: Halloween, Thanksgiving and then Christmas. Consumer frenzy is at its peak, especially in the shoppers’ paradise that the Big Apple is. Real New Yorkers bear it with humour and fortitude. Snotty British reporters freshly arrived from a former colonial outpost, obviously do not. Oh, the unwashed natives! After the terribly hard life they led in India, we must understand how dreadful it must be to catch sight of masses of Indians in Manhattan all over again: the same Great Unwashed, who pushed, shoved and brushed their smelly selves past the poor reporter in disease-laden Chor Bazaar in Mumbai. Therefore, Foulis’ ride to MSG was a fortuitous opportunity to finally release all the putrefying disgust accumulated during his Mumbai sojourn. And being thousands of kilometers away from India—where such slander could have had repercussions—he could now freely grab the opportunity to call an Indian prime minister a ‘pain-in-ass’ and even hold him responsible for the chaos on Seventh Avenue. Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister in the world’s largest democracy in free and fair elections by electronic ballot. Not even opposition parties raised doubts over the veracity of the vote. But Foulis’ CV on his employers’ website, tells us he was raised in Scotland. Little wonder, for here’s what has been making headlines since the Independence vote in Foulis country some weeks ago. By mid-afternoon on the fourth day after the Scotland vote, almost 100,000 Scottish people had signed a petition, demanding a ‘re-vote’ of the referendum, ‘counted by impartial international parties’. Petitioners cited ‘countless evidences of fraud’ documented during the poll. ‘Investigate the procedures,’ the petition demanded. ‘Allow an independent re-count.’ ‘I have seen videos that look like cheating and also too many “Yes” voters for the result to be “No”,’ wrote one signatory, who had voted in favour of independence. ‘I am a “No” voter but even I think the poll was rigged,’ wrote another. Many stated that a counting officer at the Dundee polling station seemed to have lifted votes from a ‘Yes’ pile and placed them under ‘No’. Anyhow, back to Foulis’ ‘article’. Modi at Madison Square Garden Where’s my gin and tonic? “In the India of the past six decades, events like this were a reliable shambles of short-circuiting loudspeakers, security guards with lathi sticks and feudal leaders with appalling punctuality. But since elections in May, India has been run by Mr Modi. He is, this adoring crowd believes, India’s Margaret Thatcher or Lee Kuan Yew. In time he will make India a success, not a continent-sized embarrassment”. Even setting aside the fact that Modi and other politicians held rally after rally in the remotest areas of India for the past several years—let alone six decades—where everything functioned efficaciously, Foulis himself arrived in India in 2008 to set up the Economist’s first Mumbai bureau. Somehow and despite the “short circuits”, he seems to have managed. He even authored a 2011 ‘special report’ on business in India and an earlier one on ‘emerging markets’ (by candlelight?). He lived with his family in fashionable Bandra. And like at many seminars during his years in India, he represented his publication at the ‘Evoke India’ symposium on December 4, 2013. In a speech ostensibly about ‘corruption in emerging economies’ (see YouTube here) in which he tells his Indian audience nothing they don’t know already, Foulis begins by confessing that he paid his rent into an offshore banking account (it certainly sounds like one of the tonier Bandra pads) whose account-holder he did not know anything about. Now this is worrying. The accredited-correspondent for the Economist violated Indian laws by paying money into an unknown offshore account for four long years? And as a reporter, he did not bother to get to the bottom of the mystery either? And why did Foulis participate in public events in this ‘continent-sized embarrassment’ at all? Or moderate discussions (telling Adi Godrej, only to be snubbed by the industrialist at one such — that it ‘was impossible to get to the bottom of the consumer pyramid for western industrialists’). In any case, why would western industrialists be interested in consumers in this hell-hole? We would have to ask the senators who showed up at Modi’s MSG bash the other day. We would also have to ask US President Barack Obama who will have a summit meeting with Narendra Modi shortly. Finally, maybe Foulis could ask his own PM David Cameron, whose overtures towards India are becoming embarrassing (Congratulations @narendramodi. Keen to work together”, he had tweeted as one of the first world leaders, to the newly elected PM). Oops, he’s Foulisly trying to figure out secularism too! Here’s his dopiness about India’s Muslims (Dopey in Snow White was a much better dwarf, and never tried to punch above his weight. This is from urbandictionary: 1. To punch above your weight: (a) It’s so much easier to punch above your weight in a foreign country when you have an accent.) “At 11.45am precisely, a film shows a fantasy India of robots, billionaires’ houses and vast green fields. It meshes these images with shots of those who did not support, or probably would not have supported, Mr Modi: praying Muslims, and the two deceased heroes of India’s independence movement, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi. Modi claims ownership of all of India now, even his foes.” Hundreds of Bohra Muslims were at MSG to hear Modi, cheering wildly, waving flags. Why didn’t Foulis ask some of these people – they do speak English – whether they had been paid to show up wearing skull-caps and hijab? It is another issue that the affluent Bohras would have fallen off their chairs laughing, of course. Here is a story from rediff that took the trouble to speak to some of those Bohras present. The story quotes some Indian Christians too. And here are some more statistics for the “India expert”. Most of the BJP’s gains in Muslim-dominated areas were in the politically crucial states of Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. The party won more than half of the 87 Lok Sabha seats of areas with sizeable Muslim populations. These included 27 in Uttar Pradesh, 19 in West Bengal, 8 each in Assam and Kerala, 6 each in Bihar and Jammu& Kashmir, 4 in Maharashtra, 2 each in A.P and Delhi and one each in Haryana, Tripura, Lakshadweep, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand. But rediff is an Indian website. Indians are corrupt. And unlike in Scotland, fudging figures is in our genes. So here’s a link to a story in the British daily, The Guardian on the same subject instead. But wait! The byline is Muslim: Indian Muslims too, are surely not averse to twisting facts. So here’s Foulis’ own countryman, one John Chalmers, writing for Reuters of UK. But Reuters’ local researcher, too, seems to be Indian. Therefore, here’s the Last Word itself—the BBC on the same subject. Hey, America got Independence in 1776! “Next, in response to a meticulous cue, a handful of blinking American Congressmen, who have been flattered or press-ganged into appearing, go on stage. They get a cheer: this may be the only place in the disunited states of America where that happens. The national anthems are sung: the Star Spangled Banner, first and with care, then India’s, with abandon.” The Congressmen were ‘flattered or press-ganged?’ They speak English. Why didn’t you ask them? Isn’t that what reporters are supposed to do? What are you afraid of? The libel laws of the United States? Why would they need to appear at the event, let alone come on stage, unless there was ‘something in it for them’? So diseased is Foulis, that he doesn’t seem to realize he now lives in the largest capitalist society in the world. So, here, again, is some information for the ignoramus: (Source : CNN-IBN online, which Foulis will surely redeem because of its US component): Even before Modi touched down in the United States, a total of 83 US lawmakers signed a letter asking House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner to invite Modi to address a joint session of the Congress. ‘The message is clear: the United States and India have a unique relationship on shared democratic values. PM Modi’s visit is an opportunity to further expand this relationship,’ Brad Sherman, Congressman and member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said. He was spearheading an effort with his fellow Congressmen Ted Poe and Eni Faleomavaega to request Modi’s address to the Joint Session. Here’s also a link to short interviews with other Congressmen Jerrold Nadler and Joseph Crowley. None of these names sound Indian to us. So were they all bribed or bullied by the (Indian) media or Modi’s PR team to undertake these initiatives and make these remarks? “Mr Modi ignores the dignitaries completely: idiots.” For someone who comes from a society that would bow to HM The Queen, even if she arrived three hours late due to Manhattan’s gridlock, it must be hard to understand that a democratically-elected leader must be more egalitarian. Modi was meeting the very same Congressmen later. He did walk past them with a ‘Namaste’, anxious to keep the crowds waiting no longer. But since the Economist reporter (should we keep calling him a ‘reporter’?) would have only experienced—and barely nodded to—his cook, gardener and driver in Mumbai greeting their sahib in this manner, how can we expect him to understand the significance of the greeting? The Gujarat riots………..again “After riots in the state of Gujarat in 2002 in which at least a thousand people, mainly Muslims, were killed, Mr Modi, then the state’s chief minister, was banned from travelling to America. American officials called him a monster, a demagogue, a fanatic. Now they close down Manhattan’s streets for him, and America’s politicians stand here as his stage props. Sweeter still, Mr Modi’s acceptability is not a product of his remorse or decisive acquittal, but of his power: winning an election in a country of 1.25 billion people”…”To get here, to the Garden, Mr Modi has spent decades roaring himself hoarse thousands of times before crowds of peasants in parched fields. Now it is time for some magnanimity, at least at first.” Foulis’ glee in American officials calling Modi a ‘monster’, etc. is as palpable as is his outrage over their inviting the democratically elected Prime Minister of India. His inability to accept the dismissal by India’s highest judicial instance, the Supreme Court, of charges against Narendra Modi based upon the findings of its own Special Investigation Team (SIT) too, is understandable. After all and even after every single court of justice in the UK – including its highest judicial authority—had ruled against the British Foreign Office for its criminal, constitutional violation of intimidating Indian Ocean islanders in Diego Garcia by gassing their pets and stuffing and deporting 2,000 of them in the holds of ships to dump on Mauritius and Seychelles in the 1970s, Her Majesty the Queen overruled even the highest British court verdict with the wave of a scepter just some years ago. Diego Garcia had been ‘leased’ to the United States to set up its largest military base in exchange for US Pershing missiles and that was that. Who gives a rat’s ass about thousands of deported, impoverished Diego Garcians, who languish in poverty and misery in Mauritius , Seychelles and in grotesque community housing outside Gatwick airport in the UK? That is the only kind of justice and ‘democracy’ that Foulis knows. How can he be expected to accept the electoral choice and the verdict of a Supreme Court of a banana republic like India? Read the two links to stories on Diego Garcia, Britain’s dirtiest secret below. They appeared in the international media (and also in India) and were authored by a member of the Swarajya editorial team. Most importantly, take an hour out to watch Stealing A Nation, award-winning Australian journalist John Pilger’s chilling film with real archival and contemporary footage on how dirty Britain played in Diego Garcia. All the links are here. (Story 1, Story 2, Story 3) ”Mr Modi calls himself a small man; a former tea-seller. He says he reveres democracy. Indians have lived like slaves for a thousand years, he notes, ruled by outsiders, most recently the British. The key to Patrick Foulis’ problems seem to lie in this final excerpt. Foreign correspondents who live in India on Euro-strong salaries (exchanging stuffy apartments in say, Tunbridge Wells for palatial mansions with gardens and butlers serving them sundowners), cannot reconcile themselves to the fact that Manhattan traffic, instead of parting for them—like the Red Sea for Moses—is doing so for a mere Indian. Neither can they reconcile themselves to the more sordid chapters of the history of their own countries. Mr Foulis: the sun set on the British Empire 67 years ago. Take it on the chin and move on. As for The Economist: perhaps it’s time to restore your formidable reputation and hire real writers and not racist upper-crust Britishers still pining for the Raj?
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 14:21:35 +0000