New Delhi: Responding to media reports about scores of Chinese bloggers filming a suburb in Dhaka and portraying it as a ‘dirty’ Delhi, India said Tuesday that it was ‘unfortunate’ and that “peddling of false narratives only undermines the credibility of the actors involved and those behind them in such an exercise”.
“We have seen media reports in this regard. Such efforts to present a distorted picture of any country are unfortunate. In so far as efforts by foreign elements to portray parts of Dhaka as Delhi are concerned, peddling of false narratives only undermines the credibility of the actors involved and those behind them in such an exercise. We urge authorities concerned to take appropriate action against them”, Randhir Jaiswal, the spokesperson for the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), said at a regular press briefing here.
As ThePrint reported earlier, for months now, scores of Chinese nationals have been live-streaming from crowded homes and roadside tea stalls of Uttara, a suburb in northern Dhaka. But there is an unusual twist to their broadcasts: they tell viewers they are filming in New Delhi, not the capital of Bangladesh.
The videos, some of which have garnered attention on Chinese social media, portray the neighbourhood as an impoverished and unhygienic part of India. Residents, meanwhile, say they have been left bewildered by the steady stream of foreign live-streamers who film their daily lives, sometimes entering private homes and even bathrooms without permission.
Reports in the Bangladeshi media have cited residents’ estimates of between 5,000 and 6,000 Chinese nationals involved in the live-streaming. There is, however, no official count.
In one such video filmed on 1 November, a Chinese woman who identified herself as Mianmian, from China’s Sichuan province, was live-streaming beside a canal in Uttara, showing viewers the adjoining Tekpara neighbourhood. “This is New Delhi. Their homes are extremely dirty. There is not even a fan inside the tin-roofed houses. This place is quite underdeveloped, dirty and unhygienic, and the law-and-order situation is poor,” she said.
She went on to describe sanitation practices among people in India, even though the footage was recorded in Dhaka.
According to residents, some Chinese nationals bring Indian consumer products, including shampoo, soap and Kesh King hair oil, to local pharmacies and use the shops as backdrops for promotional live-streams. The shopkeepers are reportedly paid around 500 taka to allow the filming.
In one report, Bangla Vision attempted to question some of the Chinese nationals, several of whom walked away when approached by journalists, saying they did not speak English. Others disclosed their names and nationality before leaving.
In another report, ATN Bangla News filmed Chinese nationals chasing rickshaws through the neighbourhood. The narrator remarked in Bangla that visiting Tekpara could make someone feel as though they were in Beijing.
During a visit to the area on 27 October, a Prothom Alo reporter encountered Ritu Akhter, a Bangladeshi woman who said she had been working as a guide for the Chinese nationals for several months. She said several other Bangladeshi women were employed in similar roles.
Asked where the videos were being broadcast, Akhter called over a Chinese national named Fangyou. She translated the reporter’s questions into Chinese and facilitated a conversation using Google Translate on his phone. Fangyou said the group live-streamed on WeChat, China’s popular social media platform, as part of product-promotion activities. He did not, however, explain why the group selected this particular neighbourhood or why the broadcasts continued for such long hours.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)