Backstory: The Gulf War Is Destroying Human Lives in Real-Time but Where’s the Media Empathy? |
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There is something so familiar about the times we are living through. Images from the past bubble to the surface, coalescing into those emerging from the present moment. The bombing of Palestine lives on in the decimation of Beirut today, and the carpet bombing of Iran recalls the US’s Christmas Bombings of Vietnam.
In India scenes of indescribable public pain seem to be replays of those that followed the prime minister’s famous televised announcement of November 8, 2016, that currency notes of denominations of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 will no longer be legal tender from the midnight of that very day. Or after that other special late evening address to the nation almost exactly six years ago, when a 21-day lockdown was announced to “contain the COVID-19 pandemic”, beginning – once again – at midnight.
Interminable queues forming outside banks or of workers fleeing the city; unlit kitchen fires in humble abodes across the country; shuttered shops and eateries that can no longer cater to their once surging clientele…Earlier the queues would have been outside banks, today they form outside gas distribution centres; earlier shops were shuttered because the city had been emptied out, today it is because the vital fuel that keeps them going is no longer available.
A worker sits over LPG cylinders during distribution at a gas agency, in Chikkamagaluru, Karnataka, Wednesday, March 11, 2026. Long queues were seen at several gas agencies amid an ongoing LPG supply shortage in the country. Photo: PTI.
What is also common is the clear reluctance of many mainstream establishments to get into the pores of this story largely because of the media grooming that this government has always excelled in. In fact, if truth be told, the media may have been more active social documenters during demonetisation and the pandemic than they are today. Perhaps it is the law of diminishing returns. Distress exists in plain sight, but they no longer make a story.
So we have informational anomalies like official claims that there are no fuel shortages despite clear proof of distress on the street. The bias in India’s public stance in favour of the US-Israel axis is palpable but all we hear is about Modi’s “deft” foreign policy. While analysts have raised serious questions about the incredibly bad timing of the prime ministerial visit to Tel Aviv on the eve of these hostilities and the cringe-worthy words he pronounced once ensconced in Netanyahu’s bear hug, India’s influential television media sees nothing amiss about India having let down its own legacy in failing to commiserate with Iran in an appropriate manner on the killing of Ayotollah Ali Khamenei; or on the country’s unconscionable silence over the torpedoing of the IRIS Dena by the US Navy. It is Israeli sources and spokespersons who have come to dominate our small screens, even as the embedding of Indian corporations in the genocidal project of the Zionist state is now emerging as a global scandal (see ‘Interview | Are Indian Corporations Complicit in Israel’s Genocide in Gaza?’, The Wire, March 18).
To understand how this script runs, watch Navika Kumar’s prime time show of March 16 on Times Now. She goes full sail in heralding the safe arrival of India’s LPG tanker, Shivalik, after crossing the Strait of Hormuz: ‘STRENGTH OF INDIA’S DIPLOMACY…MODI-PLOMACY DELIVERS, OPP CHOKES’, goes the headline, as she blithely announces to the world that Modi is simultaneously engaging Tehran, Washington and Tel Aviv and has succeeded in “cushioning the fuel shock.” Such assertions fly in the face of ground reality, but of course neither Kumar nor her peers in the television news business are even interested in getting their audiences to engage with the brutal truth.
Ironically, some of the best reportage on the real time impacts of the Gulf war on India has been done by non-Indian media. The news agency, Reuters, came up with a granular report on March 11 on the real state of play, including details such as how an automobile parts plant in Gujarat has replaced tea with lemon water and hot soup with buttermilk for its workers. A Guardian report of March 19 (‘Waiting for days’: India feels impact of gas supply chain disruption amid Iran conflict’) describes how a Delhi housewife carts her six-month toddler to the gas centre........