Given the amusing ways the international media finds to chronicle contemporary India, the naivete showed by Time magazine in listing student activist Gurmehar Kaur as one of the ‘next generation leaders’ and ‘free speech warrior’ wasn’t surprising.

It somehow fits the templates the Western press has been carrying while viewing the events and people in the Indian subcontinent for centuries now. It has rarely been without any template, almost always about convenient frames of narratives woven in different, and sometimes contrary, strands of Western discourse. As early as the 1850s, such impulses could be seen in the pages of the Western press and the man who had placed them there went on to become one of the most radical theorists in modern history.

Writing a series of reports on India in 1850s as the London-based correspondent for the left-wing American paper The New York Daily Tribune, Karl Marx tried to interpret the Sepoy mutiny of 1857 as a mass insurrection. His reportage, co-authored with Friedrich Engels, on the mutiny was somehow meant to fit into his general narrative of identifying an Asian precursor to predictions of the European revolution. Though a few historians subsequently tended to stretch the historical import of the event as ‘the first war of independence’, its analysis as a full-blown anti-colonial armed insurrection was a poor piece of journalism as well as historiography. It was clearly captive to a template.

It was just one of the many such examples one could find of the foreign press reporting on India in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, which never succeeded in doing away with the predictable prisms. Though looking for Third World faces and events as rallying points for Western discourse has become too common in international media, what has really been more visible in recent years is an unprecedented alarmism in the Western media about freedom of expression in India. After the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government led by Narendra Modi was voted to power in May 2014, the bogey of an Orwellian state in India has been raised in some of the most recognised names of world media. Only two months after the new government took charge, for instance, The New York Times spotted the signs of the Big Brother regime in India in an editorial carrying the suggestive headline, “India’s Press Under Siege.”

It’s amusing to know that there were still people who believed the hardware of a siege can work in times of multiple media platforms offered by technology and rapidly increasing connectivity which has spawned social media, an entity in its own right.

If technology makes such alarmist claims anachronistic, statistics make them look lazy in waking up to some selective and convenient sense of alarm. There is nothing sudden about the ‘siege’, if there is one at all.  Responding to such alarm then, Rupa Subramanya, a former columnist for The Wall Street Journal and co-author of Indianomix: Making Sense of Modern India, cited figures from Freedom House Index of Press Freedom for India spanning 1993 to 2003 and Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index for India (2002-2014) to show that the perceived threat to media freedom has been constantly building up over a number of years, and there is no sudden jump in it.

Subramanya questioned the timing of raising the bogey, as she argued: “What exactly were those folks doing when India kept getting lousy scores from Freedom House and Reporters without Borders? Why the sudden interest in media freedom? India has a lot of work to do to improve the state of press freedom, starting with getting rid of colonial-era laws which stifle free speech. But it’s disingenuous at best and downright dishonest at worst to suggest that these problems suddenly materialised. That’s a falsehood, and a usefully self-serving one, by those who keep chanting it.”

It can be added that such alarm has been reinforced by a section of free speech enthusiasts, including journalists, who seek profitable victimhood. Pitting the freedom of expression against a potentially muzzling state (almost the Leviathan) is anyway a great story for the foreign press. They have not been disappointed by this group of eager sufferers in India. Foreign correspondents covering India, it seems, are closer to such voices of victimhood while they are distant from liberal pretensions of the same voices. More of that later.

Three years later, the peculiar foreign media narratives are, however, not restricted to free speech stories. It can be identified by its pitch in other stories coming from India too. In his piece, published in The Hindu two months ago, Shravan Bhat asked, “Are foreign journalists ignorant of the true India or is their focus on news that sells?’’ He goes on to observe, “It seems they feel that a narrative of dreariness and outrage is what will sell. In a country of 1.3 billion people, every rape story has the potential to make The New York Times. Every communal scuffle can make The Guardian.’’ Not looking further, you need to just go through the Twitter timeline and Facebook page of BBC Hindi to know what Bhat is talking about.

Coming back to Time’s list, it’s not for the first time that Time decided to value a narrative while the face was just a necessary adjunct to it. It has sometimes backfired on the American publication. In 2004, it paid a price for personifying the romantic Indian middle-class tale of a young salaried bureaucrat wading through state system for efficiently delivering relief to citizens. So, exercise your memory, and you may recollect this. Before being jailed for his alleged involvement in the Bihar flood relief scam, a young Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer and district magistrate of Patna Gautam Goswami had been chosen by Time magazine as one of the ‘Asian heroes of 2004’. It was ironic that Goswami’s flood relief work, which eventually accounted for his fall from grace, was cited by Time as a reason for him figuring in the exclusive list.

Interestingly, the man writing Goswami’s citation for Time was none other than its South Asia correspondent Aravind Adiga, who four years later went on to win the 2008 Booker Prize for his debut novel The White Tiger. In his journalism, Adiga seems to have gullibly bought the inflated narratives about civil servants, which abound in the Indian media.

The problems with Gurmehar’s inclusion in a list of next generation leaders published in Time are many, some of which could be seen in the note the magazine has carried for her. First, it’s not clear what kind of leadership she has been credited with, and even if that could be vaguely inferred, what exactly has she done to earn that? Can social media responses, which any way swing between outrage and ridicule, and ways of dealing with them constitute young leadership? Is a successful victimhood campaign for being trolled, which, of course, can get nasty, the new roadmap to youth leadership? Have powerful curators of freedom of expression won their right to dictate terms of war of expression and appoint their warriors? Does Time know enough about the politics of an Indian campus to hoist a poster girl of an imagined virtuous community of students?

The naivete about Indian campus politics is something which drives even sections of the Indian media which almost waits to paint any campus confrontation as an issue of civil liberties. The author has addressed some of the fault-lines in media narratives on Indian campus in an earlier piece.

Second, the Goswami irony plays well with Kaur too. This month only, Kaur was seen threatening two teenagers on social media with legal action for exercising something she had been cited by Time as “a warrior of”- free speech. The two teenagers had posted two memes as tools of criticising the Gurmehar Kaur brand of activism. In justifying her blatantly selective interpretation of freedom of expression, Kaur tried to make a distinction between ‘free speech’ and ‘hate speech’- again a red herring to take recourse to legal technicalities when the heat is on your arbitrary and subjective sense of tolerance. A logical extension of her position would be that that she favours Section 295 A of the Indian Penal Code- which criminalises blasphemy, a form of hate speech. The youth in India can do without the leadership of such hashtag-happy activism of convenient free speech.

Early next year, Penguin will publish the 20-year-old’s ‘memoirs’ in the form of a book titled ‘Small Acts of Freedom’ –  that’s a privilege that you can enjoy when you entrench yourself in the big voices that run certain industries of outrage in India. Her small acts of hypocrisy on free speech are also not different from the way her ‘liberal’ cheerleaders operate. They can get you in one of those lists in an international magazine, and, of course, they ensure you write a book before you graduate.