Australian Channel Slammed by Indian Community Over Kashmir Map

Broadcast media SBS came under fire from the Indian community in Australia after showing the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir as disputed territory in its Independence Day coverage. The map showed India in orange, Pakistan in red while the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir was shaded with orange and red stripes, indicating that it was a disputed territory.

Ajay M Gondane, India’s High Commissioner in Australia, issued an oral demarche to the Australian government in response to the broadcast. “We cannot tolerate this. We cannot let it go just like that,” Indian Link quoted him as saying.

The Consulate General of India in Sydney also pulled up SBS for this, the publication said. “We have conveyed our strong objection to this wrong depiction,” said B Vanlalvawna, Consul General of India in Sydney, according to the report. “We have also shared the political map of Republic of India as published by the Survey of India with SBS for their future reference.”

Community Reaction

An online petition, addressed to the Minister for Communications Mitch Fifield, about this issue was put up on change.org. It had received 4,623 supporters at the time of filing of this report.

“This type of offensive content creates a divide in the multicultural society of Australia,” the petition says.

The petition goes on to list three other examples of what they call as SBS’s “hate campaign against India”. The instances mentioned in the petition are SBS Hindi’s piece on Indians googling PV Sindhu’s caste while she was participating in the 2016 Olympics, NRIs flocking to Punjab to campaign for the Aam Aadmi Party and how an Indian restaurant chef threw chilli powder at a customer.

Gondane approved of the petition. “Citizen action should continue,” he told India Link. “Citizen committees should approach their local MPs and MLAs and ask them to take up the issue.”

The publication reported an SBS spokesperson as saying, “SBS World News appreciates that both India and Pakistan lay claim to Kashmir and administer separate parts of the region. The map is designed to be seen as an element within a video not as a still image. The video shows the changes in boundaries over the past 70 years. It also makes it clear that the Kashmir region is a disputed territory.”