Did you hear about the general strike in India?

By Luzie Voß

On November 26^th the Communist Party of India (CPI(M)) organized a general strike that called more than 250 million people to lay down their work and protest across the country. It was one of the largest strikes in history–although this seems to be argued quite often when these strikes are organized. Nevertheless, it is a noteworthy event that deserves extensive coverage. The strike was organized to protest the “against the anti-national, anti-people policies of the Central Government, particularly large scale privatisation and loot of national assests, abrogating labour laws and new agri laws.“[1] As you can imagine, these protests did not go over without resistance from the government and its allies. The CPI(M) posted on their website that “the successful protests are taking place despite severe repression, intimidation and largescale arrests across the country particularly in BJP (Modi’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party) ruled states.“[2]

However, I am not simply trying to recount the events of this strike here. What is more important is the lack of coverage of the strike in Western media. I personally only found out about it through personal social media channels from politically active friends who are used to seeking out news on their own, and from personally following socialist and leftist news outlets. Nowhere in the mainstream Western news outlets was this strike mentioned; not who organized it, how many people turned up, what their demands are, and how Modi and his party reacted.

To illustrate the lack of coverage, I have looked at major Dutch and German news agencies over the past week: Tagesschau, Deutsche Welle, taz, Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, NOS, and Het Parool. Out of all of these outlets, only the Süddeutsche Zeitung published an article on this strike on the non-paid part of their website, thus making it accessible to everyone. The most nationally watched and accessed outlets, Tagesschau and NOS, however, did not report this.

I find this personally unacceptable. Of course there are a lot of news that do not make it onto the front pages, especially now that the Coronavirus seems to overshadow every other thing happening in the world. Nevertheless, the amount of time allocated to Western news (and the repetition thereof) is not in proportion to the urgency and importance of the events. For example, the German major news outlet Tagesschau runs a segment called “Tagesschau in 100 Sekunden” that is updated multiple times during the day and recounts the ‘most important’ news of the day in only 100 seconds. It occurs frequently that one-third (around 30 seconds) of this segment is allocated to football news and the weather. More than once has this made me incredibly angry, because I had to dig so far to find news about things that seem to matter more generally than the newest football scores.

While there is a subjective understanding of what constitutes important news, we cannot ignore the double standards at play here. We expect everyone around the world to watch our news and know what is going on by blowing up our events (such as Brexit), but on the other hand we underreport everything else happening in the rest of the world.

This is not to mention that what happens elsewhere very much affects what happens here. Bourdieu’s theory of field illustrates how different ‘fields’ (here: states) influence each other and intersect and can therefore not be analyzed in isolation. Paired with a neorealist analysis of international relations that sees states as systems that behave through external influence, we cannot negate the importance of world events to our own domestic and foreign policies. It is therefore unacceptable to designate one-third of a news segment to frivolous football scores that have very little impact in comparison (in no way do I seek to diminish the cultural and symbolic value of football, especially not in the German context, but it simply does not stand in proportion).

This highly Eurocentric culture of reporting on part of the major Dutch and German (and likely other European outlets too that fall outside the scope of this piece) news agencies is incredibly problematic and not questioned often enough. Not only is there a cultural imperialist element at play (especially on social media), but this actually carries over into the journalism sphere and further plays into the Eurocentric superiority complex that Europe (and North America) just cannot seem to shake. If it already takes me, someone who is very privileged, multi-lingual, and highly educated, a lot of digging to find information on a major political event in one of the most densely populated countries, then it is irrational to expect those who do not enjoy all of these privileges to do the same in order to access the same information. We need a paradigm shift in how and what we report that requires an intersectional approach and should be accessible to every citizen.

[1] “Huge Success of Countrywide Protests.” Communist Party of India (Marxist). November 26, 2020. Accessed December 03, 2020. https://cpim.org/pressbriefs/huge-success-countrywide-protests.

[2] Ibid.