BHARATA BHARATI

There was a strange question on Quora recently: Is India becoming the most hated country?

It reminded me of the years after Nirbhaya’s rape and murder, when a massive campaign was launched worldwide to portray Indian men as rapists. It was so massive that it reached not only local papers in Germany and probably everywhere else, but a local paper in Nuremberg dedicated half a page to her memory even one year after it had happened.  The impact of this campaign was extraordinarily “successful” if one could use this term:  in March 2015 a biochemistry professor at the University of Leipzig refused admission to her course to an Indian student because of India’s “rape problem”. It even turned out that this was not the only case.

Since this campaign started soon after the news about the Rotherham grooming gangs of mainly Pakistani men came out in the open, I wondered if the questioner wanted to know how well the business of maligning India had progressed and if India is on the way of becoming the most hated country.

Here is my reply:

Oh no, India can never become the most hated country—never mind how much media and missionaries and other vested interests try to portray it as such.

There are too many people in the world who know India, who know her profound philosophy, who know how much she has contributed to civilization, more than any other country in this world, who know how kind and open-minded her people are, how they live and let live and this includes millions of cows, monkeys, stray dogs, even tigers, leopards, elephants, snakes, etc., in spite of a huge population on little space.

Too many people know how colourful and joyful the atmosphere is during the many festivals, which have mostly a religious nature, they know how alive the country is and how generously India shares her knowledge like Yoga or Ayurveda, how amazing her culture is—music, dance, sculpture, architecture. And also, there are too many people who know Indians who live abroad and know that they are among the best immigrants possible.

But yes, attempts are on to portray India in very poor light, and “rapes in India” and “atrocities against minorities” are preferred news on foreign TV channels, like on German DW (Deutsche Welle) or BBC, when the same channels will not broadcast rapes that happen in Germany or Britain.

A poll in England recently showed that Indians are seen positively (+25), while Pakistanis are seen negatively (-4). The amazing thing is that Indians and Pakistanis are basically the same people. The only difference is that some Indians converted to Islam during the long Muslim rule of their country and at the time of Independence, they demanded their own country as they didn’t want to live together with Hindus. And while hardly any Hindus are left in Pakistan, India did allow Muslims, who did not want to move to Pakistan, stay and their number is even increasing significantly.

So maybe there is one condition: India can never become the most hated country as long as it remains majority Hindu!

This post got an amazing reaction—over 40.000 views within 24 hours, which was exceptionally high. Yet more or less from one moment to the other, the views suddenly dropped substantially, just at the time when I got a notification from Quora. A person with a Muslim name requested me to drop the last sentence of my post.

I didn’t do it, because what I had written is the truth. – Maria Wirth Blog, 25 May 2016

» Maria Wirth is a German psychology graduate and author who lives in Uttarakhand.

Filed under: india, pakistan | Tagged: christian propaganda, hinduphobia, pakistan, psychological warfare, rape |