Many Indians and Westerner scholars are deeply disappointed by CNN’s coverage of events in Afghanistan and the recent India-Pakistan tensions. CNN’s top journalists and anchor persons, including Wolf Blitzer and Christiane Amanpour, seem frozen in a Cold War geopolitical mindset.

 

A cursory glance of the recent CNN headlines on its web site suggests a lack of fairness, balance, and reliable content in its South Asia/Afghanistan coverage. I have been struck by the propagandist tone of many of CNN’s reports. Here are a few samples:

 

CNN Report: “Musharraf heads for Nepal summit”. It is troubling that the Pakistani military chief who toppled a democratically elected government to assume the presidency of Pakistan, and who was persona non grata prior to 9/11, is now depicted by CNN as a world class statesman. Meanwhile, India’s Prime Minister Vajpayee, heading a democracy eight times the size of Pakistan, is depicted as the underdog vying for attention at the SAARC Summit.

 

CNN Video: “CNN’s Walter Rodgers profiles Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, the general turned politician whose balancing act keeps his country together (January 1)”. Such a report appears like a release from Gen. Musharraf’s public relations team, rather than objective news analysis, calling into question CNN’s independence.

 

CNN Video: “CNN’s Ash-har Quraishi reports the Indian government has suspended operation of the only train connecting India and Pakistan (December 31).” There is also a CNN report titled, “From Lahore: Last train to India leaves Pakistan amid war fears.” But this topic is covered entirely from Pakistan’s perspective, namely, that India has done something against the norms of friendly behavior and that this harasses ordinary citizens. It completely fails to point out India’s position, namely that Pakistan’s ISI had regularly used this train to smuggle terrorists, counterfeit currency, and ISI operatives into India.  Moreover, it also ignores the fact that it was India that promoted such road and rail connections in the first place.

 

CNN Report: “Pakistan arrests leader tied to Dec. 13 attack.” The report depicts Gen. Musharraf as a hero in the war against terrorism. However, CNN has failed to point out that not only was Gen. Musharraf intimately involved in the training and support of terrorists and terrorist-training schools in Pakistan, but that the actions he is now taking are mostly cosmetic. Placing terrorist leaders and fire-breathing Islamic clerics under house arrest is meaningless, unless followed by further action. In fact, Musharraf later revealed that he had no intentions of complying with India’s request to extradite individuals charged with terrorism, including the recent deadly attack on its Parliament. Instead, Gen. Musharraf has demanded proof from India, similar to the Taliban tactics of demanding proof from President Bush concerning the guilt of Bin Laden.

 

Biased Procedures

 

Here is a list of what appear to be biased procedures and practices:

 

1. CNN’s reports from Pakistan far outnumber its reports from India, even though it has had a Delhi bureau for much longer than its Pakistan bureau, and its Delhi bureau was one of its first and largest in Asia. Have CNN’s Pakistan based journalists lost their objectivity and “nose for news” because the Pakistani military and elite has learnt the fine art of catering to international media?  (This relates to the issue concerning al-taqiyah mentioned later.)
2. CNN quotes Pakistan’s statements not as ‘claims’ the way it quotes India’s statements. In fact, Pakistan’s ‘claims’ are presented as the news itself, even when it pertains to India’s actions. So CNN is projecting events through Pakistani lens, making the slant in its coverage obvious to informed viewers.
3. Footage of Musharraf and other Pakistani officials far outnumber those of Indian leaders and spokespersons.
4. In interviewing Pakistani officials, CNN’s journalists treat them with kid gloves, as they usually do the American president. CNN’s investigative journalism skills are not apparent. It has failed to probe for the crucial information that the public interest requires.
5. CNN has invited many Pakistani non-governmental ‘experts’, including pro-Pakistani US Congressmen, without a comparable number of pro-India experts or Congressmen from the India Caucus.

 

Serious Errors and Omissions by CNN

 

As a result of CNN’s weak and unbiased coverage, many of the contradictions in Musharraf remain unquestioned, despite being of key American and global concern. In the interest of its quality control, CNN should have an independent panel of experts analyze the following:

 

1. Immediately after 9/11, Pakistan did not break ranks with Islamic countries in condemning Al Qaeda or the attacks on America, until India came forward with its unequivocal condemnation, and by offering to give the US whatever assistance was required in combating terrorism. Musharraf acknowledged, on Pakistan television, that India’s support for the US position had left him with no choice but to do likewise. CNN has not explained that this so-called “top US ally” was dragged into the job when he was left with no choice. Musharraf feared that the US and India would join to take on Pakistan-Afghanistan as two parts of the same problem, and his decision was therefore merely pragmatic. Even after Pakistan’s commitment to helping the U.S., there have been a number of diplomatic and military ploys that the Pakistani leadership has employed to deceive the American leaders and the public.
2. Immediately after 9/11, Senator Joe Biden said that he had held very good talks with the head of the notorious Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan in Washington, D.C., leading him and other lawmakers to see the ISI as the main partner of the US in the war against terrorism. However, the US would later confirm that, based upon Indian intelligence reports, the head of the ISI was himself a Taliban leader. Consequently, the US pressured Musharraf to fire the ISI chief, but CNN covered up these embarrassments. This was the same man who led a Pakistani delegation to Kandahar to try and “negotiate” with the Taliban leaders for the peaceful surrender of Bin Laden. This expedition was clearly a ploy and a façade, but CNN’s reporting seemed too naive to grasp this.
3. CNN has repeatedly blamed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan after the war against the Soviets for Pakistan’s problems vis-à-vis terrorism and Islamic militancy.  CNN reporters and commentators have prefaced their reports and analyses by placing the guilt on the US for the growth of terrorism in the area. On the contrary, this theory applies only to Afghanistan, which the US abandoned after the rout of the Soviets. It does not apply to Pakistan and does not rationalize its support of Islamic militancy in the region. Pakistan thrived on becoming a “jihad” exporter; it schooled Afghan refugee children in jihad schools, called madrassas, specifically for export. This brought clout to Pakistan in the region, and gave its Islamic clergy and Islamicized military a sense of importance that Pakistan neither deserved nor commanded in the rest of the world.  In particular, it provided Pakistan the necessary “human resources” for its proxy war in Kashmir against India. Pakistan is the founder and sustainer of the Taliban, not its victim.
4. For the first two weeks of US air strikes in Afghanistan, Musharraf’s “intelligence data” misled the American forces into bombing Northern Alliance targets and sparing Kabul. CNN interpreted this as a wise strategy, presenting the occupation of Kabul by the Northern Alliance as inimical to US interests. This, too, was manipulated by the Musharraf regime to buy time for the surreptitious evacuation of the thousands of regular Pakistani military personnel and high-ranking Taliban members who were fighting the Americans. CNN  helped cover up the Pakistani deception by not reported the extent to which the Taliban were, in fact, Pakistani nationals, including many Pakistani senior army officers. Meanwhile, the American public was wondering why the US bombing was having no effect.
5. Musharraf wanted no fighting during Ramadan.  He repeatedly warned that Muslims all over the world would take umbrage at such US action. Those warnings were empty threats and yet another example of strategic posturing that CNN bought hook, line, and sinker. Had there been a pause in the military action then, it would have facilitated the escape of more Pakistani Talibans with the help of the ISI.
6. After only a week of US bombing, Musharraf argued on CNN that American bombing of Al Quaeda’s Afghanistan bases should end, and that Americans should trust Pakistan to do the clean-up and mop up operations. Secretary Powell supported this initially.
7. Even after joining the US alliance against terrorism, Musharraf insisted that the Taliban are “not so bad except for a small number of extremists”, and strongly recommended that the Taliban should be refurbished into a new government, or at least brought in as an important and stabilizing segment of any new government. Secretary Powell publicly supported this proposal for several days, as if his strategies were formulated in Islamabad.
8. Musharraf received one billion dollars of US taxpayer money, with no restrictions on what he may do with it. CNN has not explained that similar aid was previously misused by the Pakistani elite, including its army, and used for funding militant Islam.  Those monies are not targeted to tackle the real problems of Pakistan: a lack of democratic institutions, and an overdose of Islamic fervor.
9. CNN has not adequately explained to viewers that Pakistan has not closed down the madrassas where the Taliban were trained. The print media in the US has explained that there are over 39,000 madrassas in Pakistan with an enrollment in the millions.
10. The Pakistani army is still filled with Taliban alumni at the lower ranks, and an overthrow of the Musharraf regime is considered only a matter of time. CNN has not done a report on the Talibanization of Pakistan, especially of the lower levels of its army.
11. Most senior Taliban officers are still at large. CNN has not informed its viewers of the extent to which the Taliban leaders were top Pakistani military officials. In fact, under Taliban rule, the distinction between Pakistan and Afghanistan in terms of governance and military was often blurred.

 

Shallow Interpretation by CNN

 

The entire handling of news and analysis of this region by CNN appears seriously flawed. For instance, many Indians and impartial Western observers are concerned about the following:

 

After 9/11, CNN’s analysis for the first few weeks was based entirely on two assumptions: (a) The Taliban were said to be fighting because of poverty in Muslim countries allegedly caused by the rich countries – a Marxist theory of conflict – when, in fact, the Taliban are opposed to modernity, technology, and science. There was considerable mobilization of American guilt caused by such misportrayals. (b) The US stand on Palestine was singularly blamed, but with no attempt to educate viewers on jihad teachings against non-Muslims in the Koran and in the madrassas. Islam was depicted by Christiane Amanpour and others on CNN as a religion of peace par excellence.

 

CNN failed to probe the textbooks and curriculum in Pakistan-based Taliban schools and madrassas to uncover the source of Islamic terrorism. “Talib” means student of the Koran. The Taliban are students raised in Pakistan’s refugee camps and taught in Pakistan’s madrassas, funded with Saudi money.  In most talks I have recently given on American campuses, audiences are surprised to learn the basic facts, such as the Taliban being a Made-in-Pakistan movement. Why has this not come out on CNN the way it has in the print media? One would have expected CNN to run specials utilizing American educators to dissect and read out excerpts from the textbooks used in the madrassas, the Pakistani sponsored jihad factories.

 

CNN has made it seem as if Musharraf is Pakistan and Pakistan is Musharraf. But only 10% of Pakistanis in various opinion polls would vote for him in a free election. A proper coverage of Pakistan would also explain the widespread opposition, both from Islamic fundamentalists and from democratic parties. Is CNN reporting the reality, or campaigning for the General?

 

Besides jihadis-for-rent, the export of narcotics has been another major product of Pakistan and its Taliban ally. How many CNN viewers know of this?

 

CNN has failed to explain that it suits the short-term US foreign policy to turn a blind eye to the blatant misdeeds of Pakistan vis-à-vis not only India, but also concerning Chechen and Chinese terrorists being trained in their country.

 

CNN has not reported that many people in India are disgusted with the blatant double standards of the US in dealing with the terrorist attacks against India. In fact, they think that if the US had addressed the concerns expressed by India during all these years, it would not have had to suffer the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Indians wonder how the Bush administration can ask India to show restraint when it has been bludgeoned and bloodied by terrorism for the past decade or so.

 

CNN has not compared India’s internal war against Islamic terrorism with the US external war against the same: To what extent were India’s and Israel’s so-called “human rights violations” in their internal wars similar or less severe than the methods of war used by the US in Afghanistan? Are the “human rights violations” in some cases the same as “collateral damage” in others? (I am all for prevention of such violations, BUT reporting standards must be consistently applied to all nations and all sides.)

 

As recently as in the latest SAARC Summit in Katmandu, Musharraf said on January 6^th that: “It is equally important that a distinction be maintained between acts of legitimate resistance and freedom struggles on the one hand and acts of terrorism on the other.” In other words, the denouncing of terrorism by Pakistan is a qualified one, in which there is an escape clause for whatever is deemed to be a “freedom struggle”. This is an impossible definition to agree with, as even the Al Qaeda and other jihad groups feel convinced that they are “freedom struggles”. By whose standards and through whose lens would this distinction be made? CNN has been too shallow to probe such issues with any sophistication.

 

Did the American praise for Musharraf push India into the recent military buildup, because India had to make sure that its own fight against Islamic terrorism is not ignored? Is it a racist attitude to consider Indian victims of terrorism as being less important than Western ones? CNN’s job is to ask such troubling questions.

 

CNN has failed to inquire why Pakistan’s non-Muslim population declined from over 10% in 1947 to under 2% today – an act of ethnic cleansing – whereas India’s Muslim population has increased from 10% to over 14% during the same period? Should the treatment of non-Muslim minorities in Islamic countries be raised as an issue by CNN interviewers when the Islamic spokespersons complain about the treatment of Muslims in the US?

 

Why have the Afghan government’s severe criticisms of Pakistan, including its training of Kashmir terrorists and its role in the Talibanization of Afghanistan, not been given adequate play on CNN? CNN has not given enough coverage to the Northern Alliance spokesmen, who, after all, were the real US allies on the ground, and who have repeatedly named Pakistan as the main culprit they had to fight.

 

Why have CNN analysts failed to point out the parallels between Musharraf and the many dictators previously groomed and supported by the US – such as Noriega of Panama, Ferdinand Marcos of Philippines, the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, and the Saudi royal family, to name a few? Those dictators and authoritarian leaders were masters at hoodwinking the gullible American public and media.  Their Westernized appearances, their congeniality and bonhomie with Western diplomats and media personnel, enabled them to mask effectively their anti-democratic and brutal regimes. Perhaps, Musharraf even used the same custom tailors and PR agencies as these other dictators did to help package himself on CNN.

 

Since the West considers democracy as the sine qua non to bring modernity and prosperity to a people, should this not be the focus of what is wrong in Islamic countries?  Why has CNN helped Americans forget about the so-called road map to democracy in Pakistan that was promised by Musharraf after his military coup; and how is this related to his formal announcement to remain President even after the next “election”?

 

Proposed Mini-Series: History of Wahhabi-Deobandi-Taliban

 

Americans cannot fully understand Islamic terrorism without understanding the Taliban movement and its theological foundations. Having watched CNN for hundreds of hours since 9/11, which has been good for CNN ratings, viewers deserve to be educated through a few informative mini-series and documentaries. One of these should give a history of how the Taliban variety of Islam started in the first place. This should be done without fear of Islamic threats.

 

In 1703, two important men were born, one in Arabia and the other in India. Shah Waliullah was born in Delhi. His father, Adbur Rahim, a scholar-bureaucrat in Aurangzeb’s court, had founded the Rahimiyya Madrassa in Delhi. Years later, his disciple, Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi went to Mecca on hajj and met the followers of a similar movement that had been independently founded by Wahhab.

 

Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab was also born in 1703, in Najd, Arabia. He collaborated with a desert tribal warlord named ‘Saud’, whose descendants are now known as the Saudi Royal Family. This led to a new kind of Islam that emphasized a return to fundamentals and a rejection of modernity and the West. It asserted the triumph of Islam over all others as being God’s will.

 

Wahhabism later lost some wars in Arabia. But when Waliullah’s followers in India visited Arabia in the 19^th century, they joined forces, giving the Wahhabi ideology a new base – India. It was from India that major jihads were launched against the British that kept them from taking control over Afghanistan.

 

Waliullah’s followers united the Islamic sects of Naqshbandi, Qadiri and Chishti, and created a nexus in a town in India called Deoband. Both Wahhabism and Deobandism were initially peaceful responses against modernity and the West. But the ideological seeds were sown for what later turned into a massive Saudi funded madrassa school system of extremism throughout the subcontinent. The Deobandi madrassa in Lucknow is Mullah Omar’s alma mater.

 

After the birth of Pakistan, the nexus of this movement shifted to Pakistan. Zia, Bhutto, and Sharif each utilized this fundamentalism for political leverage at home and against India.

 

Another key point that the media must bring out is this: When a few courageous Islamic liberals, such as President Nasser, attempted secularism and democracy, the West found it threatening, and preferred to support the totalitarian Kings and armies that seemed easier to control short-term. By supporting totalitarian rulers against nimble democracies and secularist states, the West set the stage for a popular uprisings from within these countries. In the absence of any democratic institution building, it was always Islamic fundamentalism that was sufficiently organized at the grass roots to be able to overthrow the dictators. Hence the bipolar choice of dictatorship versus Islamic fundamentalism in almost every Islamic country today.

 

Journalists should do a post-mortem on the West’s policy against Non-Alignment.  The West, especially the U.S., opposed the three post colonialist leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement – Nehru, Nasser, and Tito – tooth and nail. Would things have been different today (in the Middle East as a result of Nasser, and in Yugoslavia as a result of Tito) if the West had not opposed them so vehemently, and instead helped them build democracy and secularism in the Third World, which is what all three men had hoped to achieve?

 

Today, the West finally seems to realize that it is a lack of democratic institutions and experience, more than anything else, that have led nations down religious fundamentalist paths and on to terrorism.

 

Only one of these post colonial Third World experiments still functions as a democracy – India. And that, too, in spite of US attempts to subvert it. Imagine if India had also gone the way of post-Nasser Egypt and post-Tito Yugoslavia: the entire region, all the way from the Middle East to South East Asia, including India, Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia, could have been one Islamic fundamentalist crescent.

 

A good CNN question would be: What were the consequences of the Western Ego’s internal battle for the need for global democracy versus the desire to have a servile Third World? In this context, the role of India’s democracy should be examined – as the crucial factor in preventing the spread of Communism and Arabized Islam throughout the non-Western world.

 

With the democratic option unavailable to the people of almost all Islamic nations, the orthodox clergy has been able to use Islamic ideologies to mobilize resistance to the US backed puppet rulers. This is an internal clash for power, Muslims versus Muslims. It later gets ‘externalized’ against the West depicted as the puppeteers supporting the unpopular dictators.

 

The dispute with Israel is just one such externalization, but the root cause is the lack of democracy in Muslim nations and their pre-Reformation antagonism against modernity and secularism.

 

Short-sightedness leads the West to fund and arm puppets who are against democracy. Puppets tend to be Westernized in metaphors, with yuppie Armani-suited appearances, fluent in global culture, driving BMWs, and well-traveled – in other words, socially ‘comfortable’ with American policymakers and media. CNN’s Musharraf is merely the latest in a long list.

 

By contrast, democratic leaders and true voices of poor countries appear to Americans the way Gandhi appeared to the British – an alien, exotic, inferior ‘other’.

 

Western delusion continues in the subsequent stage, when the religious underpinnings of the  mobilization get ignored, and it is imagined that this is not about religion. But it is.

 

CNN should hire high quality independent scholars, who are not part of the Islamic lobby, to help produce the documentary. Some of these independent scholars and writers include Ibn Warraq, Tariq Ali, Walid Phares, V.S. Naipaul, and Farrukh Dhondy. Some of the New York Times journalists to consult are Rick Bragg, Neil MacFarquhar, Blaine Harden.

 

Proposed Mini-Series: Pakistan’s Identity Crisis

 

Without giving the necessary historical background, CNN has not created the framework and context in which to enable its viewers to make any sense of the India-Pakistan current events.

 

To explain the way many of India’s billion people feel about Pakistan, V.S. Naipaul has summarized the Taliban-like plunder of India for a thousand years[i]:

 

“Fractured past” is too polite a way to describe India’s calamitous millennium. The millennium began with the Muslim invasions and the grinding down of the Hindu-Buddhist culture of the north. This is such a big and bad event that people still have to find polite, destiny-defying ways of speaking about it. In art books and history books, people write of the Muslims “arriving” in India, as though the Muslims came on a tourist bus and went away again. The Muslim view of their conquest of India is a truer one. They speak of the triumph of the faith, the destruction of idols and temples, the loot, the carting away of the local people as slaves, so cheap and numerous that they were being sold for a few rupees. The architectural evidence – the absence of Hindu monuments in the north – is convincing enough. This conquest was unlike any other that had gone before. There are no Hindu records of this period. Defeated people never write their history. The victors write the history. The victors were Muslims. For people on the other side it is a period of darkness. Indian history is written about as a matter of rulers and kingdoms shifting and changing. This is why it all seems petty and boring to read and hard to remember. But there is a larger and more tragic and more illuminating theme. That theme is the grinding down of Hindu India. Let us consider two late dates. In 1565, the year after the birth of Shakespeare, Vijayanagar in the south is destroyed and its great capital city laid waste. In 1592, the terrible Akbar ravages Orissa in the east. This means that while a country like England is preparing for greatness under its great queen, old India, in its sixth century of retreat, is still being reduced to nonentity. The wealth and creativity, the artisans and architects of the kingdoms of Vijayanagar and Orissa would have been destroyed, their light put out. Those regions are still now among the poorest in India.

 

CNN must also educate its journalists to understand the contrasts between India and Pakistan. Just as it is no longer considered acceptable to say things like, “all blacks look the same” or “all Orientals look the same”, this homogenization of all “South Asians” has become a project to deny them their individuality and their uniqueness.

 

Pakistan’s fixation with the two-nation theory – that there must be a separate Islamic Republic because different religions cannot co-exist in a secular state – compelled Pakistan to seek an identity for itself that is specifically un-Indian, and non-Hindu. For, if Pakistanis were seen as Indians who converted to Islam, then they would seem no different than the Indian Muslims, who are equal in number to Pakistan’s total population, who are better educated and economically placed, and who enjoy greater social freedom than their counterparts in Pakistan. Hence, the very existence of Pakistan as a separate nation (i.e. the two-nation theory) rests upon constructing an identity for itself that is inherently different than India’s.

 

This identity is developing via a variety of projects as evidenced by textbooks in government schools in Pakistan, and by the ethos projected on its state television and other forums. The following are some of the major historical theories being spun by Pakistan, to secure legitimacy for the two-nation theory, and hence its separate existence:

 

1. Pakistan is depicted as the successor to the thousand year old Mughal Empire. The two-century British rule is seen as a dark period of interruption that must now be reversed by returning to the glory of the Mughal Empire. Under this dispensation, Hindus would be second-class citizens, just as they were under the Mughals. Many Pakistanis would like Emperor Akbar’s model, under which Hindus were respected, although Muslims enjoyed higher status. Other Pakistanis prefer Emperor Aurungzeb’s model, under which Hindus were oppressed if they failed to convert, and Islam was asserted in the Taliban way. Professor Akbar Ahmad, a Pakistani scholar of anthropology and political science, champions Pakistan’s sense of history and identity as successor to Akbar’s Mughal Empire. (Had the founders of Pakistan named their new country “Mughalistan”, it might have facilitated this sense of identity.)
2. Even more aggressive is the theory that depicts Pakistanis as the eight thousand-year-old people of the Indus Valley. Under this theory, the Indus civilization is claimed to have always been different from the Ganges Valley civilization. The thesis claims that the Indus and Ganges are the ancestral homelands of Pakistanis and Indians, respectively. Hence, they have always been separate people. Under this model, the Indus Valley research scholars are encouraged to show the links between the Indus and the Middle East civilizations of Mesopotamia, so as to bring Pakistan and the Arab-Persian worlds into a coherent and continuous historical-geographical identity since the beginnings of recorded history.
3. The third method of constructing an historical identity of Pakistan has been to consider Pakistanis as Arab-Persian-Turk “immigrants” who brought Islam (with a few occasional “invasions” against the infidels, when required). Hence, Pakistanis get differentiated from the “native” Indian Muslims.

 

These theories explain why rampant Arabization of Pakistani culture is being encouraged. Arabization is to Pakistanis what Macaulayism[ii] is to many Indians. The difference is that Macaulayism has afflicted only the top tier of Indian elitists, whereas Arabization of Pakistan pervades all strata of Pakistani identity. For instance:

 

• Girls are discouraged from wearing mehndi, because it is seen as a Hindu tradition, even though it has nothing to do with one’s religion per se.
• The kite flying tradition during the festival of Baisakhi, celebrated for centuries in Punjab as the harvest season, is now being contemplated by Pakistan’s identity engineers as being too Sikh and Hindu in character, and not Arab enough.
• Emphasis is placed on being un-Indian so as to assert this new identity wherever possible.

 

Independent India founded itself on the principle of secularism and pluralism, and has had one of the most aggressive and ambitious affirmative action programs in the world. The results, while far from perfect, have produced many top level Muslim leaders in various capacities in India, and a growth of Muslims as a percentage of total population. But Pakistan chose to be an Islamic Republic, its non-Muslim population has almost disappeared, and it has seldom appointed non Muslims to important posts. CNN must know these contrasts.

 

Pakistan does not speak for all Muslims of the subcontinent. Even within the subcontinent, Pakistan’s Muslim population is smaller than Bangladesh’s and India’s. Indian Muslim leaders, such as Shabana Azmi, should be called upon to speak for themselves on CNN.

 

The economic directions are entirely different: in India, the emphasis is on technology and economic development, whereas in Pakistan the madrassas emphasize the Islamic identity.

 

Given all this, CNN needs to de-homogenize India and Pakistan. India is one-sixth of all humanity. It deserves its own space in the American mind, and should not be reduced to one of eight countries lumped into a single ‘region’ or ‘identity’ just for simplicity and convenience.

 

Indians should quit trying to force Pakistan into an Indian-like identity – i.e. through the “South Asianization” program going on – and to let them go their own way. In fact, India should happily facilitate the rehabilitation of Pakistan’s new identity in accordance with Pakistan’s wishes. Geopolitical segmentation in the future will include Pakistan in the Middle East region, and India in the Southeast Asian (ASEAN) region. That would make both nations coherent with their respective cultures and ethos.

 

The core issue between these two countries is not Kashmir. The core issue is the two-nation theory espoused by Pakistan, but without a positive identity of its own. India adopted pluralism and the unity theory. The average Indian villager is quite secure about who he is without any government program to engineer his identity. The average Pakistani is constantly bombarded by his authorities to mold his self-identity.

 

These divergent worldviews are the root cause, and not any specific real estate dispute such as Kashmir. Kashmir is not the cause but a symptom of this deeper problem. One might say that this negative identity – as the ‘un-India’ – was a manufacturing defect of Pakistan.

 

Jinnah started out merely playing a political game for the Prime Ministership of India, which turned into the irreversible momentum for Partition. Now his successors in Pakistan find themselves in a corner, having to legitimize his two-nation ideology.

 

If the West does not understand these points, and continues to consider Kashmir as the problem in isolation, it could end up creating another Palestine-like unsolvable crisis. Only this time there are substantially larger populations and nukes.

 

The West must remember that until recent decades, there was a strong Kashmiri identity that was not based on any religion or politics. Kashmir has become an issue only because Pakistan externalized its identity crisis, towards an enemy outside, so as to galvanize a meaning for its existence.

 

Re-Educating CNN’s Journalists

 

CNN has almost 4,000 news professionals worldwide. Yet, it has failed to train even a few of them in the basic history and politics of certain civilizations that they are expected to cover. Every multinational corporation that I have worked with gives far greater orientation and education to its principal executives, before sending them off to other cultures to run a business. One would think that a journalist would have to be an expert on the region being covered.

 

CNN’s much celebrated Christiane Amanpour has no education pertaining to the Indian subcontinent mentioned in her CV. Wolf Blitzer earned a bachelor of arts degree in history from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a master of arts degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.[iii] But he started during the Cold War, and still appears to function within that framework. He is unable to see the importance of India as a nation by itself.

 

CNN must be careful to select the right university program to train and retrain its journalists. One good place would be the Center for Advanced Studies of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania, run by Professor Francine Frankel. CASI briefed President Bill Clinton’s team prior to their historic trip to India. It would certainly be a good investment for CNN to engage Prof. Frankel’s services, for an extensive series of courses to become India savvy. It is especially important to select a center that is India specific, and to avoid the “South Asia” programs whose agendas and scholars get diverted by their attempts to seek a new and artificial South Asian homogeneity.

 

This training would help CNN to move beyond the caste, cows and curry syndrome of viewing India. It would help its journalists to move beyond Cold War journalism styles.

 

A wider problem is that CNN is following the entertainment oriented American documentary genre, as contrasted with the British documentary film movement of Grierson[iv], Flaherty[v] and others, that is considered far more innovative. This is probably why BBC performs better than CNN in documentaries and reporting. CNN’s style also has something to do with the advertising and commercial culture of the US in contrast with that of Europe. Even US Presidents are made on the basis of their acting abilities, camera friendliness, tutored smiles, and doctored speeches. CNN has not been able to free itself from this mindset.

 

Protecting CNN’s Journalists from Al Taqiyah

 

Al taqiyah is a very powerful Islamic doctrine, which CNN should make its journalists understand, so as to avoid being blind-sided by it. It is explained as follows by Dr. Walid Phares, a Lebanese-American Professor of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University[vi]:

 

“In the early years of the Islamic conquest of the Arabian peninsula and in the Fatah (Arab-Islamic invasion and conquest of the upper Middle East and the outside world), a Muslim concept was devised to achieve success against the enemy (non Muslims), Al-Taqiyah. Al-Taqiyah, from the verb Ittaqu, means linguistically ‘dodge the threat’. Politically it means simulate whatever status you need in order to win the war against the [infidel] enemy …”

 

Phares explains that this doctrine legitimized deception and lying against non-Muslims: “These agents were acting on behalf of the Muslim authority at war, and therefore were not considered as lying against or denouncing the tenants of Islam.”

 

Utilizing “al-taqiyah” as a resource, Pan-Islamic global organizations have engineered a Westernized face of peace and tolerance. Al-Taqiyah calls for diplomacy, moderation and apparent (but not real) assimilation in situations where dar-ul-Islam (Nation of Islam) is not yet powerful enough to assert itself. In contradistinction, there is a radically different internal face of Islam back home where Islam is the majority.

 

CNN journalists must not be naïve enough to be misled by experienced taqiyah lobbyists, in places such as Pakistan or Washington, D.C..

 

The Failure of the Indian Government

 

The Government of India has been rather ineffective in the management of public opinion. It should consider appointing to diplomatic posts in Western nations media savvy professionals with considerable success in debating and articulating complex positions in Western settings. The bureaucrats of the Indian Foreign Service are often inept in the art of winning the minds of Western journalists and public. India has a large number of articulate lawyers, and world class industrialists who should be asked to take on the role of spokespersons for India. India should have trained its own information and public relations team and then sent them around the world, just as the US Islamic lobby did within hours of 9/11.

 

India’s own media could also learn a great deal about patriotism from CNN’s intentions. Many Indian journalists have gone to the other extreme, and criticized their government often for the sake of proving their independence and their distance from anything potentially branded as “nationalism”.

 

The Failure of the “Experts” and “Heavyweights”

Many Indian Americans have sought a “South Asian” identity, which, by definition, makes it difficult and embarrassing to take a principled stand against Pakistan. This is one factor behind the lack of effort by the so-called billionaires of India, by the various community leaders, and by the academic experts based in “South Asia Studies”.

 

SAJA (South Asian Journalists Association) also finds itself having to play a ‘neutral’ role, even though its membership is 90% Indian-American. In short, it has not gone to the media to squarely bat for India and against the positions being promoted by Pakistani lobbyists. But Pakistani journalists have no such self-imposed limitations.

 

This crisis also confirms in my mind that Indian American community leaders fail to understand the role of academics and scholars in shaping American public opinion, especially since this process is quite different from that in India. I am referring to the specialized think tanks, Area Studies, History departments, and International Studies departments in leading universities, and their role in educating policy-makers and media.

 

The Hindutva movement in America has made some attempts at molding public opinion but failed to accomplish much. It lacks quality English speaking spokespersons with the savvy or panache to deal with the American media and public. Also, it is marginalized in American intellectual circles, given its ‘scandals’ (as successfully branded by its opponents) about the Babri masjid incident, the Tehalka scam, and others. It uses rhetoric that quickly forces it into debating corners. It is seen as old fashioned and ineffective in building intellectual bridges. It has lost around 50% of its own second generation in America, as it has failed to develop programs to reach out and nurture the non-Indian spouses of the 50% who marry outside their community. And it has failed to leverage the 20 million ‘white’ sympathizers who practice yoga and meditation, either through a lack of awareness of their presence or by simply ignoring them.

 

(A good example of how media influence is being developed by others, in very subtle and long term strategic ways, is the Pew International Journalism Fellowship. This program is located at many places, including the Johns Hopkins SAIS where Wolf Blitzer studied[vii].)

 

One must also wonder why so many academic scholars, who claim deep love for India, did nothing about the biased media reports against India. When confronted, some explain that they are scholars and not activists. Yet, Islamic scholars are out there working overtime as activists. Also, I clearly remember that when the Babri mosque was destroyed, it was these same scholars – the Hinduism and India experts – who went around lecturing and writing letters condemning the actions. The same also happened to protest against allegations of attacks against Christians, and on the plight of Dalits.

 

This academic silence leads me to wonder whether the program to intellectually demonize the Indic identity has advanced to such a stage that today we are already not worth saving in case there were to be a genocide.

 

CNN = FNN or PNN?

 

After many letters, faxes, and emails of complaints against CNN, they did respond to several of us. A brief summary of the position stated by Sam Feist, Executive Producer of CNN’s “Wolf Blitzer Show” and “Crossfire” was given as follows:

 

CNN DOMESTIC is basically disinterested in both Pakistan and India except to the extent it directly affects US interests. Feist realizes that India’s perspective in the India-Pakistan conflict needs better coverage in the Wolf Blitzer shows. He attributes the deficiency to Indian officials not being as forthcoming as the Pakistanis, when CNN requests for interviews with high functionaries. He felt that it was far easier to get the Pakistanis to appear on a CNN show as compared to the Indians. In a recent Wolf Blitzer show, in which the Pakistani Foreign Minister was interviewed, it required considerable effort on CNN’s part to finally get India’s Law Minister to appear.

 

But many Indians see CNN as eating out of Musharraf’s hands, not asking him the tough questions, and, instead, playing rough on Indian leaders. This has turned off many Indian spokespersons.

 

Notwithstanding all this, it remains CNN’s responsibility to give balanced, fair and in-depth analyses to the public. I wish to emphasize that my evaluation of CNN is based on the American public’s interests and not on the interests of India per se. Honest post mortems, balanced views, and truthful educational news magazines would benefit American society by making it better informed. A biased “party line”, no matter how well intended, is hardly in the best interest of Americans.

 

CNN’s strategy seems to be to get top name brand government faces each night on its channel. I wonder if, in exchange, it must compromise its independence by airing the ‘official’ policies. Is CNN, in effect, FNN = Federal News Network?

 

It seems that after the takeover by Time-Warner, CNN might have lost its independence and reliability as a source of news, because it is under pressure to deliver shareholder value through ratings. If so, would it not be a sellout, exchanging integrity of journalism for the sake of ratings?

 

Given the alternative sources of information now available to consumers, especially with the Internet, CNN might be destroying the credibility it built during the Gulf War.

 

CNN has been letting Musharraf define the issues and frame them in his perspective. CNN’s job in this alliance with him seems to be to sell Musharraf to the world using the CNN brand. But in the process, CNN is eroding its own brand equity. Many Indians have started referring to it as PNN = Pakistan News Network.

 

Good reporting is not about deciding what is right or about taking sides, but about representing the major perspectives of a situation. I do not demand that CNN agree with India. But CNN must stop ignoring, subverting, and trivializing the positions taken by one-sixth of humanity.

 

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[i] V. S. Naipaul, in an interview in Outlook, November 15^th 1999. Available at: http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fname=naipaul&fodname=19991115&sid=1

[ii] This term is named after Lord Macaulay, who pioneered the British program to replace Indian languages with English, to remove respect for indigenous ideas and values, so as to create intellectual dependence and reverence for the colonizers. This was a very essential part of the colonizing process, and its crushing impact is still being felt.

[iii] See Johns Hopkins University SAIS site at: http://www.sais-jhu.edu/

[iv] Grierson, John (b. April 26, 1898, Kilmadock, Stirlingshire, Scot.–d. Feb. 19, 1972, Bath, Somerset, Eng.), founder of the British documentary-film movement and its leader for almost 40 years. He was one of the first to see the potential of motion pictures to shape people’s attitudes toward life and to urge the use of films for educational purposes.

[v] Flaherty, Robert (Joseph) (b. Feb. 16, 1884, Iron Mountain, Mich., U.S.–d. July 23, 1951, Dummerston, Vt.), U.S. explorer and filmmaker, called the father of the documentary film.

[vi] “Islamic concept of Al-Taqiyah to infiltrate and destroy kafir countries” By Dr. Walid Phares. Available at: http://www.pragna.org/Art20615.html

[vii] See: http://www.pewfellowships.org/