Lauren Frayer and beyond: Dear West, stop sermonizing India

The West is in no position to lecture India on anything. It simply has no moral authority to occupy a high pedestal and begin sermonising India. India is seen as a dirty, dusty, noisy, and crime-infested country by people in the West – especially in the United States of America.

A recent example of America’s disdain for India was seen when NPR journalist Lauren Frayer arbitrarily presumed that an incident of train burglary in Los Angeles was from India. Lauren Frayer had shared a ground report of a train burglary incident in Lincoln Heights in Los Angeles and claimed, “At first glance, I thought this was India.”

A day later, she posted a screenshot of the racist tweet, and said, “I have deleted this tweet because it was insensitive.” It must be mentioned that American media did some pretty dirty coverage of India’s Covid-19 crisis. From marketing and earning from Indians’ misery and prying upon their private spaces at crematoriums, to even lying about floating dead bodies in the river Ganga and people burning their loved ones on the banks of rivers, to now, covering up their country’s Covid-19 situation, American media has done it all.

India is depicted as a lawless and chaotic country where people are mannerless and have no decency. Yet, India needs to show America a mirror. The United States is no beacon of civilisation for the world today. The West no longer leads the world. The democratic world order centred around the United States is inflicted with a variety of problems – the addressal of which seems to be least of their concerns.

In another example of entitled Americans trying to tell India what is right and wrong, Gregory Stanton, the founding president of Genocide Watch, has asked “the US Congress to pass a resolution that warns genocide should not be allowed to occur in India.” Furthermore, Stanton also said, “(President Joe) Biden should tell (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi if genocide occurs it will require us to re-assess all our relations with India.”

America and its Many Problems

From just the top of my head, the United States has the following problems out of a mountain of crises it has to deal with:

• A homeless people problem
• A poverty problem
• An open defecation problem
• A lawlessness problem
• Rising inflation
• Rising domestic polarisation and political extremism
• An unemployment problem
• A palpable racism problem
• An illegal immigrant influx problem
• The Covid-19 problem

Mind you, I have not even scratched the surface yet. America faces unquantifiable and innumerable problems. But let’s talk briefly about two problems mentioned above – America’s homeless problem, and its open-defecation crisis.

Down the street from the US Capitol Building, right in front of Union Station, several dozen tents have been erected. The area outside the train station is a 16-minute walk from the Capitol building. Homeless people have set base in Washington D.C. – the capital of the United States. All these tents are occupied by homeless people. American lawmakers pass by these tents every day. Yet, nobody is fixing the problem.

If such conditions prevail in Washington D.C., you can only imagine how streets and public spaces in the rest of the country have been occupied by homeless people.

Read more: Welcome to Biden’s America where more homeless people live in the capital than anywhere else

Now here’s the thing. America’s massive homeless-people problem gives rise to another nasty problem. And that is the one where people begin pooping just about anywhere. Consider this: in 2019, San Francisco – a city in California reported 30,894 instances of human waste being found at public places, including streets. The numbers until July 2021 stood at around 13,000 – which is being considered a ‘low’ by authorities in the West Coast city.

How about crime? Well, inflation is skyrocketing, unemployment is off the roof and people, in general, are very open to the idea of breaking the law in the United States. So, remember Lauren Frayer – who thought the pictures of railroad areas in Los Angeles were actually scenes from India? Pictures posted by her are from another Californian city, which has a widespread burglary and theft problem.

Union Pacific recently released a statement that said rail incidents in Los Angeles County, including theft, assaults and armed robberies of Union Pacific employees, rose 160 percent last year. In the last three months of 2021, when holiday shipping was at its peak, an average of more than 90 containers were “compromised” every day.

India had an open-defecation problem. We fixed it.

India had a poverty problem. We are fixing it.

India’s economy is going strong while world economies suffer and bleed.

India is today a much more civilised and culturally-rooted country. We don’t loot cargo containers for sustenance, for example.

Can America claim the same? I don’t think so. Instead of preaching to India, the West should look inward and fix its many problems before they end up consuming Western society.