In 1981, shortly after I had finished university, I spent a year travelling through the US and the UK to work on a special project. My intention was to investigate the proposition — taken for granted by nearly every Indian I knew — that the foreign press was biased against us. This was a view that my parents had held, even when they lived in England, and though it had been a decade since my father had died, his contemporaries still stuck to it.
I knew what they meant. Brought up to believe that the West did not want India to succeed, I had been confused when the Emergency was declared while I was at boarding school in England. Indira Gandhi said that the Emergency was needed to protect India and that the West did not see the merit in her actions only because of its ill-will towards our country.
Many Indians in the UK bought this line because they were so convinced that the West — and especially its press — was biased against
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