KASHMIR: THE CROSS IGNORANCE OF THE FRENCH MEDIA

Following the assassination of 28 Hindus in Pahalgam by Pakistani-backed Islamic terrorists on April 22, India bombed Kashmiri separatist training camps inside Pakistani territory. Reading the French newspapers reporting these events, one wonders, on the one hand, whether the correspondents based in Delhi are truly fulfilling their mission of informing their often ignorant readers and listeners about the complexity of the Indian subcontinent ; or, as usual, whether they are deliberately propagating the hyper-leftist idealism that views the world through the distorting prism of its prejudices, and even the hatred that the left propagates against everything it doesn't like.

Let us recall the facts : Pakistan is an Islamist country, often prey to military dictatorships, which was created in 1947 with the benevolent help of the British, because the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent did not want to live in a country with a Hindu majority. Hindus, who today number 800 million in India, and 1.2 billion worldwide, are a most friendly and tolerant community, which, unlike Islam, has integrated into all the countries where Hindus have been settled, whether England, the United States, Mauritius or France. Moreover, Hindus have never sought to convert anyone, and Hindu philosophy and culture has been exported peacefully, on the one hand to the East, the marvellous temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia are testimony to this ; and on the other hand towards the West : Zoroastrianism is inspired by ancient Indian writings and historians, such as Alain Daniélou, have noted that the Druids had borrowed from the Vedas.

Pakistan, from its inception, began exporting Islamic terrorism : note that most of the perpetrators of the attacks on the World Trade Centre in the United States in 2011 were trained in Pakistan ; on the other hand, Pakistani intelligence services support, finance, arm, and train Indian separatists in Kashmir, as well as Khalistan’s.

On the one hand, you have the world's largest democracy, India, which today has the highest GDP on our planet, in the process of supplanting China as a land of investment for the West ; and on the other, Pakistan, a small country on the verge of bankruptcy, anti-Indian, anti-Western, and where Sunni and Shiite Muslims are killing each other. But reading the French media these days, including my old newspaper Le Figaro - and this is very sad - these two countries are equal before God - and it is especially India that is the main culprit. The hatred of Le Monde, Le Figaro, France 24, RFI, etc. against the Indian BJP government and its leader Narendra Modi, even though he was democratically elected three times by 700 million Indians, is sad to see. Moreover, Pakistan, which possesses nuclear weapons, the technology for which was graciously provided by China, is making a new club blackmail to the world : " If you don't pressure India to stop its strikes, we will trigger a nuclear holocaust. " It works every time : President Trump or Emmanuel Macron put pressure on India, despite being the victim of terrible Islamist terrorist attacks for 20 years, attacks directly linked to Pakistan (including the one in Mumbai in 2008, which left nearly 200 dead), to call for calm. Of course, Turkey, always on the lookout for a caliphate, of which Pakistan would be a part, and China, join the chorus.

What is the primary reason for this relentless attack on India by the French media ? As a journalist who has covered this complex, mysterious, and marvellous subcontinent for 35 years, and who has also written some thirty books on South Asia, I have only one answer : "The CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) Indologists, sponsored by the French government and ultra-leftist in their idealism, have been harping on the same hostile clichés for decades : poverty, caste, and, of course, the 'Hindu fundamentalists.' Their influence, including that of their leader, Christophe Jaffrelot, on the French media, is still extremely pernicious : even when I was at Le Figaro, they wrote countless letters to my editor-in-chief, Franz Olivier Gilbert, complaining about me, calling me Islamophobic and pro-Hindu !

Isn't it time for the truth to come out and for us to take another look at India, a future great power, a friend of the West, a land of asylum, for all the persecuted religious communities in the world, including the Zoroastrians (Parsis), Jews (India is the only country in the world where Jews have never been persecuted), and Tibetans today have found refuge ? But for that to happen, our politicians and our media would have to put aside their false ideas and inform us correctly.

François Gautier