Union Tourism Minister KJ Alphons tells ThePrint that dubbing India most unsafe place for women by “picking one stray incident” is “completely biased reporting”.
New Delhi: There is a “strong, radical, racist press internationally” that projects India as an unsafe country for women, Union tourism minister K.J. Alphons has said, adding that it’s a “Left-sponsored hate propaganda” against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government.
Alphons, who described American news channel Fox News and a section of news agencies as “hugely racist”, also hit out at the “so-called feminists” on the basis of whose responses the Thomson Reuters Foundation projected India as the most dangerous place for women in a survey released in June.
The foundation had conducted a global poll of experts on women’s issues and found India the most unsafe place for women.
‘Complete rubbish’
“We talked to the agency that put out the news (Thomson Reuters Foundation)… they talked to 548 so-called feminists and they talked to 43 feminists or people who are dealing with women’s issues in India,” Alphons told ThePrint.
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“I said ‘give us the names’; they said ‘no’,” he added. “Who are these people who are so-called specialists in women’s affairs or feminists? They are all Left; they are all radical Left people.”
“You don’t expect them to support the Prime Minister,” said Alphons. “Because you don’t want to support the Prime Minister, you also don’t end up supporting the country… It’s hate propaganda against the Prime Minister and my government.
“There is a strong, radical, racist press out there internationally. What has something like Fox News put out? So many of these news agencies are hugely racist,” the tourism minister said.
Dubbing India the most unsafe place for women by “picking one stray incident” in a country of 1.3 billion people is “completely biased reporting”, he said, noting how millions of women and young girls travel to the remotest places and “nothing happens to them”.
The minister added that even one stray incident was not acceptable to the government, but said it was “complete rubbish” to describe the country as the most unsafe for women.
“There are issues of safety of women all over the world, not only of women, but also of men,” he said.
“Do you travel in New York metro after certain hours and stop over to walk in certain streets of Manhattan…?” he said. “Look at the number of incidents that take place in London or Paris or anywhere in the world. The numbers are much more.
“Point is that you take one incident and blow it out of proportion,” he added. “Our own media is doing it… runs front-page articles, lead articles, saying how India is a waste basket. Do you see the American media doing that?”
“What happened in Kathua, what happened in the Nirbhaya case… were isolated cases…. We need to report them, but do you see The New York Times or The Washington Post or any of the leading newspapers saying that America is completely unsafe,” he said.
“They have a shootout happening almost every day at some place in the US,” he added, “Do you see them, writing editorials or lead articles on front page? You don’t.”
“Therefore, it’s not only the responsibility of the Prime Minister or the tourism minister to get tourists in India… We all need to work together…,” he said, “We need to love our country a little more.”
A fan of RSS idea of India
In a wide-ranging interview with ThePrint, the minister praised Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat’s “idea of India”. He said he had attended Bhagwat’s lecture series at Delhi’s Vigyan Bhawan recently as the Sangh is “a leading ideology of the country”.
“The interaction of the RSS chief was extremely interesting,” he said, “He presented an RSS that is completely all-inclusive, a country that is for everybody…”
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“We should all be open to ideas… instead of saying the RSS means Hindutva and Hindutva means extremism,” he added.
“If someone listened to Bhagwat, you’d see how sensible his idea of India is… all-inclusive where everybody can live peacefully. That’s the kind of India we want.”
Undeterred by the controversy over the adoption of the Red Fort by a corporate house for its upkeep, Alphons declared his plan to give all monuments in India, other than the Taj, to the private sector.
Earlier this year, the Red Fort was adopted by the Dalmia Bharat Group as part of a government initiative to involve the private sector in preserving and maintaining India’s prominent heritage sites, which have often made news for poor upkeep.
“Taj is not on our radar as of now…. We will see after elections…. The whole thing is about the belief that we own our heritage.”
the minister is a genious. Apparently he does not read the papers. Further he is probably weighing in as a BJP politician and is following his masters footsteps in terms of fallacy and thoughtless statements. What is important is th enumber of incidents , poverty, joblessness , and the promoting of such individuals and acts by politicians associated with the ruling party.
Actually, it is a lot more than “ one Nirbhaya or one Kathua “, as anyone who reads the newspapers or watches TV would know. The word “ one “ used in such a context is itself deeply hurtful. It converts a great human tragedy into a trivial statistic. Spin may work in the country, not abroad. Just a few days back, an incident from Bihar, where a group of schoolgirls who had sought shelter were attacked by boys for resisting molestation was the most read story in the World news section of the Guardian UK.