FOREIGN JOURNALIST

I HAVE had the privilege to live for more than 30 years in India.

To my knowledge, only two foreign journalists have stayed so long in this country: Mark Tully, who as you know was for long the South Asia BBC correspondent and myself.

It has long been my opinion that India is very difficult country to grasp for a foreign correspondent, as it is so different from the West, full of contradictions, paradoxes, baffling parameters, etc. Going from Delhi to Madras, for instance, is like flying from Paris to Athens, because there is absolutely no comparison between the two, as if you have passed from one continent to another. Thus, for a Westerner, say from Europe, where all the countries share more or less the same religion (Christianity), more or less the same ethnic origins (Caucasian), more or less the same food habits (meat) and more or less the same dress code (ties and dresses), India can be a very enigmatic country.

Disinformation about India by the intellectual media

Yet, not only do we find that Western correspondents are generally posted only for three, maximum five years in India ñ too short a time to really start getting the ABC of the subcontinent; but also, that most of them have ñ before even reaching India ñ very strong and biased ideas, prejudices, misconceptions, on the country they are supposed to report about in an impartial and fair manner.

Forget the fact that by the time they leave India, these foreign correspondents have even been more reinforced in their prejudices: the Hindu ìfundamentalistsî, the ìpersecutedî minorities of India, the ìHuman Rightsî abuses performed in Kashmir by the Indian Army, plus the usual folkloric the stories about India: the ìdashingî maharajas (who are absolutely irrelevant to modern India), the ìatrocitiesî on Indian women (no country in the world as India has given such an important place to its women), or the ìhorribleî sati and bride burning (an old British trick to show Hindus in a bad light).

I was lucky. First I came to India when I was very young (19), with hardly any prejudices, because I had never really thought about India; I was also immensely fortunate to have spent my first eight formative years in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram of Pondichery, where I met the Mother, a formidable Presence and read at length Sri Aurobindo, Indiaís modern Avatar, Revolutionary, (the first Congress leader to have advocated Indiaís Independence, if necessary by force), immense Poet, Philosopher and Yogi (yet totally ignored by todayís Indian youth); I was also extremely lucky that when I started journalism in the early 80s, I did freelancing assignments in rural areas, particularly in the South: Keralaís extraordinary Kalaripayat, the ancestor of all great Asian martial arts; the beautiful Ayyappa pilgrimage, also in the jungles of Kerala; the Ayanar sculptures in the villages of Tamil Nadu.

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These foreign correspondents have even

been more reinforced in their prejudices: the Hindu

ìfundamentalistsî, the ìpersecutedî minorities

of India, the ìHuman Rightsî abuses performed

in Kashmir by the Indian Army, plus the

usual folkloric the stories about India

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And this led to my most important discovery, which endured to this day (and I believe Mark Tully came to the same conclusions ñ read his books): namely that the genius of India was (and still is) in its villages ñ and not in the cities -- where an arrogant intelligentsia and a more and more westernized youth, have less and less idea about their roots and culture.

Even so, it took me ten years to feel that I was beginning to understand India and to discard the ideas I had somehow picked-up along the way:

that the Congress was the best party to lead India out of communalism; that secularism was the best option for the country, given its incredible ethnic and religious diversity; or that the RSS, the VHP and other Hindu groups were ìviolentî and dangerous. On a more positive note, it also took me ten years to understand what a wonderful culture and civilization Hindu India had been -- and still is in some way: how Hinduism never tried to use the might of its armies, as Islam and Christianity did, to convert other nations; how Hindus always recognized the divinity of other religions and never shied from also worshipping in Buddhist temples, Christian churches, or Muslim mosques; how India, since time immemorial, has been the land of refuge for all persecuted minorities of the world: the Jews, the Parsis, the Syrian Christians, or todayís Tibetans.

Only Marxists find fundamentalism in Hindus

It took me ten years to see, that far from being the fundamentalists described by the British and todayís Indian Marxists, Hindus have been at the receiving end of persecution for 1,600 years: first wave upon wave of Muslim invasions, which tried, in the most ruthless and horrifying manner, to wipe-off Hinduism from the face of the earth; then the more insidious European colonisation ñ but no less harmful ñ witness the Portuguese who crucified countless Brahmins in Goa, or the British under whose ìenlightenedî rule 30-million Indians died of famine. And it is not finished: todayís Hindus are still killed in Kashmir, in Bangladesh (see Taslima Nasreenís book Lajja), Pakistan or Afghanistan.

It also took me a long time to understand that Indians are sometimes their worst enemies: Indian journalists have often taken-up like parrots the slogans coined by the British to divide India and belittle its civilisation; Nehru blindly adopted most of the set-up left behind by the English, without bothering to borrow from Indiaís ancient genius and, as a result, Indiaís constitutional, judicial or educational system is totally non-Indian and only produces western clones.