Like the rest of the world, India is battling the coronavirus pandemic. However, here the public conversation over the past week has focuss...
Like the rest of the world, India is battling the coronavirus pandemic. However, here the public conversation over the past week has focussed inordinately on only one facet of the disease: its link with the Tablighi Jamat, a Muslim religious group.
A Tablighi Jamat event, held in early March in Delhi, was attended by foreign delegates from South East Asia as well as members from all over India. A few attendees, it later turned out, were coronavirus carriers. When the event finished, many people went back to their home states, carrying the virus with them.
While the event did certainly spread the virus, press reporting on it has painted it as the principal carrier of the disease in India. How accurate is that? Not very, say experts.
Half truth
Take a look at this India Today statistic, for example.
While the graphic was widely criticised for its Islamaphobic depiction of the disease, there is a problem with the numbers itself. While India Today tells us the proportion of positive cases linked to the Tabligh, it does not tell us the proportion of Tablighi cases that were tested to arrive at this figure.
This oversight was repeated across the Indian media. The Economic Times, for example, stated that “over 95% of coronavirus cases reported over the last two...
