作者： bharat.cn

From the New York Times to the BBC and the Wall Street Journal, the biggest news media have been caught peddling lies and being condescending and hostile towards India, a vibrant democracy and one of the oldest civilisations.
It has been 72 years since India achieved freedom from her British colonisers, but the West’s media has still not come to terms with it.

Its correspondents still arrive like new viceroys, and much of the reportage ranges from patronising and condescending to viscerally hostile and downright fake. Media outlets from nations merely a few hundred years old, for instance, lecture civilisations like India – one of the oldest in the world – on civilisational matters such as Kashmir. They also give sermons to unique civilisations like China or Russia on matters they understand little about.

And the vanguards of western media continue to speak sanctimoniously about their editorial standards, despite being repeatedly caught spreading fake news.

Citizenship law and ‘Eew’ York Times
The moment the Narendra Modi government passed the Citizenship Amendment Act to shelter persecuted minorities from neighbouring Islamic nations Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, the western fake narrative-setting machinery creaked into action. One of the first off the block was the virulently anti-India – and globally anti-nationalist – New York Times.

One of its very first reports carried a lie in the headline. ‘India takes step towards blocking naturalization for Muslims’, it screamed.

Another NYT report spoke about the marginalisation of Muslims, which is ‘Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist agenda’. Again, this is either an uninformed rant or a blatant falsehood. India’s new citizenship law has nothing to do with Indian Muslims. And the ‘Hindu nationalist’ government has included persecuted Christians, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs and Zoroastrians from the three Muslim-majority nations as beneficiaries along with Hindus.

How media vulture fed on Kashmir
Kashmir, one of the world’s most militarily sensitive zones, has always been the playground of propaganda for the western press. India’s strong, civilisational bond with Kashmir has been stubbornly ignored, and jihadi separatist voices given legitimacy.

The scrapping of the Jammu and Kashmir’s special status under Article 370 earlier this year triggered a fresh fake news salvo by the western media.

The Wall Street Journal reported: ‘India’s Kashmir clampdown turns hospitals into graveyards’ – a claim stoutly refuted by one of the most senior police officers in Kashmir, who also pointed to the total lack of proof in the article.

Locally developed apps make up 41 per cent of India’s top 200 installed apps this year

Chinese apps in India were overtaken by locally developed offerings this year in terms of total number of installations, as the world’s second largest smartphone market continues to draw major international players in a range of categories.
Of the top 200 installed apps in India this year, domestic apps now make up 41 per cent of the list, a 38 per cent increase from last year, according to a new report released this week by AppsFlyer, a San Francisco-based mobile marketing analytics firm. It said much of that growth was driven by demand for apps in the shopping, food and drink categories. The AppsFlyer review covered 6.5 billion total installations in the April to September period.
Apps from Chinese developers, by contrast, made up 38 per cent of the top 200 list, down from their market-leading 43 per cent share last year. Chinese apps, however, continued to lead in categories such as gaming, news and entertainment, and utilities.
“Given the size and blue-sky potential of the market, India could very well see more foreign competitors following in the footsteps of the Chinese, which have expanded at a surprising clip, over the next decade,” the AppsFlyer report said.
The increasingly competitive apps market in India reflects how Chinese technology companies have sharpened their focus in the world’s second most populous country amid a slowdown in their home market. Chinese Android device brands Xiaomi Corp, Vivo, Oppo and Realme had a combined 52 per cent share the country’s smartphone market in the past two quarters, according to data from the AppsFlyer report.
India’s policymakers are also pushing initiatives to further boost domestic technology development. A regulation on e-commerce, for example, went into effect in February this year. There are already 665 million internet users in India, according to the country’s Telecom Regulatory Authority. That number is about double the size of the US population.
The AppsFlyer report cited a Cisco Systems forecast that smartphone ownership and internet usage in India will surge to 60 per cent of the population by 2022.
While they may have been surpassed in overall number of installations this year, Chinese apps developers remained leaders in popular categories. Internet giant Tencent Holdings, for example, continued to lead in the gaming category, where the Chinese firm’s Clash of Kings mobile game has an overall share of 20 per cent this year, the AppsFlyer report said. It said game apps from developers in Israel and Slovenia have also carved a growing niche in the Indian market.
In the news and entertainment app category, Chinese apps – led by popular video-sharing app TikTok from Beijing-based ByteDance – bolstered their share to 59 per cent this year, up from 36 per cent last year, the report said.
TikTok was already the most downloaded social media app worldwide for November, with close to 72 million installations, which represented an 11 per cent increase from a year ago, according to data from apps analytics firm Sensor Tower.
Despite domestic developers’ lead in India’s shopping app category, Hangzhou-based e-commerce platform operator Club Factory’s app remained one of the top performers in that category. Club Factory was the most downloaded shopping app worldwide for November, with more than 27 million installations, according to Sensor Tower. It said 99 per cent of those installations during that period were in India.

India’s PM Narendra Modi has urged critics of the contentious citizenship bill to stay civilized, lashing out against rioters who damaged public property and again warning citizens against falling for rumors and misinformation.
“People who damaged public property and were involved in violence in the name of protests in Uttar Pradesh should ask themselves if what they did was right. They destroyed buses and public property that belongs to the future generation,” Modi said in his address at the foundation-laying ceremony of the Atal Bihari Medical University in Lucknow.

I want to tell every resident of Uttar Pradesh that after Independence, we only insisted on our rights. But the time has come to also put emphasis on our duties.

“Better roads, transport and sewers are our rights, and it’s our duty to protect it. Quality education is our right but safety of educational institutions and respect for teachers is our duty. Secure atmosphere is our right, but it’s also duty of citizens to respect the work of police,” he said, praising local police for doing a “good job.”

The Uttar Pradesh administration earlier promised to slap rioters with fines, estimating the damage inflicted on public and state property at over $14 million. Rallies across the state turned especially violent, resulting in at least 18 casualties out of a nationwide death toll of 25. Accused of using excessive force, police claim they’ve only resorted to live fire in rare cases of self-defense, when overwhelmed by violent protesters.

The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the bill that sparked nationwide rallies, fast-tracks naturalization to religious minorities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh – but doesn’t extend to Muslims.

Critics claim that the new measures are discriminatory, stoking fears that Muslims would be rounded up and sent to detention centers, especially since, aside from that, the government also plans to compile a National Register of Citizens to tally up illegal immigrants on Indian soil.

New Delhi strongly rejects the criticisms, insisting that its move instead actually demonstrates “a culture of compassion” towards persecuted minorities, and won’t affect India’s Muslims in any way.