BBC’s (British Broadcasting Corporation) colonial hangover just doesn’t seem to end. The British state-funded channel has been churning out anti-Bharat propaganda for as long as one remembers. Even though its influence on Bharatiya middle class and across the world has sharply plummeted in the last 2 decades, it is still unable to overcome the racist, Orientalist mindset which rationalized the brutal British Raj as some sort of ‘civilizing mission’.

Bharat has battled the Covid-19 pandemic with far greater alacrity and effectiveness than Western nations – introducing travel restrictions, airport screenings, contact tracing and finally a nation-wide lockdown much earlier in the epidemic cycle compared to most other countries. UK in particular dilly-dallied with a controversial ‘wait & watch’ policy, in the hope that allowing the virus to sweep through relatively unhindered would bequeath their society herd immunity. This was soon abandoned after the grim reality of the pandemic became clear, and stricter restrictions were hastily imposed.

For the record, as of today UK has 80K cases and 10K deaths, while Bharat has 7.5K cases and 250 deaths from Covid19.

Initially, WHO had recommended that face masks were not required for healthy people as they went about their daily business – like most WHO directives and statements on the Covid-19 pandemic, this too has proved misleading. There is ample evidence to suggest that face-masks, even ordinary cloth-based ones, offer some protection against the Coronavirus which can travel up to 1 metre or even more when ejected along with saliva droplets by a coughing or sneezing infected person.

Now, many Bharatiya states and cities like UP, MP, Odisha, Delhi, Mumbai have made face masks mandatory for anyone stepping out in public. The Union Health Ministry has recommended home-made face masks for public at large, which can be washed and reused. Guidelines for creating these masks at home have also been issued. This has been done to avoid mass buying of N-95 and surgical masks which are in short supply and more needed for health care workers.

How does BBC interpret this important public health advisory? By creating a despicable cartoon showing a half naked man with his child, both wearing masks torn from the man’s undergarments.

When #Covid_19 was creeping into their own country,they we busy lecturing India,& poking fun.
Now,when it's crippling their health system,& shattering lives in their own country,they're still lecturing India & poking fun.
Some colonial hangover,this https://t.co/YTbZPsjZX1

— Smita Barooah (@smitabarooah) April 10, 2020

The tweet by BBC Hindi says, “To save oneself, even what was saved has gone.”

To expose the hypocrisy of the BBC and their colonized sepoys like cartoonist Kirtish Bhatt, this speech by an Anglicized politician like Shashi Tharoor is enough. Exposing the reality of the British colonial plunder of Bharat, Tharoor says:

• India share of the world economy when Britain arrived on it’s shores was 23 per cent, by the time the British left it was down to below 4 per cent. Why? Simply because India had been governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by it’s depredations in India. In fact Britain’s industrial revolution was actually premised upon the de-industrialisation of India.

• 15-29 million Indians died of starvation in British induced famines. The most famous example was, of course, was the great Bengal famine during the World War II when 4 million people died because Winston Churchill deliberately as a matter of written policy proceeded to divert essential supplies from civilians in Bengal to sturdy tummies and Europeans as reserve stockpiles.

So if Kirtish Bhatt today is poking fun at Bharat and poor Bharatiyas, he should first turn around to his British employers and question them on why so many Indians were sunk in poverty during British rule, so much so that poor Indian farmers actually had to leave their homeland and work as ‘indentured (slave) labor’ in places like Carribean, Fiji, Mauritius etc.

And while Bhatt is serving his masters’ needs to depict Bharat as a ‘poverty-stricken, backward’ country that still needs the “White Man’s civilising mission”, we Bharatiyas will ensure that our poor fellow citizens are taken care of during this global crisis. We will donate cloth if needed to ensure that every Bharatiya citizen has a face mask. We will not leave Bharatiyas to die like Kirtish Bhatt’s British masters did.

BBC and sepoys like Kirtish Bhatt will be better served worrying about how UK and other Western nations deal with Covid19.

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