In the early decades after independence, India enjoyed warm diplomatic relations with Sweden and Denmark, both of which were keen to support newly decolonised countries with economic assistance. These friendly ties, however, did not translate into favourable coverage of India in the Scandinavian press.

In the 1960s, Indian diplomats in Copenhagen and Stockholm were increasingly frustrated by what they saw as a lack of balanced reporting on India. They believed much of the Scandinavian media relied too heavily on British and American news agencies, which, in their view, shaped an unflattering picture of the country.

“At present the Danish press is completely dependent on foreign news agencies, mainly British and American,” the Indian Embassy in Copenhagen wrote to the Ministry of External Affairs in 1964. The embassy noted that there were plans to establish a Scandinavian news agency and suggested reaching out to it in an effort to “combat anti-India propaganda” in the local press.

The concern was particularly acute in Sweden. Reports sent by the Indian embassy in Stockholm prompted Surendra Singh, a senior official in the external affairs ministry, to conclude that negative coverage extended beyond newspapers to radio and television. He believed the foreign correspondents themselves were not necessarily biased. Rather, it was the editors back home who sensationalised their dispatches.

“The suggestion, therefore, that a Swedish correspondent in Delhi would make some difference is obviously a good one, but one should not overrate the publicity value of a correspondent,” Singh wrote in a memo. Such a journalist, he predicted, would “invariably associate himself with his Western colleagues” and cover subjects such as food riots, communal violence and, inevitably, Kashmir.

Singh contrasted India’s approach to critical Western correspondents with that of neighbouring Pakistan, which he said “made no bones” about confronting them and even threatened them with bans. He cited the case of a French television crew that was prevented from leaving Karachi airport after it reported on the plight of refugees from East Pakistan who had fled to the Garo Hills, in present-day Meghalaya, following communal violence in 1964.

For his part, Singh preferred a less confrontational approach, believing that directly challenging international news organisations would achieve little.

“One cannot just walk into the AP office in New York and accuse them of maliciously editing their correspondent’s dispatch for they will have a thousand and one answers in reply, and inevitably the correspondent always has some base to his story,” he wrote. India, he added, could hardly deny the food crisis it was facing.

Diplomatic anxieties

Khub Chand, India’s ambassador to Sweden, was more forthright in his assessment of the problem. He complained that Swedish media coverage placed disproportionate emphasis on “the holy cow, filth and squalor in Indian cities, our antediluvian customs and traditions”.

For this, Chand blamed British media organisations in particular. The embassy, he wrote, had tried to explain that such depictions represented an old and disappearing India, what he described as “the India of Rudyard Kipling which will soon become a nostalgic dream”.

“Fed as the Swedish press is by our pseudo friends, the British news agencies and the British press, Kipling’s India still finds greater publicity,” Chand wrote.

He also pointed to the structure of Swedish television. Because it operated as a government department and had no advertising revenue, he argued, it had little choice but to depend heavily on British sources. As it happened, that very year, Swedish television aired a British documentary about India’s starving millions.

Chand was equally troubled by anti-India views expressed by some British citizens. At a dinner, he recalled, the president of a major Swedish steel company told him that a British friend had called it “silly to pour millions of tons of food into India” because it “would only make the Indians breed still faster”.

For Chand, what he called “insidious British propaganda” was among the biggest obstacles to improving India’s image in Sweden. “I think our Ministry would be well-advised to attempt a change in the tone of British news agencies and the British press if it wants an improvement in the Swedish or other Western European publicity-media, since the latter are merely a reflection of a poisonous original,” he wrote.

He also blamed some of the negative coverage on journalists sympathetic to China, singling out Sven Lindqvist. Chand described Lindqvist, who had worked as a cultural attaché in Beijing, as “a paid agent of the Chinese propagandists”, complaining that his articles in Dagens Nyheter were derogatory towards India. Such suspicions had become more common after the 1962 Sino-Indian war, which shattered the once-cordial relationship between the two Asian powers.

Yet Chand acknowledged that Swedish coverage was not uniformly hostile. Reporting on Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had died only months earlier, had been “overwhelmingly sympathetic and pro-Indian”.

Western gaze

The Indian embassy in Stockholm eventually asked its press attaché, Dharam Deva, to conduct a detailed study of the Swedish media’s coverage of India. His findings were unlikely to have pleased an image-conscious Ministry of External Affairs.

Deva argued that the ministry’s perception of systematic bias reflected either “a somewhat insufficient appreciation of the position of the Swedish press” or “a meagre understanding of the Swedish traditions, attitudes to life, Swedish temperament and Swedish conditions of living”.

He rejected the idea that Swedish journalists were simply following an anti-India trend. “Their sense and tradition of neutrality is powerfully strong and they are not, therefore, generally prone to take sides, forcefully, one way or the other, even on the most controversial issues of the day.” Swedish journalists, he added, were generally careful and analytical, and their writing could be deliberately vague or ambiguous.

Commentary on international affairs was often “beautifully hazy, full of mild sarcasm, innuendo and euphemism,” he observed. Freedom of the press was constitutionally guaranteed and deeply valued. “The newspapers and writers are at pains to maintain this freedom and even to advance it,” he wrote. “To criticize and to find fault, with their own government particularly in the domestic field, has therefore, become a sine qua non of Swedish journalism.”

Deva urged his colleagues to consider the stark differences between Sweden and India. Sweden, he argued, was the cleanest country in Europe and criticism by its journalists needed to be seen in this context. “Most of the Swedish criticism is directed against our social customs and problems,” Deva wrote. “Indian caste system, the holy cows, untouchability, dirt and poverty are the main themes of such critical comments.”

He recalled that Alva Myrdal, a strong supporter of India who was Sweden’s ambassador to the country, had told her Indian counterpart that “the drive from Santa Cruz airport to Bombay or an early morning train ride out of Delhi give rather unfavourable impressions to a visitor”.

For Deva, this context mattered. Swedish journalists, having grown up in a pristine environment, inevitably observed India’s dirt and filth through the lens of their own society.

At the same time, he agreed with the embassy’s core complaint: Sweden lacked its own correspondents in India, forcing outlets to rely on formulaic British reporting. “It is common belief here that Britain, with its intimate knowledge of India for over 200 years, still knows best about our country,” Deva wrote. “There is, therefore, a common tendency to turn to British sources for information on our country.”

Both Deva and Chand believed that having Scandinavian correspondents in India would help reshape public perceptions. Chand regularly met top editors in Stockholm to counter biases that the Indian embassy strongly suspected originated from the “deep-seated hostility and bitterness” towards India within the UK, where many journalists supported the Pakistani stance on Kashmir.

The embassy also explored ways to counter British coverage on Swedish television. Chand proposed distributing pro-India documentaries through a European agency. Singh, who was the director of the foreign ministry’s West division, supported the idea and suggested that the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting allow documentary films already shown in India to be screened on Swedish television without royalties.

Singh also proposed inviting Swedish journalists to India. “If we do not have to pay the fare, we could at least bring 6 for a fortnight’s stay,” he wrote in a memo. “I would be inclined to add that January would be the suitable month as the food crisis (as we hope) would be over by then and they could also attend the Republic Day parade in Delhi and other festivities.”

Singh further suggested sending Indian editors and writers on lecture tours of Scandinavia to discuss mutual challenges with their peers. Another proposal involved ramping up cultural diplomacy by sending dance troupes and art exhibitions to Sweden, mirroring efforts in cities like Paris, Rome, Moscow and New York.

At the time, India faced severe budgetary constraints, disallowing any sustained campaign to reshape the country’s image in Scandinavia. Six decades later, the relationship between India and Scandinavia has changed considerably, as have the technologies through which countries encounter one another. British news agencies, for one, no longer occupy the same gatekeeping position in an era of social media and the internet.

Ajay Kamalakaran is a writer, primarily based in Mumbai. His latest book, Colombo: Port of Call, has been published by Penguin Random House.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.