China bashing by the Indian Media

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
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Apparently…Pakistan has now some competition. Indian media has picked China as the source of all evils in India. :slight_smile:

BBC NEWS | South Asia | ‘China bashing’ in the Indian media

‘China bashing’ in the Indian media

By Amit Baruah
Editor, BBC Hindi

It’s the silly season in India-China relations. If you’ve tuned into one of the more hawkish Indian television channels or are reading the views of the many experts on India and China, it might seem like the two countries are at each other’s throats.

There has been a spate of denials from the Indian foreign ministry, the border guards and even the Indian air force. All insist that there have been no clashes and no violations of Indian air space.

“A media report about two ITBP [Indo-Tibetan Border Police] jawans [soldiers] having been injured due to firing from across the Line of Actual Control has come to notice. It is factually incorrect,” the Indian foreign ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.

And here is what the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman had to say about the same incident: “I have not heard of the scenario you mentioned… I have noticed, however, that Indian media has been releasing some groundless information recently. I wonder what their intention is.”

‘Without pause’

But China’s concerns about accuracy do not seem to bother a large chunk of the Indian media, which is engaged in a rather serious bout of “China-bashing” these days.

Such China “stories” continue without pause.

Facts do not seem to matter as some Indian media organisations believe that this is the best way to grab a larger market share.

“Nothing has changed on the ground between the two countries,” a senior Indian official, who preferred anonymity, told the BBC.

Chinese soldiers at a drill ahead of a military parade in Beijing, China, on 19 Sept 2009
The Indian media has been reporting alleged incursions by Chinese soldiers

“I just can’t understand the reasons for this hysteria,” the official said.

China is India’s largest trading partner, with two-way trade volumes crossing $50bn in 2008.

The two countries have been trying to negotiate a solution to their decades-old boundary dispute, a process which shows few signs of reaching fruition anytime soon.

There hasn’t been a single fatality in skirmishes along the undefined India-China boundary since 1967, but the memories of the crushing defeat inflicted by the Chinese on India in the 1962 war have not faded from the minds of some Indians.

In a sense, the ghost of 1962 also has not been exorcised from the memories of a certain narrow, but influential, category of retired generals and diplomats, who still harbour ambitions of “giving it back to the Chinese”.

Media war

In the last two decades - ever since a path-breaking visit by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to Beijing in 1988 - there has been a visible effort on the part of the two governments to try to narrow their differences.

A code was agreed on how patrol parties were to act in case they encountered each other.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited China in 2006

These encounters do take place and the two sides have a specified drill in such cases, which appears to have worked well over the years.

But now, the threat to a stable India-China relationship is coming not from the governments, but from sections within the media.

If the largely private Indian media is belligerent about China, a response is beginning to emerge from the Chinese side as well.

“India likes to brag about its sustainable development, but worries that it is being left behind by China. China is seen in India as both a potential threat and a competitor to surpass,” the state-run Global Times wrote in June this year.

In essence, a media war, initiated by a few Indian television channels and newspapers, has now been joined from the Chinese side as the Global Times opinion piece indicates.

Briefing editors of national dailies, a senior Indian official suggested that there was no point in the press showing any “hysteria”.

Not many journalists, it would appear, want to listen to such suggestions.

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Re: China bashing by the Indian Media

Yes let them both fight and destroy each other! And then Pakistan will be the asian Tiger!!! :-)

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Re: China bashing by the Indian Media

china bashing is not new in the indian media!

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Re: China bashing by the Indian Media

Indian officials wouldn't have the nerve it takes to raise their voice before China ;), their media however is full of hyper "things" so it's quite entertaining.

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Wait for that day !!!

Sadly it will never happen

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With so many western countries and their armies running wild in Pakistan, you country should be highly skilled "in not having the nerve it takes to raise their voice" kind of behavior. And you talk about India.

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[note] Topic here is India/China. Stick to it. [/note]

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True. Its just that China was pretty dormant all these years as it was focusing more on developing its own economy while Pak has been supporting cross border terrorism all this while. Hence the focus was on Pak, but now with Chinese economy shaky, they are also trying these stunts :)

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Re: China bashing by the Indian Media

Here you are with your big filthy lies about Pakistan. CAn you not write anything else but talking against Pakistan? Nothing else you have to say here on this Pakistan forum?

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Yeah, but China never had to worry about a country like India on its border...
Too China, the Indians are nothing but musquito. For Pakistan its a far graver threat.

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Re: China bashing by the Indian Media

^^ mosquito :rotfl:

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oK TOOTHLESS TIGER
IF YOU SAY IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN
THEN IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN
ANY MORE PREDICTIONS?
ABOUT AFGHANISTAN WAR?
IRAQ WAR?
TSUNAMI?
FLOODS?
ANY PREDICTION WILL DO MR. PANDIT
LOLZ

Virtual reality headset for PS4
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u cannot even stop few boats entering your country
lolz
India is just like Indian movies with most of the time happy ending.
Hero takes it all. Well wake up toothless Indian Tiger REAL POLITIC is something else

Its not like Indian film script and u can just shoot it the way u want. You do have a big mouth and guts to talk so much nonsense about Pakistan supporting cross border terrorism.
But your mouth shuts when you talk about Kashmir.........WAAAAAAIT you do not even DARE to touch that topic because your sissy army commits grave crimse against humanity there.

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Re: China bashing by the Indian Media

India’s China Panic: Seeing a ‘Red Peril’ on Land and Sea

India’s China Panic: Seeing a ‘Red Peril’ on Land and Sea - Yahoo! News

India’s China Panic: Seeing a ‘Red Peril’ on Land and Sea

By ISHAAN THAROOR Ishaan Tharoor – Sun Sep 20, 1:30 am ET

In recent weeks, public attention in India has reached feverish levels over what is perceived to be the growing threat lurking north of the border. Tensions along the Himalayan frontier with China have spiked noticeably since a round of Sino-Indian talks over long-standing territorial disputes this summer ended in failure. In their wake, the frenetic Indian press has chronicled reports of nighttime boundary incursions and troop build-ups, even while officials in both governments downplay such confrontations. Elements in the Indian media point almost daily to various signs of a Beijing plot to contain its neighbor’s rise, a conviction aided by recent hawkish editorials from China’s state-run outlets. This week, leading Indian news networks loudly catalogued Chinese transgressions under headlines such as “Red Peril” and “Enter the Dragon.” (Read about China and India’s territorial disputes.)

India and China fought a war in 1962 whose acrimonious legacy lingers even while economic ties flourish (China is now India’s biggest trade partner). Beijing refuses to acknowledge the de facto border - demarcated by the British empire - and claims almost the entirety of the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as part of its own territory. Indian strategic analysts believe Beijing’s stance has hardened in recent years, perhaps as a consequence of its increasing economic and military edge over India as well as growing Chinese influence in smaller South Asian countries like Nepal and Bangladesh. Comments made last month by India’s outgoing navy chief that the country could not hope to match China’s hard power capabilities set off a bout of national hand-wringing. “There’s a nervousness among some policy makers that the Chinese see India as weak and vulnerable to coercion,” says Harsh Pant, professor of defense studies at King’s College, London, and author of a forthcoming book on India’s China policy. “Indians feel they can’t manage China’s rise and that they are far, far behind.” (Read about China and India’s high-seas rivalry.)

But the real arena for future confrontation, say most Indian strategists, lies not in standoffs on remote, rugged peaks, but in the waters all around the Indian Subcontinent. The Indian Ocean is the thoroughfare for nearly half of global seaborne trade, its coastal states home to over 60% of the world’s oil and a third of its gas reserves. Traditionally, India has imagined the ocean as part of its backyard without investing serious resources in its navy - much more still goes to an army and air force perched by the land boundaries with the old enemy Pakistan. And that gap between India’s maritime hubris and real power has been exposed in recent times by China, which is buoyed by its own sense of historical revival - dating back to the days when the eunuch admiral Zheng He sailed his medieval trade fleets to India and Africa, bringing back, among other things, a giraffe.

To safeguard its vast appetite for oil and other natural resources, particularly drawn from Africa, China has embarked upon a “string of pearls” strategy, building ports and listening posts around the Indian Ocean rim. Beijing’s projects span from the Malacca Straits to the Cape of Good Hope, and many places in between, including countries that were once in India’s sphere of influence. A massive deep-sea port being built by Chinese funds and labor at Hambantota, at the southern tip of Sri Lanka, has in particular riled Indian analysts. With a $1 billion facility also under construction in Gwadar, in Pakistan, China will eventually possess key naval choke points around the Subcontinent that could disrupt Indian lines of communication and shipping. Reports of a tense standoff earlier this year between Indian and Chinese warships on anti-piracy patrol in the Gulf of Aden - though dismissed by both governments - did little to subdue the sense of distrust brewing between policymakers on both sides.

In response to China’s gains, India’s navy aims to modernize its own fleet. It launched the country’s first nuclear submarine in July and purchased new destroyers from Russia and the U.S., yet China’s plans to build aircraft carriers and boost its own submarine fleet far outstrip that of New Delhi. India has expanded defense contacts and exchanges with a host of strategic Indian Ocean countries and archipelago nations such as Mauritius, Seychelles, Madagascar and the Maldives, as well as engaging in naval exercises with other East Asian and Southeast Asian nations that are wary of China’s growing stature, such as Japan and Vietnam. But China also maintains solid relationships with many of these countries - ties that, in most cases, bind far tighter and offer much more than what poorer India can muster.

Conflict, though, is not inevitable. It’s natural for rising powers to extend their reach and rub up against each other. China and India, says C. Uday Bhaskar, director of the National Maritime Foundation, a think tank attached to the Indian navy, need to “evolve some kind of modus vivendi as they establish themselves in the Indian Ocean.” But few can divine what that may look like. Part of the problem is that despite booming trade between India and China, there is little political understanding between their governments. “They engage very superficially,” says Pant. “There’s rarely consensus on any of the fundamental issues.” Comparisons have even been made linking India and China’s current rapport to the ill-fated understandings between the U.S. and Japan in the early 20th century. Though in a vastly different context, the two countries, says Pant, are clandestinely probing and feeling out each other’s geo-political intentions in an eerily similar fashion.

An article in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs by Robert Kaplan, a prominent American writer and strategic thinker, suggested that the U.S., far and away still the world’s preeminent military power, could be the chief “balancer” and “honest broker” in the Indian Ocean. But that idea has been received icily in Asia, with many governments seeing the U.S. as a nation in decline, marooned in costly adventures abroad and led by an Obama administration less willing to confront the aggressive posturing of a rising giant like China. It would be better, says Bhaskar, for India and China to slowly forge a constructive pan-Asian consensus and do away with the “post-colonial baggage” that animates the current Sino-Indian border dispute. But as talk of a new Asian “Great Game” gains favor, history and geography may not be so easy to overcome.

malala's daddy on ted...
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Re: China bashing by the Indian Media

If anything, India vs. China is a comparable match up.

How much of the Indian "analyst's" fears are justified? We shall see in the coming years.

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Only in population, in which India is poised to win hands down, every thing else the less said the better.

So People, What Are You Wearing?