Indians today live in a country where mullahs can preach secession, while Hindu gurus revered by millions of Hindus are the target of ridicule, media… - François Gautier

Now compare this with the attitude of the BBC during the Kargil war. Most of us foreign correspondents know by now that the Pakistanis are training, arming and financing Kashmiri mujahidins. We also know that Pakistan is sponsoring international terrorism, whether in New York or in Sinkiang and is a closed ally of the Taliban, one of the most fundamentalist and dangerous forces in the world today. Yet, for the last 10 years, the BBC has kept on with the old refrain : " India SAYS that Pakistan is training Kashmiri militants, an accusation which Islamabad refutes". By insisting on mouthing this absurd statement, even during the Kargil war, when the whole Western intelligence knew that most of the militants manning the heights were Pakistani soldiers in civil, the BBC thought that it is practising impartial journalism. But who are they fooling ? Everybody is aware of the strong Leftist bias of the BBC (nothing wrong in being Leftist, as long as you don’t pretend to be impartial), who has always defended Muslims separatists all over the planet, whether it is the Palestinians, the terrorists in Chechenya, or the Kashmiri militants. Unfortunately, the BBC has so much of a reputation in the world (and indeed their documentaries are first class), that it shapes the opinions of our editors in Paris or Bonn, who in turn put pressure on us to report on "Hindu fundamentalism", or the "poor persecuted Kashmiris".

In Tripura, for instance, there were no Christians at independence, the maharaja of the state was a Hindu and there were innumerable temples all over the State. But from 1950, Christian missionaries (with Nehru’s blessings) went into the deep forests of Tripura and started converting the Kukis. Today, according to official figures, there are 120.000 Christians in Tripura, a 90% increase since 1991. The figures are even more striking in Arunachal Pradesh, where there were only 1710 Christians in 1961, but 115000 today, as well as 700 churches! What to say of Mizoram and Nagaland, where the entire local population is Christian! The amount of money being by poured by Christians into the North-East is staggering: The Saint Paul’s school of Tripura, for instance, gets an 80 lakhs endowment per semester. Which Hindu school can match this ? No country in the world would allow this. France, for instance, has a full-blown Minister who is in charge of hunting down "sects". And by sects, it is meant anything which does not belong to the great Christian family, particularly if it has Hindu "pagan" overtones…

This year, most of the sources have dried in Almora and there is hardly any water, when the summer is still far away. “It’s because of Global Warming”, we often hear. There is some truth in that, but what our friends do not say, is that unknown to the Indian general public, there has happened over the years a massive deforestation of the Himalayas. In Almora for instance, gone long ago are the oak and indigenous forests and in the twelve years I have come, I have not seen any afforestation done in the surrounding hills. Even worse, the locals could not care less ! Not a day passes by in the area where we live, without one of the few pine trees left being surreptitiously felled down and even the poor mimosas do not escape the villagers’s wrath. “It’s because they feel the forest belongs to the Government and not to them”, says a local NGO. Is it ? But we have witnessed the same phenomenon in Auroville, Tamil Nadu: every time the local villagers are angry after the foreigners there, they cut the trees planted for their benefit ! No doubt the Government of India, which allowed the massive deforestation of the country after Independence, is the main culprit; but in the Kumaon hills, there are also literally thousands of NGO’s, doing woman empowerment, village empowerment, this empowerment, that empowerment, this khadi, that khadi… But bare for two or three of them such as Chirag, Arohi, or NTGC, nobody does tree planting. “It’s the Forest Department’s fault, they are too corrupt”, many NGO’s claim…