Sydney University professor and sociologist Salvatore Babones is not one to pull his punches. He is becoming increasingly popular in India as a man from the West who busts the “Western left-liberal lobby" in India and globally. He believes there is a pan-Christian-Islamist alliance that actively works to project India poorly, especially by way of social indices and rankings.
Babones weighed in on the George Soros row after the American billionaire said that questions on Indian industrialist Gautam Adani will weaken Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “stranglehold on the federal government and hopefully lead to a democratic revival".
Soros in the past has been on record opposing the Modi-led government as a “Hindu nationalist government".
“I doubt George Soros knows much about Indian democracy, but he does know what he reads in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, which is then presented as factual accounts of Indian democracy. Yet those accounts are coming from primarily South-Asian, primarily Indian voices, who have very strongly held opinions about India," Babones told CNN-News18 in an exclusive conversation on Tuesday. “I don’t doubt the sincerity of those opinions, but they come to be presented as facts to the rest of the world. And because we have no other sources of information on India, we take it seriously."
On hearing someone call American democracy now being a fascist dictatorship, people shrug their shoulders, because they are very familiar with American democracy, he said. “You can make your own decisions. When a Westerner sees India called fascist in the Wall Street Journal or others, we take that seriously because we know very little about India. Our knowledge of India is so shallow that if all we hear these complaints, we take them seriously," he added.
Babones has in the past criticised “intellectuals" in India for being largely responsible for the anti-India narrative in the Western media.
“There must be people who resent being challenged on a narrative that they have monopolised for a long time. Western knowledge of India has been monopolised by just half a dozen people, columnists, and intellectuals with access to Western media, who have shaped the entire Western understanding of the country," he said. “And that understanding is not just faulty, but false. The quantitative data we have suggests a very different India than the qualitative understandings that we have received from the small group of journalists and intellectuals."
He added that this is indeed a more recent phenomenon because of intellectual opposition to Prime Minister Modi.
“I think it is mostly anti-Modi activism, but such that it has translated into an anti-India or anti-democracy narrative. Instead of challenging the government, it challenges the state," he said. “For example, challenging the independence of the Election Commission of India. I’ve seen very little in India that suggests the ECI has been compromised in any way, yet the international narrative we have seen is that the Election Commission has gone from being fully independent just 8-10 years ago to now being in the pocket of the government. I doubt that is true, but that’s what we have been given. People are taking their subjective opinions and presenting them as objective facts."
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