Entitlement, White Privilege, Patronizing, and Liberal Lies: Deconstructing John Oliver’s Coverage of India

If one heard John Oliver virtue-signaling to Indians on how to run their country a century ago, it could easily be mistaken as a white master lecturing his slaves on his ‘civilizing mission’. That is how patronizing and sermonizing the HBO’s Last Week Tonight host became a few days ago, in his bid to lecture Indians upon the supposedly ongoing ‘misconduct’ of their twice-elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had just returned to office last summer after a full-term, with a larger mandate than the first time.

Oliver seems to have taken a bit too much offense at the US President Donald Trump’s gaffe of calling Prime Minister Modi ‘father of the country’, when the title was, according to Oliver, reserved for another of India’s political leaders, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, or “Mahatma” (great soul) Gandhi- only it was not (more on this in a while).

Flying into the stretched-sheepish-smile outrage so typical of his Left-Liberal ilk of media, entertainment, and most late-night, “comedic” talk shows, Oliver basically delivered a 15-minute reprimand to nearly 230 million Indians who had polled for Prime Minister Modi in the Lower House general elections held during April-May of last year. What was telling was not just talking-down to Indian voters by a British-born, white American telling them how they had made a mistake in electing their leader and they deserve this telling-off by the superiority complex-fueled Liberal, but the appalling use of lying, slander, a misrepresentation that was actively employed to achieve this.

India and her ‘rustic’ ways continue to be “laughing matter” for ‘Sahibs’

Sahib is a word from Hindi language, one of India’s 22 recognized by her Constitution, that was used for British colonial officers during the time India was a British colony. Aside from the obvious losses of life, economy, and political freedom, for 190 years, one of Indians’ primary grouse against the British Raj (rule) has been of the British antipathy towards, and mockery of, India’s indigenous knowledge, customs, and traditions, as compared to the ‘civilized’ Protestant Christian masters- Rudyard Kipling’s ‘White man’s burden’ was just the articulation of it. John Oliver brought back that very same humiliation.

In his very opening act (about India), John Oliver shows hundreds in a political rally wearing face-masks of Prime Minister Modi, and goes on to very subtly, but in no uncertain terms, highlight how the hoi-polloi, ‘populist’ sentiment that Modi gets showered with is a woke, sophisticated Champagne-Liberal’s “nightmare”.

Lies of ‘minority’ persecution

Oliver accuses the Modi government of “steadily escalating persecution of minorities”, which is ironic at so many levels that it actually becomes quite hilarious.

Firstly, when he says “minorities”, he cherry-picks Muslims, the second-largest religious majority, while ignoring millions of Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and even smaller numbers of Zoroastrians (colloquially called “Parsis”), Irani-s (followers of another pre-Islamic religion of Persia/present-day Iran, believed to have fled intransigent Islamic persecution), Jews, etc. All the aforementioned groups have lived very peacefully in India with the government as well as the Hindu majority- not just for the last six years (Modi government’s regime), but also under any and all regimes previous to that in independent India, and for thousands of years before that as well.

Had this government’s nature been anti-minority, would they have gone after those who are actually this country’s second-largest majority, amounting to more than the rest of all the minority communities pout together, or would they have first consolidated their position by targeting the ‘easier’ minorities?

Secondly, even as Oliver accuses Modi (and, by not-so-covert proxy, all of his voters) of majoritarianism, Modi’s party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has recently lost a state election Delhi, the national capital city. Many pollsters are murmuring that the extent of defeat is actually owed to the disillusionment of the majority Hindu community with the BJP, because the party is being seen to be indulging in the same appeasement and mollycoddling of fundamentalist and intolerant among Muslims, that it accuses its political opponents to do.

One of the first acts of Narendra Modi government, on returning to power in 2019, was to liberally dole out various social security and educational scholarship schemes for only and only minority population- of which the Muslims are expected to receive a lion’s share, being around 70% of the ‘minority’ population, and notwithstanding that they were already targeted beneficiaries of numerous schemes and programs of the government- of his predecessors, and Modi as well.

Oliver also falsely states that Indians “across the country have been taking to the streets in anger”. Not many lies could be farther from the truth than this. There has been sustained, noteworthy street-protest by members of the society in only two places- the national capital Delhi, and Lucknow, the capital city of the country’s most populous state. In the rest of the country, there have been sparse disturbances within a handful of college campuses, that were met by equally strong, if not more, support for the said policy in question of the agitations, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA). Of the two, the Lucknow disruptions were sternly dealt with by the chief minister Yogi Adityanath, who ordered the police to start attaching properties of those found guilty of damaging the public property.

Before I touch upon the question of protests themselves, it’s important to note that the cities that did erupt in violence, Lucknow and Delhi, house one of the largest shares of Muslim population by percentage- in fact, the Muslim share of population in Delhi is nearly 30%, double of the national average, whereas in Lucknow, it stands at 21%, 1.5 times the national average of 14%.

Persecutor and persecuted cannot be put at par

Before moving over to the protests, it’s imperative to understand what the protests are actually about. To address the issue of religious persecution in the neighboring theocratic, Islamic republics of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, which has led to a little over 31,000 refugees fleeing to India, the Modi government has passed the CAA in the parliament last December. A limited, targeted, one-time legal intervention, it fast-tracks citizenship to those religious minorities in India’s neighboring theocracies who have already been inside India on or before 31st December 2014, providing it to them in five years, instead of the minimum 11 years it takes for any normal applicant to be considered for citizenship in India.

What protesting people, overwhelmingly Muslim and seconded by those who identify as Far-Left, openly communists and socialists, are actually demanding that this humanitarian intervention, surely done “on the religious basis” (because the prosecution, to begin with, was on the basis of religion itself), be scrapped in effect- they demand that either the refugees be treated at par with their prosecutors, or they be not shown any compassion and humanitarian gesture at all.

Oliver parrots the same fake news and wild, irresponsible conspiracy theories about it- that it is a plan to give citizenship to all Hindus and strip it off of all Muslims, that it will be coupled by a mythical National Register of Citizenship, etc.- which have not only been the oxygen of the “protests” he mentions in his show, but have also led to the death of around 40 people (so far) in the subsequent riots, including a woman who, as I write it, appears to have been raped, murdered, and thrown in a gutter, and an internal security personnel, who was reportedly stabbed 400 times before being dumped in the same gutter.

While Oliver could understandably not have foreseen such horrors, but his apathy to India’s ground reality could be understood from the fact that he glossed over the earliest signs of violence shown by the aggressors, in form of willful and wanton destruction of property, by cracking jokes about it. For him, torching buses, one of the essential, absolutely indispensable modes of transport in Delhi, was “generally aren’t a sign that people are happy with you. It’s the gesture that says, ‘you suck so hard that I don’t even care how I get home’.” Privilege, anyone?

Stabbing someone 400 times is hardly protest

While the protests blew into full-fledged communal riots only after the presumable time-frame when Oliver must have shot the episode, but these agitations have had a communal nature since day 1. It’s difficult to imagine a situation where Oliver could have missed that part if even the most half-hearted efforts could have gone in to look at the issue comprehensively.

A Muslim student leader and one of the speakers at Shaheen Bagh, the ground zero for these communal agitations, Sharjeel Imam had been caught on-camera advocating cutting off India’s north-eastern parts from rest of the country. Before this, the ‘student’ agitators had raised slogans of Azaadi (freedom) from Hindutva (literally Hindu-ness) and Hinduon (Hindus), essentially saying that they’d ‘free’ (read: purge) India from not just the Hinduness (as if being a Hindu is some sort of sickness), but from Hindus itself- literally a dog-whistle for ethnic cleansing. The radical, fundamentalist, violent underpinnings of these supposedly ‘peaceful’ and ‘secular’ protests were also stripped bare for all to see and be ridden of any doubts by the agitators themselves, when some of the earliest slogans of the agitations turned out to be “Allahu Akbar” and “La Illaha Illallah”.

During the same orchestration of anarchy and holding the State hostage, that Oliver sought to whitewash as protests, journalists were attacked and heckled.

As a logical progression to such aggression, in which the ‘protest’ was only a step of consolidation of the worst elements, the streets of Delhi are now ablaze with communal violence, the horrors ranging from Hindu-baiting by desecration of temples to stripping girls and forcing them to walk the streets naked, to murders so gruesome that stood horrified even the forensic specialists.

Lies and Omissions

Oliver claimed that Modi, in a swing-and-miss of Demonetization of high-value currency notes in 2016, canceled 86% of the country’s cash wealth with a window of merely 4 hours for people to save their money. This is a classic case of lying, and lying by omission.

First of all, what the Modi government did was not the invalidation of wealth itself, but only that of the notes. People were given the chance to get their currency notes changed to either new currency notes, or get the amount credited to their bank accounts.

Secondly, the window provided for this was not merely four hours, but nearly two months. In some cases, upon the discretionary powers vested in officers to address those genuine cases of hapless people who could not access the banking network in time.

This is not a defense of demonetization itself. Both its operational efficiency, and the economic and financial wisdom behind it have certainly left a lot of questions unanswered. But the specific remarks of Oliver about it were plain lies.

Rife Liberal Entitlement and Talking Down To

We have already see above how the Left-Liberal star Oliver paraded his privileged (I leave the judgment of white or rich to the readers) obliviousness to the importance of buses in a country like India, where the burning of buses creates livelihood crises, regardless of how funny it looks to a white, privileged British-American comedian far removed from those harrowing realities.

He tops it off by what is now looking to be the most repugnant of the characteristics of the contemporary Left-Liberal ecosystem- talking down to the people who elect people you don’t like. In an act of what would have been called ‘mansplaining’ had the target audience been even remotely female-dominated, he goes on to explain how Modi’s ability to evade “public anger sticking to him” is a “very dangerous superpower”.

In an astonishing display of imperviousness to irony, Oliver ‘warns’ the audience to “not take that image [him thumbs-upping Hitler, whom he claims, ironically out-of-context, to be admired by the founders of Modi’s parent organization, for killing Hitler] out of context”.

But Oliver’s entitled presumption of talking down to Indians, telling them what their country is (and isn’t) doesn’t stop here. He constantly refers to Gandhi, and India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, both Liberals, as India’s ‘founding fathers’- they are not.

India is neither a Europe-like nation-state, nor a country created along the lines of nations like the US or Canada- essentially, it does not have a founding father, or a ‘father of the nation’, for that matter. The modern Indian State is an unambiguous inheritor of at least six thousand years of Hindu civilizational legacy, of which no one person could be justifiably ascribed a father, or a founding father. And this is not just a “right-winger’s” rhetoric- the Indian government has repeatedly denied ever conferring this title to Gandhi, or any individual, and it has done so not just in times of Modi, but also when the party lead for long by Gandhi-Nehru themselves was in power in the country. Hence, Oliver’s calling Gandhi father of India was exactly as fallacious as Trump conferring the title to Modi.

In fact, this act is a textbook case of the fallacy of evidence by citation within a closed system- where Liberal Gandhi and Nehru get conferred with parenthood of a nation (presumably by other Liberals), and then the Liberal Oliver gets outraged when the non-Liberal Modi is seen trying to break ranks and enter the system, by getting the similar (though non-Liberal) endorsement for the same title, by an ‘outsider’, challenging the Liberal privilege and entitlement to power.

In his patronizing ‘mansplaining’ of India, Oliver further continues to spiral down, quoting selectively from Left-leaning publications and media outlets from India as well as West, peddling lies and lies by omission like “the protestors come from a wide range of backgrounds” (truth: they don’t; as explained above, the mainstream of “protests” were Islamic from day 1, and continued with their Islamic, secessionist rhetoric throughout; those shown by Oliver as proof of ‘Hindu/diverse’ background of protests would not amount to even 1% in numbers).

And in the typical colonial master’s way of telling the subject what they “should” and “should not” be, Oliver closes the monologue by telling India, home of “this enduring symbol of love (Taj Mahal)”, how it ‘deserves’ “a lot more, than this (a carefully-chosen particularly unflattering image of an angry Modi staring at something) temporary symbol of hatred.”