Religious Tolerance and the Press.
An Analysis of Socio-political Factors in the Coverage of Religious Issues in the Indian Newspapers
Kuriakose Mundadan & Norberto González Gaitano
Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. Rome
Abstract: The breath of Indian religious pluralism was the age-old of a tolerant culture. But recent political developments have caused constant religious violence. This intolerance is the result of the hate propaganda towards the minorities by certain fundamentalists groups that are very active in the political scenario of India. The press coverage of three religious events regarding the Christian minority in India has been scrutinized with a discourse analysis method implemented with a quantitative methodology that “transforms” concepts of the qualitative analysis into variables adapted for statistical analysis, like framing and thematic structure. For our analysis we have chosen three national English language newspapers - The Hindu, The Indian Express, The Times of India- and three regional Malayalam language of the southern State of Kerala -Malayala Manorama, Deepika, and Mathrubhum-. An overall result of the analysis proves that the newspapers in our study have kept their role as the watchdog of democracy and secularism that are embedded in the Indian Constitution. Though the events, in our case, were predominantly connected with a minority religion and had a predominant religious meaning, the newspapers were more interested in the political dimensions involved in them. Finally, a deeper qualitative analysis of the editorials proves that the national newspapers, which have a larger circulation in the cities, where one or another fundamentalist group is dominant in the political arena, were soft in exposing the vices of those extreme groups in their atrocities against the Christians. |
