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4 times NYT showed it has a major India problem

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DailyBiteJun 06, 2016 | 17:29

4 times NYT showed it has a major India problem

The New York Times is in the news again for its rabid and ill-founded anti-India stance, this time trumpeting that New Delhi's inclusion in the prestigious Nuclear Suppliers Group is "unmerited" in this patently ill-researched editorial.

Not only has the NYT got it horribly wrong on the fact front (it confuses the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and makes a legal muddle of the two), the editorial actually brandishes what can only be called anti-India propaganda and blatant display of nuclear racism.

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But this is hardly the first time the NYT has had its "oops" moment. Here is a look at its glorious history of India itch.

Lata faux pas

This was the time when the NYT pretty much sounded like a verbose Maria Sharapova, when she casually asked "Who is Sachin Tendulkar?"

For its own part, the Times prefixed a "so-called" because qualifying Lata Mangeshkar as a "playback singer", according to it, was in the interest of clarity.

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NYT's South Asia bureau chief Ellen Barry later tried "whitesplaining" the lexical choice - it was used to denote actual usage of a particular term - but India's Twitterati, for reasons various, was up in arms. Feeling slighted that the Nightingale of India isn't that very known outside this country is sort of a two-fold problem that got highlighted in this very Timesesque manner.

Dig at ISRO's Mars Mission

That the much-hyped and super successful Mangalyaan, or Indian Space Research Organisation's Mars Mission, cost less than the Hollywood sci-fi movie Gravity - all at Rs 400 crores  - and heralded India's inclusion in the space race elite club, didn't go down very well with the Times. Its response was this thoughtless and utterly disgusting cartoon, full of age-old stereotypes that die hard.

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The NYT's cartoon on India's Mars Mission.

However, following a global backlash, had to "apologise" for the tasteless comic. Though where does that leave the foremost news and opinion generating media house of America? Somewhere not very nice for sure.

Debjani Khobragade coverage

While US authorities were harsh in their treatment of Devyani Khobragade, a high-ranking diplomat at the Indian Consulate in New York City in December 2013, NYT's coverage went one step further turned the whole thing into a "clash of civilisations". 

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Screenshot of the NYT piece calling L'affaire Khobragade a 'culture clash'.

While the backlash from India and the world over was about subjecting the deputy consul general to a body cavity search in American custody, clearly overshooting the diplomatic protocol and an obvious breach of Khobragade's right to privacy, NYT made it seem that Khobragade brought it upon herself with her traditional baggage of "servant culture" that okayed her unfair treatment of her domestic help, Sangeeta Richards.

Unflattering focus on Indian athletes

In January 2014, the Times carried a piece that grossly overstated the case against Indian athletes saying that our sportsmen and women had "easy access to legal steroids" and this "performance-enhancing drug use" must be a reason for meriting harsher scrutiny from sporting regulators. The focus initially was on sprinter Ashwini Akkunji and some others who failed doping test at the National Anti-Doping Agency, but then it quickly went on to linger on India's abysmal performance of winning only "26 medals in the 113 years it has competed in the Olympic Games".  

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Given USA's own history of doping scandals, including Lance Armstrong, Serena Williams, sprinter Tyson Gay, baseball ace Alex Rodriguez, among others, this singular attention on India as the steroid capital of the sporting world was uncalled for, to say the least.

Last updated: June 06, 2016 | 17:29
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