by Manjeet Kripalani
Manjeet Kripalani is the executive director of Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations, Mumbai. She was formerly India bureau chief for BusinessWeek, and a reporter at Forbes magazine, New York. She participated in an OPC panel on China’s global influence last August, which you can read about here.
COVID-19’s second wave has been cruel to India. But even more cruel has been the coverage of the Western – especially U.S. – press, of the continuing misery. Day after day, starting at the end of April, cataclysmic images of the COVID-19 dead being burnt on triangular piles of wood in common ground, flames and ashes everywhere, have been carried to the world on screen and paper.
There may be an element of fascinated horror in those sights, a visual of the burning fires of hell that Biblical faiths believe in. For Hindus, fire is holy, the cleanest way to detach the eternal soul from the mortal frame and send a loved one on their onward journey. The ashes, or rakh, are sacred, and immersed in the river or sea, with a prayer. There is ancient understanding to these rituals.
The funerals are also intensely private. Many of the photos were taken by overhead drones on public grounds made available by government for cremation – violating privacy and publishing without permission from the bereaved.
So, to have highly trained and talented western journalists – and their Indian stringers – turn private, sorrowful affairs into a one-dimensional public spectacle, stirred strong reactions in India. Indians, already suffering, felt exposed, insulted, and worse, put back into the box of “exotica” – from being the vaccine makers to the world. Social media and various analysts called it “cremation porn.”
Having learned my journalism from the very best at Forbes and BusinessWeek, I would consider exposing personal tragedy to public readers, unethical. It’s also lazy journalism, reflecting a limited vocabulary and a Rolodex devoid of sources.
The pyres bypassed the more serious story: That like Japan, which in March 2011 experienced an earthquake, a tsunami and a nuclear disaster, India experienced a trifecta of policy decisions and coinciding events between April 16 and April 18 that created a deadly COVID-19 combination – and hence the deaths. On April 16, a tweet by India’s Serum Institute to the U.S. President requested him to release raw materials or have India face an acute vaccine shortage; it coincided with the federal government’s April 18 decision to vaccinate those between 18 and 45 years – and the sudden arrival of a new, deadly, highly transmissible double mutant of the coronavirus, with cases beyond 200,000 a day and New Delhi taking the brunt of cases.
In the confusion between opinion and fact created by social media, only good journalists can make the difference. We hope they will.