Say Anything Blog

Amitabh Tripathi is convinced his nation of India is under attack; so he did something few people are willing to do. He abandoned a promising freelance career with India’s mainstream media (MSM), so he could he could write openly as a conservative about Indian leftists, Islamists, and government policies that play into their hands.

“You cannot write about the leftists,” he told me, “because the Congress [Party] government is dependent on them”; and if you identify the terrorist threat as Islamist, “you are called anti-Muslim and a racist.” But, Tripathi said, that is not what worries him the most. “The major threat to Indian sovereignty is government policies that are based on pseudo-secularism and Muslim appeasement.” For journalists, that translates into a rigid political correctness that forces them to adhere to the MSM’s left-wing bias or look for employment elsewhere.

“After meeting Dr. Daniel Pipes and Dr. Richard Benkin,” Tripathi said, “I came to know the gravity of the Islamic threat, what the whole world is facing, and the ignorance people have about the Israel-Palestine struggle. India is entering the most critical period in its history and that the current government and other elites are handing our enemies a victory.” Since most of what we hear about the world’s largest democracy centers on its new role as an economic giant, its nuclear status, and perhaps its ties with Israel, we might think Tripathi is exaggerating; but there is a great deal that our own MSM does not report.

I was in India for the better part of February this year, when almost every day saw radical action: “road strikes” where separatists and other protesting radicals closed major thoroughfares; a thwarted cyber-terrorist attack by Islamists; communist agitation and demonstrations against India’s proposed nuclear deal with the United States; and a military operation by Maoist terrorists against a police station that killed dozens.

Islamic radicals are flexing their muscles, too, building radical madrassas (or Islamic schools) throughout the country, especially in Muslim-dominated villages. Darul Uloom Deoband, the seminary that produced the Taliban’s Mullah Omar, is located less than 100 miles from the capital and continues to issue regular fatwas. Muslims are demanding autonomy in several areas; and three Indian states have communist governments. The most entrenched of them, West Bengal, sits less than 15 miles from a barely-patrolled border with China.

So Tripathi started Lokmanch, a Hindi-language web site that features frank criticism of what he and others call the government’s “ostrich-like behavior.” He also has translated articles on Israel, the US war against Islamist terror and extremism, Barack Obama, and other topics. They provide Indians with information that their media simply does not report. Quietly, Tripathi is attracting more and more Indian journalists, including bona fide members of the MSM. Several of them offered me their candid opinions about the media’s leftist bias, the center-left government, and the severity of the Islamist threat facing their country. They work for major newspapers and broadcast channels; English and Hindi-language outlets, purely Indian companies, and some with an international reach. Their concern was genuine; their passion intense.

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Mandhol Kalan is a small village about 50 miles from Delhi where Deoband imams banned television, radio, photography, even singing. One Hindi TV network did a story exposing it, which forced the government to react. But instead of addressing the issue it raised, the Ministry responded by distributing new television sets. Not surprisingly, the Deobandis returned, confiscated the TVs, and re-instituted the ban. But now, the government does not return calls, and networks have not returned to Mandhol Kalan. Thus, just outside the Indian capital is a village that makes Afghanistan look like Las Vegas. Worse, said one of the journalists involved in the original report, the media’s silence “allows [the Islamists] to impose their views exclusively and produce more terrorists.”