How 'Financial Times' latest hit piece on Ram Mandir shows new selling point of Western media

How ‘Financial Times’ latest hit piece on Ram Mandir shows new selling point of Western media

In their latest hit piece against the Indian government, the Financial Times continued their descent into desperation as Indian elections are nearing. Marking the mood of the nation, the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya awaits massive footfall as Hindus across the globe await its grand re-opening and the Pran Pratishthan of Sri Rama after over five centuries.

It is this symbol of grand reawakening that has the British publication seething this time. As it is reclaimed from the violent history of the Turkic-Mongol invader Babar and his hordes of Islamic zealots who destroyed one of the most important sites of Hinduism and a monument reminiscent of centuries of history, it is important to remember the thousands of Hindus who fought to retain the intergenerational memory of the temple by visiting and conducting prayers even through Islamic rule and British imperialism.

Generations of the citizens of Ayodhya carried on circumambulating the structure as their ancestors did around the temple, invoking all that the precious site stood for. Numerous attempts to retake it over years include the Nihang Sikhs led by Baba Fakir Singh conducting a hawan and installing a symbol of Sri Bhagwan (Sri Rama) and writing Ram Ram on the walls of the then taken temple that had a mosque built over it.

In a happenstance of fate and faith coming together, the eighth descendant of Baba Fakir Singh, Baba Harjit Singh Rasalpur will be conducting the “langar sewa” for the thousands of devotees expected on the 22nd of this month. Despite Nihang Sikhs now unfortunately known to kill strangers in rural gurudwaras on mere suspicion of “sacrilege”, in ways absolutely unfamiliar to anything preached in Sikhi by the ten Sikh Gurus revered in Sikh and Hindu traditions, the Nihangs are a well-known and respected martial sect who were once looked to for defence of Dharma and desh. Many still retain ancient knowledge and do their best to carry forward necessary traditions.

Other citizens of Ayodhya kept up prayers and genuflected at the site despite it being a mosque because the temple remained in the minds and hearts of those who carried their culture in their blood, and shed some for it.

In 2002, a train carrying Kar-Sewaks and their wives and children was set afire by Islamist mobs in Gujarat, triggering the riots in Godhra.

It is always the reaction to violence that has been decried if the victims have been Hindu or Jewish by Western media, a vestige of Anglo imperialism that has held economic and cultural sway over centuries. What is decolonisation in the West, the retaking of native culture celebrated by academicians and intellectuals, is termed barbarism and taught to students of “Indology”, a colonialist study of a pagan people rising again as an uncomfortable “other” in a world guarded for some centuries by Abrahamic rules. This is what the Financial Times article exemplifies.

“Three decades after Hindu zealots tore down a mosque at Ayodhya…” write the authors, without a mention of the destruction of the temple, and the willingness of the Shia Muslim Waqf board to return the site and build a mosque in Lucknow or some metres away due to their understanding of the significance of the revered site for their countrymen. Hindus are termed zealots and “nationalists” without meaning patriot, echoing the “dirty savage Hindoo” stereotype carried forward for eons by English dailies for decades before Indian independence. Without fail, this article too sprinkles in its casual anti-Hindu bigotry where Hindu matters of faith are “contested”, but Muslims and violent conquest may never be questioned – “Ayodhya is the most prominent of several contested religious sites, where Hindu nationalists have been fighting to demolish or demote mosques built during India’s centuries of Muslim domination.”

Yet, Ayodhya, despite imperialist despondence, was merely biding its time. Once desolate and racked by raw emotions of politically-instigated communal violence, the city rises again as the abode of Sri Rama awaits his arrival.

The Suryavanshi Thakur Kshatriya clan will finally don their turbans after 500 years as they vowed to eschew the symbol of respect until their beloved Sri Rama returned to the temple. An 85- year old woman, Savitri Devi, will finally speak after three decades as she refused to vocalise until Sri Rama was returned to his abode.

It is these stories of enduring faith that John Reed, an actively anti-India bureau head for the Times calls zealotry, a term used to describe those who commit lethal violence due to their faith, a term he has never used for Islamists supporting Pakistani terrorism in India that has led to hundreds of Indian lives lost.

Providing employment to thousands of workers, many of who have specifically chosen to work on the site as an act of devotion, are written of in the disparaging article as “toiling day and night,” as if they are indentured labour, a difference those working for British interests ought to be more familiar with considering their history of slavery by other means and names.

“Modi, who has ruled India since 2014,” rues an early paragraph, dismissing the democratic wave of millions of citizens voting him in, twice, and continuing to make him the most popular political leader in the world for nigh a decade.

The use of “minority Muslim” appeals to an uneducated audience who wish to believe that a community with more than equal rights in the country and forming the second largest majority in India, are dependent upon western emotional largesse against “Hindu zealots”.

The Financial Times, along with several other mainstream platforms whose reportage has been shorn of credibility in recent times, liberally use “Analysts / Sources say,” to divest responsibility from their own creations.

They are hardly shy about using outright lies to evoke anti-Hindu sentiment in readers such as claiming that “Modi rose to power on a wave of Hindu revivalism stoked by the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the right-wing nationalist movement behind the ruling party.”

In fact, Modi was elected amidst numerous scams involving Congress politicians and terrible inequality marked by rapidly deteriorating economic conditions. He was re-elected on the basis of leakage-free welfarism, globally understood as a Leftist initiative. Despite such, his politics continue to be cited as “right-wing” a phrase used by Western media to denote anyone who puts the interests of their own citizens over that of globalist agendas. FT cites an author avowedly anti-Hindu, to repeat what they wished reiterated, heavy on Muslim victimhood, light on any facts that would disprove their claims. As cited in my counter to FT’s heavily editorialised interview of the Indian Prime Minister some weeks ago, the tone taken is hostile to the Hindus, sympathetic to the Muslim, and patronising to the reader.

A light-on-truth, heavy-on-propaganda affair is easily exemplified by their claim that, “… the Supreme Court in 2019 approved the construction of Ram Mandir, despite a lack of conclusive evidence that there had ever been a Hindu temple on the site. Building work began in August 2020.”

Thousands of pages of evidence, much of it based on archaeological study, with letters from KK Muhammed of the Archaeological Survey of India, were cited as evidence for the existence of a non-Islamic structure at the site, that finally allowed the construction of a temple awaited by Hindus for centuries. Contrast this with the conversion of the Hagia Sophia in Turkey from a church to a museum, and then to a mosque, receiving measured critique in the Financial Times, where apparently it was an understandable political ploy.

The abuse of Indian freedoms of speech and expression to peddle in propaganda to an unsuspecting readership is an unnecessary effect of an open society. In a nation with a less dysfunctional legal machinery, distributors of communally offensive disinformation could be brought to book by citizens. A stronger stance would mean that repeat foreign offenders who sought to actively harm the nation through indulgence and apologia of anti-majority violence be questioned legally.

After all, a recently post-colonial state can ill-afford further foreign interference. Yet, it is the wont of Indians to bear with little contest the contempt of foreigners as they indulge their bigotry to build upon eons of atrocity literature that even percolates into the unwitting minds of their former colonies, while adding to tomes of material to justify violent action on Indians and Hindus in lands they own and covet. Perhaps it changes, perhaps it remains, but hopefully, more minds are awakened to the design of stooges that operate with ill-disguised ill will.

The author is a columnist at several Indian publications such as NDTV, FirstPost and CNN-News18, and hosts a podcast on geopolitics and culture. She writes about international relations, public policy and history, and posts on X on her handle @sagorika_s. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views

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