A Wall Street Journal reader, Avatans Kumar, shares his exchanges with the newspaper and points out the biased reporting.
Western media’s coverage of the Ram Mandir has been extremely biased and patronizing. Here are a couple of examples from the Wall Street Journal.
On January 17, just a couple of days before the Prana Pratishtha in Ayodhya, the Wall Street Journal published this op-ed piece of Sadanand Dhume.
I wrote a Letter to the Editor about this piece:
Dear Editor:
While reading Modi, Ayodhya, and the Fall of Nehru’s Secular Temple (East is East, January 17, 2024), one fails to understand the meaning of “Hindu nationalists/nationalism” because the author never defines them. On the so-called “Nehruvian secularism,” the author’s admission that “Nehru and his successors failed to devise a viable framework for pluralism in India” and how Mr. Nehru changed Hindu marriage and divorce laws but did not do it for Muslims contradicts his claim about its existence. Perhaps secularism for “India’s Westernized elites” was a mere academic abstraction rather than a matter of statecraft. Also, India became a constitutionally secular republic only in 1975 when the “secular” and “socialist” were inserted in the preamble during the Emergency, almost 11 years after Mr. Nehru had passed away. The author also fails to provide any evidence in support of his claim that the so-called “Hindu nationalists have struggled to accommodate the 1 in 5 Indians who profess a faith other than Hinduism.”
Sincerely,
Avatans Kumar
There was no response from the WSJ.
On January
I wrote the following Letter to the Editor:
Dear Editor:
The most glaring lacuna in Krishna Pokharel and Tripti Lahiri’s reporting on the Ram Temple in Ayodhya was that it did not have a single reference to the fact that the said mosque was built by demolishing an existing Hindu place of worship. The unanimous decision of the five-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India was based, among other things, on an extensive archaeological study of the demolished structure ordered by India’s court system and conducted by the Archaeological Survey of India. It was a 500-year-old dispute, no less.
Sincerely,
Avatans Kumar
Surprisingly, I received the following response from WSJ’s “Correspondence and Corrections Editor.”
I responded with another email.
Thanks for your response. I appreciate it.
I did read the linked article. However, the privilege of a hyperlink was not available to WSJ’s print edition readers. Unfortunately, the fact that a temple had existed before 1528 CE was not revealed to them. Was it done maliciously? I don’t know. But to many, it would appear so.
In case you are interested, here is my article on this subject for your reference.
Thanks again.
Thanks,
Avatans Kumar
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