BBC's 'Newsnight' programme that was aired on 16 May as part of the results coverage of India's general election,and where its star presenters Mishal Husain and Yalda Hakim covered the story had referred to Modi a 'Hindu nationalist' and as a 'pariah' who was banned from UK and USA.
This election has seen Prime Minister Narendra Modi's fans in a mind-boggling numbers from different corners , starting from the nameless (fake :) ) troll on Twitter, Face Book against Modi's critics to the articulate intellectuals on TV panel discussions.
As reported in media, the latest to join this bandwagon is Tory MP Priti Patel, who has now urged the wider Indian community in Britain to bombard BBC with complaints about its allegedly 'biased' coverage of the Indian elections in general and Modi in particular.
The senior Indian-origin politician had lodged an official complaint with BBC over what she has termed its biased, one-sided coverage of India's new Prime Minister.In a letter addressed to BBC Director General Lord Tony Hall dated 19 May, Priti Patel, who had been appointed as an Indian Diaspora Champion by British Prime Minister David Cameron, said she had received a number of complaints from the Indian community based in the UK in reference to the BBC's 'Newsnight' programme aired on 16 May as part of the results coverage of India's general election.
The Telegraph notes that she specifically wants presenters Mishal Husain and Yalda Hakim to be removed for the 'irresponsible' coverage of Narendra Modi.
She also asked BBC to rephrase the terms in which they referred to Modi. According to Patel, the Indian community in Britain is offended by the association of the term 'Hindu nationalist' with PM Modi.
Another rhetoric, as reported, that mirrors another British MP, Barry Gardiner, who made waves when he tore apart NDTV's Nidhi Razdan for daring to suggest that the UK had boycotted Modi for years after the the 2002 riots. And when she incautiously mentioned his "human rights" record, Gardiner went on to school Razdan on what she should and should not be asking about an Indian politician, saying : …"It seems you have no respect for your own Supreme Court. The Supreme Court of India has looked at those allegations, I believe, on a number of occasions. And has absolved Mr Narendra Modi completely from those allegations. For you to be bringing them up on Indian television is extraordinarily strange."
INDIA HONEST cannot resist agreeing with the writer of the story, who ashamed the politically divided Indians by questioning us : "What is extraordinarily strange is a British MP telling Indian citizens and journalists what they may or may not "bring up" about their elected leaders -- more so, one who is campaigning to be Prime Minister. Imagine an Indian politician scolding a British journalist for raising questions about Gordon Brown or David Cameron."
The senior Indian-origin politician Priti Patel was also upset that Hakim interviewed artist Anish Kapoor who called Modi a 'mass murderer', arguing that how Hakim didn't contest such a sweeping declaration made by the artiste in the show. Certainly, the decision to treat an artist as an expert on Indian politics just because he signed an anti-Modi petition is shoddy journalism, she asked.
Being cornered, the editor of Newsnight Ian Katz offered a meek defence that they also invited Modi admirer Swapan Dasgupta to respond to Kapoor's allegations, but INDIA HONEST agrees with the argument that the crude defence hardly mitigates that kind of editorial double standard. It is more of a laughing suggestion that in the same way if one ask BBC, "Will BBC ever invite a sculptor to weigh in on the meaning of the results of a British election just because he openly opposed the winning candidate".
It is to be noted that here the importance of Patel's attempt to stir up her constituents will not go down only because Modi has already won, and also decisively, but it is important for the biased media in India and abroad to note that Modi is the sovereign leader of the world's largest democracy. No government can afford to treat him as a pariah. And whenever he visits the United Kingdom,which he surely will,he will want to be viewed as the Prime Minister of India, not as one that some biased presenter reflected on him at the BBC. IH asks, will Indians dare to disagree with this nationalistic thought.