Western Media Coverage of India: A Structural Analysis
Once upon a time, news meant reporting discrete events that altered reality in a demonstrable way. A law passed, an institution built, a famine avoided, a discovery made. Evaluation followed reporting. There used to be good news too.
In contrast, much of today’s elite Western journalism functions through topic selection rather than event reporting. Institutions such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Times, and BBC News no longer primarily ask “what happened today?” but “which ongoing concern does this event serve?”
The Filter System
When The New York Times writes about India, the analytical lens is almost always democracy under strain, nationalism, caste, minorities, or geopolitical hedging. When The Washington Post covers India, it is usually in the context of China containment, illiberalism, or technology regulation anxiety. The Guardian filters India almost exclusively through human rights, climate damage, or identity politics. The Times treats India largely as an elite geopolitical or business abstraction. BBC News, despite its breadth, defaults to episodic reporting driven by controversy, crisis, or spectacle.
During the 2020 Delhi riots, Western outlets like NYT focused on ‘Hindu nationalist’ angles over Tablighi Jamaat disparities, maintaining the ‘majoritarian risk’ narrative. COVID coverage surveys show 60% of respondents saw agenda-driven negativity in Western reporting.
Last year’s Pahalgam terror attack was no different. The New York Times headline read, “At Least 24 Tourists Gunned Down by Militants in Kashmir,” while The Washington Post echoed a similar tone with “Gunmen Launch Rare Attack on Tourists in Indian-Administered Kashmir.” Deutsche Welle and Euronews followed suit, using similarly worded headlines while avoiding the word “terrorists.” Al Jazeera, consistent with its pattern of echoing Pakistan’s narrative, framed the reporting in a manner that subtly aligned with Pakistan’s position on Kashmir.
The important point is not that these stories are false. Many are factually accurate. The point is that positive structural developments in India are rarely considered newsworthy unless they are first reframed as risks. India’s growth is interesting insofar as it creates emissions. Its digitization is interesting insofar as it enables surveillance. Its foreign policy autonomy is interesting insofar as it complicates Western alliances. Success without Western sponsorship is treated as suspicious by default.
The Empirical Test
To test whether this pattern was real or perceived, a simple experiment was conducted using Gemini AI. The search was straightforward: find any original positive reporting on India from The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Times, and BBC News over the past month. Not celebratory puff pieces, just standalone stories about growth, innovation, development, or progress. The AI searched systematically using multiple keywords and site-specific queries.
The result was unambiguous: not a single article. Over thirty days, across five major outlets, covering a nation of 1.4 billion people, there was no original positive feature. India appeared only in analytical pieces about problems, geopolitical complications, or risks.
When the search window was expanded to one year, the AI system crashed under the weight of the query, unable to process or return results from such an extended absence.
Search resulted with another search with Claude AI, which confirmed the result. There was no news which report anything positive about India since 2019 to 2024 except a few opinion articles.
This is not bias in selection anymore; this is categorical exclusion from a type of coverage other large democracies routinely receive. The absence is the evidence. When you cannot find what should occasionally exist by chance alone, you are looking at editorial policy expressing itself through systematic omission.
Western outlets do not maintain deep, curiosity-driven reporting pipelines for Indian success stories. Their correspondents are deployed to monitor instability, not competence. There is very little agenda-setting journalism that begins with the assumption that India might be doing something right on its own terms.
Epistemic Inertia
Western liberal media emerged in a world where progress radiated outward from the Atlantic core. Their moral vocabulary, institutional incentives, and audience expectations were formed in that era. India does not fit comfortably into those templates. It is neither a pliant client state nor a clear adversary. It is too large to ignore and too autonomous to celebrate. The safest editorial posture, therefore, is perpetual skepticism.
When something negative happens in India, it is treated as news. When something positive happens, it is treated as context, or worse, as a complication to an existing critique.
Propaganda
Propaganda, in its classical and precise sense, is the systematic and deliberate shaping of perception in order to produce a desired attitude or response, rather than to inform independent judgment. It need not be a lie.
More fully stated: propaganda is the strategic presentation of facts, omissions, emphasis, language, and emotional cues so that audiences arrive at conclusions chosen in advance by the communicator, while believing those conclusions are their own.
What these newspapers are doing often meets the operational definition of propaganda, though it is a soft, institutional, self-justifying form rather than crude state messaging. Every article must attach itself to one of the approved themes. This satisfies the core propagandistic criterion: deciding what people are allowed to think about.
When coverage never allows India to surprise positively, and rarely allows Western assumptions to be wrong, journalism has crossed into narrative maintenance. That is propaganda.
This form of propaganda is subtle, respectable, and deniable. It operates through analysis rather than slogans, through omission rather than fabrication. That also makes it hard to detect, unless one searches for a specific news item and detects the pattern of omission itself.
This is not usually the result of editors waking up and deciding, “Let us run propaganda today.” It emerges from institutional incentives: audience expectations, newsroom culture, activist pressure, elite consensus, and fear of moral deviation. Once embedded, it becomes self-policing.
Yet the end result is propaganda.
Hostile Breeds Hostility
Constant depiction of India as a “case study in democratic backsliding” or “majoritarian risk” gradually trains Western publics to see India not as a partner but as a tolerated necessity. That makes future cooperation fragile and reversible.
Media hostility reinforces the Indian elite’s conclusion that validation from Western opinion is neither reliable nor necessary. That pushes India toward diversified partnerships and a posture of polite indifference. We can already see this in India’s refusal to internalize Western moral panic over issues where Indian interests diverge.
Notice the language used when India appears in trade or strategy discussions. India is suddenly not a society or democracy but a “market,” “counterweight,” “supply-chain alternative,” or “strategic partner.” The same media ecosystem that depicts India as troubled and regressive in social reporting depicts it as indispensable and unavoidable in economic and geopolitical reporting. The two narratives are never reconciled; they are simply kept in separate compartments.
To domestic audiences, governments frame FTAs with India as acts of necessity, not endorsement. The message is: we do not approve of how India is, but we must deal with it because the world is dangerous and China exists. This allows elites to preserve moral self-image while pursuing interest. India becomes a tool, not a partner.
They are not celebrating India; they are “handling” India.
There is no strategic, long-term logic in this propaganda, but there is institutional and psychological logic in continuing anyway. That logic is racism.
Racism with Better Vocabulary
India is rarely portrayed as acting for intelligible reasons rooted in its own history. Instead, actions are reduced to impulses: nationalism, majoritarianism, populism. Western actions are strategic but Indian actions are emotional.
India is spoken of as a democracy that must be “reminded,” “pressured,” or “corrected.” No one speaks this way about France, Japan, or Israel, even when comparable issues arise. That tone difference is not accidental.
Indian successes are reframed as threats, risks, or moral costs. This is a classic racist move: never allow competence to stand on its own. Competence must always carry suspicion.
What makes this form of racism especially insidious is that it presents itself as anti-racist. It speaks the language of rights, justice, and universal values. That gives it moral immunity. Anyone who challenges it can be accused of defensiveness or authoritarian sympathy.
It is racism with better vocabulary. It is smoother, deniable, morally dressed up, and therefore far more resilient than the old kind. The old racist term inferior becomes problematic. It does not rely on biology to discriminate. It relies on moral diagnosis and epistemic authority.
Psychology
For a long time, Western societies lived inside a coherent story about themselves: they were the engine of progress, the natural center of history, the source of modernity, reason, science, and moral advancement. This story was not merely propaganda; it was emotionally stabilizing. It told people who they were without requiring constant comparison.
When scholarship such as that of Paul Bairoch and Angus Maddison showed that this dominance was historically brief, contingent, and partly extractive, that story cracked. When, simultaneously, non-Western societies like India and China began rising without Western permission, it caused anxiety.
Healthy systems revise their self-image and move on. Unhealthy ones defend it emotionally. An inferiority complex forms when past superiority is remembered but no longer secure, present coherence is weakening, future dominance is uncertain, and identity has been built around being “the standard.”
At that moment, admitting equality feels like annihilation. So the psyche does something defensive. It calls others flawed, immature, needing guidance, threatening values.
The cause of this psychology is not hatred of India, or love of China, or media bias in isolation. It is unprocessed historical displacement. It is inferiority masquerading as superiority.
Economic Cause
India did not have a post-war Marshall Plan. It did not receive massive, sustained, system-shaping foreign direct assistance of the kind China received after opening up. It did not enjoy a “peace dividend.” On the contrary, from the moment of independence it inherited a hostile neighborhood, with Pakistan positioned as a permanent warmonger, backed at different times by the United States and United Kingdom. Multiple wars, continuous military expenditure, terrorism, sanctions, technology denial, and diplomatic pressure became India’s environment.
And yet, despite all this, India grows. This makes it genuinely unsettling for a hegemonic mindset.
India’s trajectory suggests something far more disturbing to that worldview: that a large, plural, argumentative, non-aligned society can grow without permission, without templates, and without patrons, even under continuous pressure.
From the perspective of a hegemonic system, this is far more threatening than a rival that can be contained, sanctioned, or morally quarantined. This is why the media reaction is not purely strategic, but psychological.
Senility
Institutions can retain enormous resources and still behave irrationally if they are clinging to an outdated self-image. When creativity slows and self-correction becomes painful, judgment of others takes its place. Talking replaces doing. Evaluating replaces building.
Aging is natural, but all do not accept it rationally. People often get bitter in old age. When a person loses relevance but cannot accept it, they often become verbally aggressive, critical, and abusive. They talk more, listen less, and demand recognition through irritation. Families recognize this not as wisdom, but as loss reacting to itself. That is why such behavior is not debated seriously; it is quietly bypassed.
At a civilizational level, the same mechanism applies. A system that continues to scold, moralize, and abuse a growing power is behaving like someone who has not accepted the loss of centrality. The abuse is not strategic; it is symptomatic. It is what happens when identity outruns reality. That is why it feels delusional.
Pushback
This is how India has been treating Western media.
For a long time, India explained context, history, constraints, poverty, diversity, and complexity. The underlying assumption was that explanation would lead to understanding, and understanding would lead to fairness. That assumption has quietly been abandoned.
In Indian social life, when an elderly person repeats the same jibe or complaint again and again, the response is rarely confrontation. No one says “shut up.” That would still acknowledge authority and invite escalation. The response is calmer and more decisive: “Don’t worry, I know what I am doing.” It is a way of asserting autonomy without humiliation, competence without argument, distance without disrespect.
When Jaishankar says that Europe assumes its problems are the world’s problems but not the other way around, he is not seeking debate. He is signaling that India has heard the lecture many times and no longer needs it to act. The subtext is: we understand your anxiety; we will handle our interests ourselves. It is reassurance, not submission.
When Goyal says India does not sign FTAs with a pistol to its temple, the message is similar. He is not accusing anyone of bad faith in emotional terms. He means: pressure is unnecessary; we are capable of deciding. Again, competence replaces compliance. The need to argue evaporates.
This posture denies the other side the satisfaction of reaction. There is no outrage to feed on, no defiance to dramatize, no anger to frame as nationalism. Calm certainty is disarming. It quietly relocates authority.
And the elephant moves on.
References:
- Western Media Narratives on India by Umesh Upadhyay, https://www.dailyexcelsior.com/analyzing-perspectives-of-western-media-on-india/
- Western Media Bias: https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/western-medias-enduring-bias-against-india-the-case-of-pahalgam-terror-attack-13887528.html