NEWS THAT IS DIFFERENT & IS A REASON FOR CONCERN .

Media Wants Riots: Why Indians are Protesting Bias and Sensationalism in Media

These last few months of media reporting in and on India are sounding ominously like the media climate in America in the period between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the invasion of Iraq. There is blood and fire in the air and on the ground, and a gloomy atmosphere of even more death and destruction to come. There is a sense of righteousness and justice at work in the passions that these media narratives arouse and stoke, too. But most of all, there is the utter lack of credibility, balance and a sense of honor for truth in all of this idealistic talk.

In the last week of September at Dadri not far from the Indian capital, an angry mob lynched to death Mohammad Akhlaq over allegations that a cow was slaughtered and he ate beef.

In the 1970s and 1980s in Bihar where there was no Bharatiya Janata Party, cow slaughter was still banned and there were times when there would be conflicts over beef and policemen would visit homes.

Beef conflicts are not new to contemporary India. Cows are not slaughtered across the Islamic world, but the reason cows are slaughtered mostly in the Indian Subcontinent is because Indian Islamists introduced the practice of cow slaughter here as a challenge to Hindu religious practice of worshiping cows.

Fikr-e-Nau (New Thinking), a newly launched Urdu magazine published by Pakistani Marxists – explores the issue of cow slaughter (a translation will be published soon by the Washington D.C.-based Middle East Media Research Institute).

You can look further back into history.