Locating the Impact of Geopolitics on the New York Times’ Coverage of Kashmir from Late 20th Century to Early 21st Century

Abstract

The Cold War, among other global geopolitical events, configured and reconfigured politics at multiple levels globally. Other mediatised events, such as the September 11 attacks, the subsequent ‘War on Terror’, Islamophobia and economic processes, such as India’s economic liberalisation in the 1990s, created new global geopolitical alliances between regions. Effects of the shifting politics percolated to local and national amalgams of power, which influenced the gaze of the media. The paper, through Critical Discourse Analysis, unravels the geopolitical impact of the reportage on the Gaw Kadal Massacre and the Amarnath Land Row in Kashmir by The New York Times between 1990 and 2010. The study connects the political objectives of the ruling class to those of the media. Contradistinctions in the political nature of reportage that emerge from the text are linked to geopolitical processes, suggesting that important global events shaped the publication’s gaze on the contested space.

Keywords

Media geopolitics Islamophobia peace journalism Kashmir Cold War 9/11 India neo-liberalisation

Introduction

Regions of conflict cannot be studied in isolation and it is imperative that the geopolitics surrounding the region, locally and globally, are examined to illuminate the roots of any disputed territory. In that sense, Indian-administered Kashmir needs to be studied holistically and impartially, through various prisms and not just selective surface-level manifestations of violent incidents which lead to sweeping generalisations in the national and global imaginations. History, the impact of Cold War politics and iconic global events, India’s liberalisation policies, the formation and growth of geopolitical alliances after the Cold War have influenced not just the trajectory of the movement for self-determination but also have affected subsidiary extensions of power, such as the media. This paper unravels the impact of geopolitics on The New York Times’ (NYT) coverage of Kashmir and deconstructs its reportage, highlighting shifts in its political stance over two decades, enabling an understanding of how the media portrays Kashmir and the factors that influenced its treatment.

A multi-level analysis is central to deciphering the various approaches media have over an event or a development and the role of the power centres in the process of news making. The study also connects the political objectives of the governing class to those of the media. As the media are considered to be an extension of the ruling class by some, these objectives are filtered down to the publications and editors who determine the nature of the stories and reveal or conceal the geopolitics of the era. This not only illuminates the nuances of political positioning of the publication but also detects the shifts within the publication over time.

The research focuses on the English print media because of its intimate relationship to the elite governing structures that construct hegemonic narratives to manufacture consent and set agendas on national and international issues, unravelling the understanding of the politics of media vis-à-vis contested regions in general and factors that shape mediatised conflicts. The research links the Cold War’s impact, India’s economic liberalisation, the September 11 attacks, ‘War on Terror’, Islamophobia and the Mumbai attacks to the emergence of new geopolitical alliances that shaped The NYT’s Kashmir’s coverage on two widely covered incidents. However, since 2010, there have been several major socio-political developments in the Valley, coupled with an increase in the levels of militarisation. Understandably, this has altered the tenor and scope of reportage by The NYT and the Western media. This remains beyond the scope of this paper due to limitations of the time period and other researchers may attempt to explore these developments.

Conflict, governance and media

Political upheaval or a dissenting population leads the governing class to strengthen its hegemonic control over any occupied territory through undemocratic legal sanctions to entrench its position. Such persuasive political practices require normalised interpretations best communicated to the population via the media or the governing class’s coercive apparatus. We may, thus, infer that capitalist hegemony requires parallel media hegemony as an institutionalised, systematic means of knowledge production, coercing and representing subordinate classes to particular political or cultural practices within the context of capitalism (Artz and Kamalipour, 2003). Any resistance to this stance is met with direct or structural force that has been legitimised through misrepresentation of the dissidents, their political representatives and their motives through the media. Kashmir has been a theatre of such machinations enacted by the governing class.

In a democracy, media can be reduced to serving as a pedagogical tool in the hands of the powerful to with an agenda, thereby eliminating the public’s free choice. As conflict reporting focuses more on incidents or events and not processes that lead to them or the intricacies of their outcome in various spheres, it becomes difficult to interpret conflicts and resolve them. For McLuhan (1994), the natural dynamic of books and newspapers is to create a unified national outlook on a centralised pattern. Collectively, these function to establish and expand ruling class hegemony. In conflicts regions, Lynch and McGoldrick (2005) found that reporting that reinforces official versions of reality has a huge and dangerous influence on public understanding.

For decades, globally, intelligence agencies have weaponised mainstream media to spread propaganda. For example, at the height of the Cold War in America, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) developed its very own stable of writers, 3000 editors and publishers that it paid money to circulate Agency propaganda under a programme called Operation Mockingbird, which influenced over 25 newspapers and wire agencies, including The NYT. Almost from its founding in 1947, the CIA had journalists on its payroll (St. Clair and Cockburn, 2016).

In an age where information warfare is one of the most critical and well-financed areas of warfare, a revelation in 2014 by a former top journalist in Germany is crucial in understanding how the Western media is influenced by the deep state. In an interview in 2014, Dr Udo Ulfkotte, a top German journalist and former editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, explains ‘Journalists are often bribed to lie, deceive and write stories favourable to intelligence agencies’ (MacMillan, 2016: online). Ulfkotte, a few years after the release of his tell-all book Journalists for Hire, died of a heart attack mysteriously at the age of 56 years (Kuma, 2017). Manipulation of information by the deep state is not only pervasive in internal conflicts but also in external wars. Because during conflicts, the space for societal discourse is turned into a battlefield as governments use it to legitimise claims, demonise the enemy, marginalise counterviews and generally create societal beliefs that support war (Bar-Tal, 1998).

Cold War and Asia: Kashmir as a case study

The Cold War influenced global politics at multiple levels in various regions of the world. With support of its Cold War allies, India’s governing class played a crucial role internationally at the United Nations in reinterpreting the Kashmir conflict. Over several decades, the ruling class, through constitutional amendments, political coercion and co-option, use of military strength against civilians, the opportunistic use of its international allies at the United Nations and its use of the national media to cement a statist version of the conflict in the national imagination, maintaining its hegemony but not been able to crush the movement for self-determination in the contested space (Boga, 2018).

States such as India, China and Pakistan that are competitive regional powers are akin to supranational powers such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Russia, each vying for regional supremacy and at times, unifying for common objectives. These powers are known to work through the foreign media deputed in the sub-continent. Hence, international news agencies and publications working in other regions prove themselves loyal to their countries of origin. In South Asia, regional powers that protect each other, or are in competition, are often used by other transnational powers that own media companies to foster global economic alliances or raise topics nations attempt to invisiblise. This transnational military–industrial–state–corporate–media/infotainment nexus shapes the way matters of relevance are presented to the world.

During the Cold War years, India’s proximity to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics resulted in critical reportage on Kashmir by American publications such as The NYT from the late 1940s to the 1970s. The reason why media’s relationship with power becomes more distinct in regions of conflict is because of the ruling class’s need to control the narrative emerging from that space, as the handling of conflict reflects on its international and domestic image. Therefore, the governing class protects itself from scrutiny through the media by manufacturing, facilitating and intensifying conflicts through distortion, so that state power is able to function and multiply without public criticism. To develop in-depth background knowledge about the media’s trajectory on Kashmir as a space of conflict, let us now examine The NYT by tracing the trajectory of the publication’s shifting perceptions, illuminating a stark contrast over decades.

At the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s and 1960s, political coups were briefly made visible by The NYT. From the mid-60s, The NYT had depicted Kashmir’s reality and portrayed a critical view of India’s mismanagement of the political upheaval in the region, Prime Minister of Kashmir Sheikh Abdullah’s incarceration and had even referred to India and Kashmir as two separate countries (The NYT, 1964). An article titled, ‘Abdullah Reported Silenced by a Warning from India’ symbolises the power imbalance between India and the former Prime Minister of Kashmir and warns the fate of all Kashmiris who will ‘face serious consequences’ if they ‘continue to press for self-determination’ (The NYT, 1964). The ruling dispensation’s response to a people demanding their universal right to self-determination exposes its political obstinacy and its inflexible nationalistic stance that resorts to reinterpreting historical facts only to remain in power by amassing territory. The headline is also noteworthy, as the former Prime Minister of Kashmir Abdullah’s attempts to resist Indian advances on Kashmir’s autonomy finally results in a ‘warning from India’ after his release from ‘10 years of incarceration in Indian jails’ (The NYT, 1964). The word ‘warning’ also conveys the nature of the relationship shared by the two countries – that of a bully or tyrant and the victim or the oppressed. This pinpoints the beginning of the political conflict between India and unmerged Kashmir, where the hegemon determined the quality and quantity of autonomy for the land it occupied by denying people’s right to self-determination that it had promised through a plebiscite at the United Nations in the presence of the international community.

End of Cold War and media

By the end of the Cold War, global power politics underwent major realignments over the years, marking a shift in the manner in which The NYT portrayed the conflict in Kashmir may have stemmed from the geopolitics of the era. This transformed after India’s economic liberalisation, post-September 11 attacks and the War on Terror. The West was interested in continuing to control raw materials and develop potential markets for Western products, leading up to an ever-expanding military–industrial–corporate–media nexus (Thussu, 2000). Despite the end of the Cold War, globalisation and liberalisation of markets threatened to undermine the social policies of elected governments, transforming the state from a welfare state to an authoritative one (Puri, 2004). By 2009, the Indian and US militaries openly joined hands to settle the costs of military exercises on a barter basis (Dutta, 2009). These conditions affected Kashmir’s representation abroad and the interpretation of the Kashmir dispute by the US media converged with India’s version, with both the media mirroring the ruling class’s perspectives while protecting the role of the state of their origin (Boga, 2018). This symbiotic relationship caused an obfuscation in The NYT’s portrayal of Kashmir. This also highlights that the media is an extension of the capitalist state and is employed to control public perception on issues of relevance.

India’s economic ‘liberalisation’ and its impact

Since the 1950s, the United States has been selling weapons to Pakistan. After the end of the Cold War, the United States began to expand its military–industrial complex by selling arms and security technology to India, too. Since then, without attempting to resolve an international dispute among nuclear-armed countries, Western powers, such as the United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, have been fuelling war by arming South Asian markets in India and Pakistan not just militarily but also with nuclear power and cyber espionage technology. Along with the United Nations, these imperial war economies anchored in monopoly capitalism also deliberately ignore human rights violations in the Global South, thus normalising violence, militarising societies and cultivating cultures of impunity, especially in conflict regions, such as Kashmir (Chomsky, 2001).

Post-neo-liberalisation, by the mid-1990s, the veiled global state–military–industrial complex made India one of the largest importers of weapons in the world and the United States, the largest exporter. Cold War divisions transformed as the global ‘War on Terror’ forged new geopolitical alliances, where violence was directed towards a certain group of people worldwide, depending on the resources they owned. This direction of violence has been justified and legitimised by the perpetrator nations under the garb of protecting ‘national interests’ and combating ‘terror’, enabling them to play defensive victims during invasions. Taking a cue from Western countries, India too has joined the bandwagon to play the victim of pan-Islamic terror, and subsequently militarise, introduce anti-constitutional laws and securitise, while actually targeting political dissidents in all parts of the country. This process emulates the Western public discourse, where those who oppose established orders are terrorists and state terrorism is a category virtually never employed, unless it refers to the Communist bloc (Schlesinger, 1981). Similarly, in Kashmir, like other conflict regions of India such as Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Assam, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Manipur, dissidents and political leaders of resistance have met the same fate, where their struggle for political demands or the universal fundamental human right of self-determination has been discredited and delegitimised by the ruling class, categorising them as anti-India, pro-Pakistan, pro-China, jihadis or pan-Islamic militants or terrorists. Baudrillard (1983: 50) thus posits that nothing is more ‘cut off from the masses’ than terrorism – power always tries to set the one against the other. The modern state, since post-independence was unable to address the political demands and decades later, political movements turned violent due to state repression, especially within a neo-liberal framework of governance.

Reportage in the early 90s was set at a time when the strategic relationship between the United States and Pakistan was set in the post-Cold War milieu and India’s proximity to Russia threatened the two. Geopolitical alliances played a crucial role in The NYT’s stances vis-à-vis Kashmir, often attributed to the Cold War divisions between nation-states in the first phase of the study – 1990–2000. Subsequently, the September 11 attacks translated into a shift in the priorities of the states and subsequently, of the media, too. For example, due to a shift in geopolitical alliances, The NYT’s contextualisation of the historicity of Kashmir and its pro-people stance drastically altered after 2001 as it emulated US’ posture and proclaimed the rise of the global ‘War on Terror’. It can be said that The NYT’s reportage in the early 1990s was not restrained and it accurately reported on state-led atrocities in Kashmir as we will examine in the section below.

The NYT’s gaze of Kashmir in the late 20th century: 1990–2000

The materials examined have been classified into two phases, namely (a) Late 20th century: 1990–2000 and (b) Early 21st century: 2000–2010, based on international geopolitics. For example, in the first half of the first phase of the study, The NYT has contextualised historical processes and incidents of violence accurately, outlining reasons behind the international dispute. The researcher has discussed how this gradually transformed after India’s liberalisation which led to a Cold War thaw and after the United States launched the global ‘War on Terror’. From this time on, in a more pronounced manner in the second phase of the study, The NYT’s reportage on Kashmir changed drastically to focus on the perspective of the ‘victimised’ West and ‘terror’, contributing to the existing Islamophobia manufactured by the global world order through the media. Let us now turn to analyse a newsworthy incident that occurred in Kashmir in 1990, the first phase of the study.

Massacre at Gaw Kadal

Gaw Kadal (Bridge) in Downtown, Srinagar, an urban location, witnessed a gruesome massacre on 20 January 1990. Considered historically to be the heart of the local resistance movement, residents of this area had organised a protest march against the state on the day they were shot by Indian troopers on the bridge. According to official figures, 28 people were killed and at least 100 injured in firing by security forces during the massacre. However, witnesses reported the death toll was much higher (Dalrymple, 2008).

On 22 January 1990, The NYT (Crossette, 1990a) not only reports the massacre by mentioning that ‘if the death toll is confirmed, the violence would be the worst reported in Jammu and Kashmir’ and that ‘35 [were] shot by the Indian Army’ but also provides a historical context by exposing the root of the conflict by stating that the violence for the independence of Kashmir started in 1947. In an effort to encapsulate the motivations for the recent phase of the conflict, The NYT (Crossette, 1990a) in an article titled ‘35 Reported Dead as Indian Army Opens Fire on Kashmiri Protesters’ connects the cause of the beginning of the armed movement by ‘Muslim militants’ in Kashmir to the ‘rigged election of 1987’ as the coalition formed by Congress and Abdullah ‘lost the confidence of many Kashmiris’. Placing militancy in a political context and illuminating the cause for the beginning of the armed movement in Kashmir’s long struggle for self-determination, the article enlivens the historicity of the conflict, contextualising it, and also explains the politics between the State and the Centre (Crossette, 1990a):

The coalition formed by the Congress Party and Dr. Abdullah in a 1987 election that was locally regarded as having been rigged, soon lost the confidence of many Kashmiris. In the absence of other strong local parties, disaffected residents of the valley began to sympathize with, if not actually support, the armed resistance groups. Kashmir is now being described by officials here as ‘worse than Punjab’, another state torn by a militant separatist movement. Parts of Kashmir are claimed by both India and Pakistan. Both countries keep large forces on either side of a United Nations line of control that serves as a border, and they have occasionally exchanged fire. Some of the Kashmiri guerrilla groups are pro-Pakistani and militantly Islamic. Pakistan denies any official role in the state’s problems, but leaders of Pakistani Kashmir acknowledge a willingness to assist rebels on the Indian side of the boundary.

This background encapsulates the underlying drivers of the violence and reveals how democratic non-violent avenues to address the people’s demands were blocked by power in Kashmir. It is also a comment on the geopolitics of the era and a comparative analysis of the other conflict that India was grappling with at the time. Moreover, presenting such a multi-layered context enables The NYT (Crossette, 1990a) coverage to not only correlate between the beginning of the armed movement and the people’s loss of faith in the governing class when it rigged the election but also to justify that the people’s response to state terror and the flouting of human rights [rigging elections], resulting in armed resistance.

In the article, political violence is shaped in terms of global media networks, where the media are understood as ‘a set of relationships that are discursively formed through a cultural and governmental context’ (Lewis, 2005: 15). One might also argue that political objectives of publications which are aligned to that of the state of their origin determine the nature of the stories. Foregrounding this, Crossette’s (1990a) account of the Gaw Kadal massacre serves as a backdrop for understanding the multi-layered contested space and the long-standing disaffection of many Kashmiris in the trajectory of their struggles against neo-colonialism.

The coverage of the Gaw Kadal massacre represents Kashmir as a conflict region, where the ruling class’s response to people’s dissent is framed as a form of domination of the population through military might. Tracing the trajectory of violence in the region also enables illumination of the people’s narrative. Pointing to the precursor of the massacre, Crossette (1990a) explains, ‘Riots had erupted in the city on Saturday after Indian security forces raided homes, arresting at least 300 people’. The trajectory of violence is the focal point, hence the clear distinction between the oppressors and the oppressed appears, decoding this stage of the conflict. In such a framework, Sirnate (2014) simplifies that the soldier, in abnormal conditions of governance, should be viewed as a state actor and that to understand life under militarisation, it is important to draw attention to the conditions of governance that control the everyday lives of millions of citizens. Such a thorough description by Crossette (1990a) fulfils that requirement. While drawing a parallel to another India’s conflict zone and effectively juxtaposing the people’s narrative with the official version on the nature of the Kashmir conflict, The NYT (Crossette, 1990a) compares: ‘Kashmir is now being described by the officials here as ‘worse than Punjab’, another state torn by a militant separatist movement’. This comparison too situates the reader in relation to the extent to which the ruling class participated in controlling the people’s liberation movement, resulting in elevated levels of categorisation of state violence in the Valley.

Concentrating on the international aspects of the contested space and placing the onus of the unresolved dispute on the ruling class, the article internationalises the dispute: ‘The United Nations says that India has refused for 40 years to allow a plebiscite on Kashmir’s future’ (Crossette, 1990a). This is important for understanding the dispute as it not only places responsibility on the governing class for the stalemate of the conflict but also recognises it as having a monopoly on violence in the region as it controls mass dissent. Drawing a contradistinction between the will of the ruling dispensation and the wishes of the people, the news item encapsulates the fundamentals of the conflict as a background to the Gaw Kadal massacre. The NYT’s (Crossette, 1990a) reportage, however accurate, may be perceived to have been anchored in the Cold War geopolitics, where India was America’s adversary due to the former’s proximity with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

On the one hand, India’s position on Kashmir became entrenched in the 1960s with repeated vetoes by its Soviet allies in the United Nations Security Council, enabling India to evade accountability about the status of the dispute before the international community (Akram, 1995). At the same time, the growing United States–India confrontation over Kashmir had been taking place against a background of ‘rising foreign policy differences between the two countries on a broad range of international issues’ (Schaffer, 2009: 3). Hence one might argue, The NYT’s (Crossette, 1990a) position on Kashmir may have been anchored in geopolitical rivalries when the United States was critical of India while befriending Pakistan, a potential regional ally against China and a party to the Kashmir dispute. America had fully supported Pakistan on the Kashmir issue at the United Nations during the Cold War (Jain, 1999). This may allude to the fact that the mainstream international media could be aligned to the state of its origin and functions to further its global agendas. It is also crucial to note that the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in 1988 helped bring the brewing crisis in Jammu and Kashmir to a head. In addition, the success of the Afghan mujahideen, backed by the United States, was seen by many Kashmiris as ushering in a new era of Muslim self-determination in which armed struggle would be victorious (Thussu, 2000). Thus, one may infer that conducive to the posture taken by the United States, The NYT’s (Crossette, 1990a) stance on Kashmir may have been compelled to take cognizance of these geopolitical environments.

Building on the analysis above, one may claim that The NYT’s portrayal of the Kashmir conflict presents India’s ruling class using violence against those seeking self-determination. To substantiate its stance against the state on the Gaw Kadal massacre, the coverage (Crossette, 1990a, 1990b) foregrounds opinions of most of the stakeholders in the Kashmir conflict including the United Nations, Islamabad, New Delhi, local officials, Western diplomats, Indian TV channels, Indian news agencies and international news outlets like Reuters. This type of reportage serves as a tool to carve out a people’s narrative of the conflict by alluding to ‘self-determination’, a political requirement the ruling class has not fulfilled.

At this stage of the tripartite dispute, The NYT does not replace the people’s perspective with the official version of the event. Visible manifestations of a variety of people abhorring the actions of the powerful governing class reveal the unbearable conditions that the population was subjected to on a daily basis. A deliberate inclusion of a variety of voices from the grassroots in the article drowns state rhetoric and propaganda and draws the reader as close to the processes that were prevalent at the time in the region as opposed to violent and spectacular events. Giving space to an array of voices brings the audience that are not a part of the direct conflict, closer to the Kashmiris, representing the true nature of the conflict. Such a form of journalism also known as accountability journalism ‘dispenses with the very premise of a need for “balance” based on the premise that intellectual honesty is far more important than a ritualised objectivity’ (Rosen, 2015: online). In an attempt to resolve conflict, Peace Journalism, too, enables reporters to present all sides of the conflict, especially the people’s voices, while contextualising its historicity and visiblising all significant stakeholders. Such a media discourse is essential to unravel reality, especially in conflict regions which are a battleground of narratives. Globally, media discourse shapes the representation of liberation and rights struggles.

In another article, Crossette (1991) interviews a local guerrilla leader from Hizbi Islami, ‘an Islamic fundamentalist group wanting to join Pakistan that is less popular than Jammu Kashmir Liberated Front’, to present his side of the story. The NYT’s view depicts that the secular Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front was comparatively more popular among the Kashmiris than religiously motivated groups like Hizbi Islami – a view contrary to the Indian governing class’ or the media’s that paints the whole resistance faction as homogeneous or Islamo-fascist:

The guerrilla said he had also received a message that the security forces were about to sprinkle gunpowder around the neighbourhood and set fire to it, a tactic used widely here with devastating effect. He said his commandos were armed to fight them off.

Such an array of voices of Kashmiri society in the article presents a holistic dimension of this particular stage of the conflict and the conditions under which people survived. The presentation of the guerrilla’s standpoint also highlights how in the early 1990s, the international publication (Crossette, 1991) perceives rebel violence as resistance or retaliatory violence in response to state terror. A deliberately coerced misrecognition of Kashmir and its people misleads readers into viewing the conflict in a way that power deems fit. For this reason, processes of identifying the conflicting parties and their goals, along with the impact of the shifting geopolitics of the era, all become vital components in decoding any conflict. Faulty notions are often propagandised by the powers that fuel the conflict, profit from it or manage it as has been observed above in the national media’s coverage. Trying to outline a set of humanistic assumptions within which violence, including political terrorism, should be evaluated, Schlesinger (1981) maintains that violence has a specific historical determination and its causes require empirical exploration. The ‘Us vs Them’ reportage or the genre of War Journalism does not inform the reader about the complexities of the conflict beyond national interest or its root cause as it only protects those in power using binaries leading to a fractured society. Galtung (1998) opines War Journalism tends to promote a zero-sum analysis, depicts violence as self-generating and without background causes, focuses on the visible consequences of violence, views conflict from the perspectives of two sides, instigates us/them differences, demonises the enemy while humanising ‘our’ side, maps conflict in terms of loss and gain and ignores peace proposals (pp. 13, 14).

One could argue that The NYT’s stance until the mid-1990s may have stemmed out of America’s support to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan to counter the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Crossette’s (1992) independent classification of the rebels could also possibly stem from the geopolitics of the time, when the demonisation of the Muslims had not been initiated. Until then, the West had not manufactured and propagandised its global version of political Islam and its reinterpretation of the concept of ‘jihad’. Thus, Crossette’s (1990b, 1991) representation of the Valley may have emerged from the geopolitical circumstances the United States was anchored in at the time.

Expanding the scope of the argument, military aid that India received from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a major concern for Pakistan during the Cold War (Noor, 2004). Since the mid-1950s, Pakistan’s alignment with the United States encouraged the Soviet Union’s pro-India posture on Kashmir (Bose, 2003). While Soviet and American interests continued to urge a peaceful resolution of the war in Afghanistan, fighting continued throughout 1990 and neither power was able, or willing, to induce or compel contending factions to accept a compromise political settlement. Nor was there much reason for optimism about settlement prospects in 1991 (Kreisberg, 1991). Now let us analyse the Amarnath Land Row to lay bare the contradistinction in how Kashmir was portrayed by The NYT in 2008.

Early 21st century: 2000–2010

Amarnath land row

As Kashmir is a contested space, the relevance of ownership of land is of utmost importance. Article 370 of the Indian Constitution had granted special autonomous status to Jammu and Kashmir, which prevents Indians from buying land and gave the state a ‘special status’ until 5 August 2019. On 17 October 1949, the Indian Constituent Assembly adopted Article 370, ensuring a special status and internal autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir, with Indian jurisdiction in Kashmir limited to only three areas – defence, foreign affairs and communications. The Amarnath land row of May 2008 erupted after the government transferred 100 acres of forestland to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board, endangering the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir and in contravention of India’s Constitution. The move led to large-scale protests all across the Valley followed by the killings of unarmed demonstrators, which went on for months.

The NYT/Associated Press (2008) sources an article from Associated Press in June on the Amarnath land dispute titled, ‘Land Transfer to Hindu Site Inflames Kashmir’s Muslims’. International news agencies such as Associated Press have to toe an invisible line if they want to remain operational in the region, as explained in detail in the second chapter. Reframing the headline as a ‘Hindu-Muslim issue’ as opposed to an unconstitutional move by the ruling class marks a remarkable shift in the manner in which the conflict was portrayed by the American news agency in 2008.

On the fifth day of protests, the said article in The NYT/Associated Press (2008) reports that in ‘Indian-controlled Kashmir three people had died and dozens of others, including 22 police officers wounded’. The violence stemmed from protests that began when land was transferred by the state government to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board, a trust running the popular Hindu shrine in Kashmir (The NYT/Associated Press, 2008). This representation indicates that the people resisted the unconstitutional move of the land transfer through protests, resulting in violence and violations of human rights by the ruling class. Even though, the fifth paragraph contextualises the will of the people and the historicity of the contested space when it comments: ‘Anti-Indian sentiment is strong in Kashmir, where nearly a dozen militant groups have been fighting since 1989 for independence or a merger with Pakistan’; the headline fails to convey the dissatisfaction of the people that arose out of the state violation of the Constitution through the transfer of the land (The NYT/Associated Press, 2008). Instead of terming the governing class’s move illegal, the headline highlights an ethnonationalist (Hindu–Muslim) divide that is not prominent in the region but is often exemplified by the ruling class to demonise the dissenting locals seeking self-determination in the eyes of the public. Often the dominant nationalistic narrative refers to the contested region as India’s ‘inseparable part’ to galvanise public sentiment and to justify human rights violations by a state that militarily aims to crush mass political dissent. Simultaneously, over decades, the isolation, stereotyping and demonisation of the Kashmiris through the national and international media have been an essential step in that direction, especially in this study phase, after the September 11 attacks in 2001 (Boga and Ranjan, 2022).

In that light, it is interesting to note that from the 1950s through the 1970s, few people used the term ‘Muslim fundamentalist’ and Cold War concerns were the defining feature of US foreign policy (Gee, 2005). After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the replacement of the older Cold War frame with the newer ‘War on terror’ frame offered a way for American politicians and journalists to construct a narrative to make sense of a range of diverse stories about international security, civil wars and global conflict. The use of the ‘terror’ frame served several functions both cognitive, by linking together disparate facts, events and leaders, and evaluative, by naming perpetrators, identifying victims and attributing blame. It allowed political leaders to communicate a coherent simple message to the public while also reshaping perceptions of ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ (Norris et al., 2003). As this ‘terror’ inculcated a sense of ‘victimhood’, India too joined this bandwagon. In this context, the United States in a bid to strengthen its position with India extended the notion of ‘terror’ to the conflict in Kashmir. This explains the marked shift in reportage by The NYT on the Kashmir dispute. Kashmir, being a Muslim-majority state sharing a border with Pakistan, became associated with ‘pan-Islamic terror’. With advances in technology that shaped reportage in this phase of the study, the September 11 attacks placed Kashmir on the global terror map, even more than the Kandahar hijacking or the kidnapping and beheading of the Norwegian tourist in the Valley.

Before the September 11 attacks, New Delhi was spending monumental resources on getting Pakistan declared a terrorist state. After the attacks, India enjoyed the company of its friends in Moscow and Tel Aviv that termed separatist movements as ‘terrorism’ and Muslims, be they in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Palestine or Kashmir, as ‘terrorists’ (Khan, 2003). Simplistic stereotypical imagery of backward Arabs and Muslims emerged from the US media. The sinister image of Bin Laden, whatever his culpability in the September 11 attacks, served that purpose well, as did the brutality of Saddam Hussein (Gee, 2005). This heightened xenophobia was not just confined to America and Asia but was also found in Europe. For example, Bendib (2006, 2007) points out that while violent Muslim reaction to the Prophet’s cartoons in the Danish media worked to reconfirm crude stereotypes, the xenophobic European press added fuel to the fire. The occupations of Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine, coupled with the imagery found in the cartoons, confirmed both Muslim fears that the West is contemptuous of their beliefs and their suspicion that denigration and humiliation are still standard features of Western imperialism (Said, 1994). Bendib (2006, 2007) therefore accuses Western media and governments of having double standards when it comes to offending Christian and Jewish versus Islamic sensibilities.

The NYT’s reportage in the second phase of the study in 2008 suggests that certain events or processes in the United States and India reconfigured geopolitical alliances between the two, leading to a more lucrative relationship a few years after India’s ‘economic liberalisation’. America’s failure in Vietnam and Afghanistan, India’s defeat in East Pakistan, its liberalisation in the 1990s, the nuclear tests of May 1998 by India and Pakistan followed by the Kargil conflict in 1999, the September 11 attacks, the United States’ ‘War on Terror’ and the Mumbai attacks were some of the iconic global events that redefined India’s relationship with the world, especially the United States and Britain. This phase also saw India being viewed as a ‘vocal member of the international coalition against terrorism’ by the European Commission’s executive body of the European Union (Institute of Regional Studies, 2002: 7). During this phase, India’s foreign policy, too, focused on strategic partnerships in an emerging multi-polar world. Relations with America blossomed into a privileged partnership and, in the post-September 11 era, extended to military co-operation. The Kashmir conflict, in this geopolitical climate, was aggravated dramatically by the attacks on Parliament and the Assembly in Kashmir and New Delhi in 2001, bringing India and Pakistan within a sliver of a new war (Regional Press, 2002: 7). Shedding light on the burgeoning Indo–US alliance, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Arms Transfers Database states that India was the largest importer of major arms in the world from 2008 to 2012, accounting for 12% of the global arms import, with a reported increase in 24% in 2013–2017 (Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 2018).

To sum up the argument, The NYT/Associated Press’s (2008) representation of the protesters as ‘Kashmir’s Muslims’ resonates with this global narrative propagated by the United States while seeking to homogenise the diverse population of the Valley. Framing protestors as singularly young, male, Muslim and ‘deviant’, ‘Pakistan-sponsored’ and categorising the unrest as a ‘law-and-order problem’, the media racialises the conflict and reinforces stereotypes among the public (Kaul, 2011). Furthermore, an ethnonationalist framing of the conflict impedes conflict resolution and promotes War Journalism (Boga and Ranjan, 2022). This misrepresentation or what Baudrillard (1995) refers to as ‘virtualisation’ influences the understanding of the particular issue by demonising the Muslims, making the Hindu–Muslim polarisation ‘capitalisable’ politically, both domestically and globally, for future, while absolving the state’s role and institutionalising cultures of impunity.

It has been observed how a post-Vietnam, post-Cold War, post-modern, virtuous war emerged prior to 9/11, from the battle space of the Gulf War and the aerial campaigns of Bosnia and Kosovo in which the killing was kept, as much as it was technologically and ethically possible, virtual and virtuous. Virtuous war, ‘relying on computer simulation, media manipulation, global surveillance and networked warfare, was designed to deter and discipline any potential or overly magnified enemy’ (Der Derian, 2009: 233). After 11 September 2001, this Islamophobic posture is one of the most dominant fears that has been inculcated by the West has not only for its territory but the world in general (Nazemroaya, 2015). A significant outcome of the September 11 was that for the first time, after their foray into the Middle East, the United States was able to ‘securitise’ another continent, setting up military bases in Central Asia that aided American multinational corporations in tightening their control over the world’s major energy resources. Kashmir too has been projected by the media from the lens of securitisation or as a nuclear flashpoint, thereby justifying state violence (Boga, 2018).

Blatantly attacking those intending to jeopardise the above design, the United States projected ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’ and ‘International Terrorism’ as new threats replacing ‘Soviet Expansionism’ and justified the need for protracted warfare in Central Asia. The launching of the New World Order II was physically articulated by the bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq. A rising American military budget since 2001 (a 43% rise in the national defence budget and a 50% rise in the international military budget from 2001 to 2007) substantiates all these moves. In 2005, US military spending accounted for 48% of the total military expenditure worldwide; in 2009, it matched the total defence spending of the rest of the world. The role of a submissive media became exceedingly important at this juncture. Through skilful mass-media imagery, a localised terrorist incident, which was happening every other day in various parts of the world, was transformed into a world event that was formidably used as the prime basis for launching a worldwide military campaign (Banerjee-Guha, 2011: 2).

Given the present situation of the world with its post-Cold War problems, ‘War on Terror’, Islamophobia, arms race and power sharing in South Asia dominating the agenda, the international and national media have publicised the state as victim. Be it the invasion of Vietnam or Afghanistan by Western powers or the war in Iraq and Syria and its occupation of Pakistan, the United States in a bid to establish its hegemony on foreign shores has weaponised ‘terror’ to advance its hidden agenda of exploitation of resources in the countries it occupies (Chomsky, 2008; Heinrich, 2015; Mujaddidi, 2009; Weber, 2008). Hence, the relation between the ruling class and violence is seen as an intimate one, in which the state claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force (Bhattacharjee, 2014).

Post-Cold War and with the advent of neo-liberalisation, the new imperial age saw the collusion of 34 countries as the so-called ‘Coalition of the Willing’ in the 1991 Gulf War to ‘combat’ the ‘Axis of Evil’ (Der Derian, 2009: 237). In terms of strategically constructed war propaganda, many concepts from the US-led wars featured in the narratives manufactured by the governing class on Kashmir. Der Derian (2009) reiterates that ‘the first and most likely the last battles of the counter/terror war are going to be waged on global networks that reach much more widely and deeply into people’s everyday lives’ (p. 241).

Conclusion

To summarise, the coverage of Kashmir by the international media correspondingly alters according to the geopolitical climate, in varying degrees – much more in the first phase of the study than the second. In the first phase, due to Cold War politics, The NYT was sceptical of India’s role in Kashmir, compared to the post-90s phase. The effect of India’s liberalisation by the mid-1990s, along with the September 11 attacks, the ‘War on terror’ and the Mumbai attacks consolidated Kashmir’s media portrayal in connection with pan-Islamic violence around the world. Islamophobia spread by the hegemonic countries through their media propelled India to seek the position of a victim of terror, along with the West. This made it possible for India to join hands with Western war economies, enabling it to be part of the expanding global military–industrial–media–state–corporate complex.

The analysis above shows that reportage on violence in the early 90s, before the September 11 attacks in 2008, not only contextualises incidents against the backdrop of history and frames the nature of violence as a retaliatory attack but also mentions previous major violations by the state forces. Such accounts focus on the political conditions characteristic of the region, depicting what the population endured at the hands of the ruling class. However, after the September 11 attacks, in the second phase of the study from 2000 to 2010, The NYT’s coverage shifted its focus in concurrence with the priorities of its ruling class, with an emphasis on victimisation while repeatedly foregrounding the issue of ‘terror’ and racialisation of the liberation movement.

From the arguments developed above, one may suggest that at a micro level, the media protects the state of its origin through tacit influences and corporate control through geopolitical alliances. Similarly, at a macro level, supranational powers protect each other by overlooking rights violations to nurture profitable alliances under capitalistic democracies (Burman, 2006). This proves how the ruling class adjusts politics to suit the conditions of a global market. Hence, the American media gives significant coverage to the issues of its political, military and economic interests. ‘The withdrawal of the Soviet troops and the reduction of tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States and the end of the Cold War affected the interests of American officials, as well as their media’ reiterates Mughees-Uddin (1992: 43). To control people’s narratives, representation and grassroot movements, the ‘state-military-industrial-surveillance-corporate-media nexus’ that Falak (2015) refers to has been further expanded, fortified and exalted to perfection in Kashmir. Hence, one may deduce that all these factors combined make journalism subordinate to the aims laid down for it by the political forces governing it (Becker, 1999).

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author, D.B., hereby thanks the invaluable contributions of Rohit Ranjan of the Indian Institute of Technology for offering invaluable insights.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author, D.B., hereby discloses that this paper has not been funded by any agency.

ORCID iD

Dilnaz Boga

Author biography

Dilnaz Boga is an academician, professor, freelance journalist and filmmaker based in Mumbai, India. As a journalist, for over two decades, she has written and taken photographs for The Guardian, L’Humanite, Al Jazeera, Frai, Dawn, New Internationalist, Asia Sentinel, Himal, IndiaSpend, Hindu Business Line and The Hindustan Times. In 2019, Dilnaz completed her PhD at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences on the local, national and international media’s coverage of Kashmir from 1990 to 2010.

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