(b) The folklore and the superfluous: Maharajas, of whom westerners are avid, although they are totally irrelevant to modern India, the palaces of Rajasthan, cherished by such magazines as Vogue which regularly sends their photographers and lanky models, who have no idea of India festival: Pushkar, the camel fair, kumbh-melas, dance performances in Khajuraho... all these have their own beauties, but they represent only a small part of this great and vast country.

(c) The politically correct: There must be at least three hundred foreign correspondents posted in Delhi, which should vouch for a variety of opinion. But if you give them a subject to write about – any subject – say Ayodhya, the RSS, fanatic Hindus, secularism, or Sonia Gandhi, you will get 298 articles which will say more or less the same thing, even if it is with different styles, different illustrations and various degrees of professionalism. This is not to say that there are no sincere western journalists who write serious stories which do homage to India’s greatness and immense culture, but they are usually the exception. And at the end, the result is more or less the same: a downgrading of India, a constant harping on “Hindu fundamentalism’’, or the “fanatical khaki-clad RSS members’’ of the burning of Christians in India’’, conveniently forgetting to mention that Christians have found refuge in this country for 2000 years and have often taken advantage of this great Hindu tolerance.

These three kinds of reporting about India have been going on for fifty years and very few Indians have dared – or bothered – to complain. But the interesting question is: Why this always harping on the negative, the folklore, or the politically correct? Why this uniformity of views and un-originality in the selection of subjects, in a country which is so ancient, whose civilisation is so diverse so profound, so fascinating, that there are thousands of extraordinary topics, which could be exploited?

It seems to me there are two important factors, which are at play in every foreign correspondent’s functioning. First, a foreign correspondent before even being posted in Delhi, has already fixed ideas about India: prejudices, cliches, negative “a-prioris’’, etc. This is not to say that it is wilfully done; it is just something which we pick up unconsciously from the concepts on India floating in the West: Tintin’s stereotyped India – the good Maharajas and the bad fakirs; Kipling’s jungle child ready to embrace the good of the Christian civilisation, or else it is poverty, dirt and the squalor of India which is always over-emphasised in the West and which scares many of us, used to a clean disinfected (and soulless) world.

More subtly, even, we western journalists are influenced by what is said about India in the ‘serious’ books of distinguished indologists, who have got it all wrong: the supposed invasion of India by the Aryans (which, say more and more archaeologists and linguists, never happened); the great achievements of the Moghul culture (which mostly borrowed from Hindu genius); the fanaticism of Hindu social and political movements (which were born in the early twenties after nearly thirteen centuries of horrendous persecutions by Muslim invaders and shameless European colonisation); the importance of being “secular’’ in Modern India. These “wise’ historians have unfortunately a very strong hold on the image of India abroad and they give all the wrong ideas to foreign newspaper editors, who in turn expect a certain (Hindu fundamentalism) angle from the stories of their correspondents.

The second factor is simple: India is a vast and complicated country, often contradictory, full of paradoxes, with many castes, religions, ethnic groups, political parties. It is thus extremely baffling to the mind of the foreign correspondent freshly arrived from the United States, for example, where everything is black and white, good or bad (the evil Milosevic as painted by Newsweek and the good saintly OTAN). Thus, naturally, the foreign correspondent will turn for advice and information to his counterpart; the Indian journalist, who is frequently witty, brilliant and well informed. And here lies the crax of the matter, because Indian journalists are often the worst enemies of their own country – they are more secular than the secular, more anti-India than its worst adversaries and often play in the hands of India’s foes.

Another important factor which enhances the uniformity of views amongst foreign correspondents, is that New Delhi has become a very superficial and arrogant city, geographically cut-off from the rest of India (does Delhi have any idea of what is happening in the South?); and there, the foreign correspondents always hear the same stories, whether in the Embassy cocktail parties, or at journalists’ parties. We have then come a full circle: we thought that the western press was negative about India, out of a personal bias, but we have found that it is influenced by the Indian press; we thought that the Indian press was negative about its own country, because of some dark, sceptical, self-destructive streak in itself, but we found out that it was a tendency generated by the Congress, which in turn was manipulated by its British masters. And thus, we have come a full circle; all along, the snake was biting its own tail!

Fortunately, since a few years, there is a change in the Indian Press. Magazines have started showing an effort to look at India in a different manner, to strike a distinct note from the usual self-denigration. This is a positive sign – and there are more the popularity of songs like Vande Mataram, which expressed India’s true aspiration and were literally relegated to play second fiddle by the Congress.