This is an excellent question and I would begin to answer this by pointing out to an article which the quintessential global English newspaper New York Times send in my inbox → The Billionaire Yogi Behind Modi’s Rise. This was a feature in the New York Times (Breaking News, World News & Multimedia)

First of all, India has a reasonable high number of English readers. Within that many of them interested in foreign affairs or international affairs. These quintessentially names in the media such as the BBC, NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, Washington Post, Financial Times, The Economist, etc. hence are quite popular. Primarily they have an anti-India bias and secondly if looked carefully an anti-Hindu bias. Most of these newspapers or their editors for quite a good time post independence fondly called India as a ‘land of snake charmers’. The liberalization of the 90s and the subsequent IT boom has changed the perception slightly but not fully.

It is certain that most people would agree that there exists such a bias for Hindus. Now the question is why. For this one might have to go back to history and find out some threads. India has been under foreign rule for more than 900 years, firstly the Sultanates, followed by Mughals, intermittent attacks by other Mongols and Ottoman tribes and then the British. All these were anything but Hindus. Such a complex labyrinth of philosophy and rituals of Hinduism would have boggled these invaders who tried to decipher Indian culture i.e. Hindu culture. Trying to make sense of it for a very long time, they either simplified or tagged it as a backward looking religion stuck in rituals and begrimed with caste based hierarchy and other dogmatic practices. To even rule among the masses they made several attempts to destroy it or proselytize the Hindus. But such was the power of the religion and its philosophy that it still survived these attacks in this land of ours i.e. India.

Now, since India was under foreign rule for such a long time, the foreigners were the folks who were writing about it (Hinduism and India’s culture) and therefore a lot of negativity spread around it. All this got amplified under the British regime in India. The orientalist literature and the hegemonic view from the top was primarily anti-Hindu. Since India was poverty ridden and majorly illiterate when we broke from the clutches of the Brits in 1947, it had significant climbing to do. But, even with its climbing we were also ridden with socialist ideas and the western concepts of democracy and the Eaton graduated Prime Minister with an English taste did not assist in the cause of Hinduism as it embraced a rather liberal term, ‘secularism’.

Irony bounds - Hinduism by definition rides on assimilation and inherent tolerance, humility, acceptance which the otherwise borrowed secularism might not hold.

Now if you look at the post-Independence India, it was majorly governed by the socialist forces embracing secularism. Any talk about pro-Hinduism was considered right wing and hard-lined as fundamentalism and dangerous for the country.

The country’s majority kept adjusting to the new reality and the education system kept on abetting it.

Taking cue from our own political leadership, the global media was sharp to write about it. It was fashionable for them to cover about Hindu fundamentalism or RSS and term them as fascists by just looking at one facet of it. They tried their benchmarks and made sense of the country and Hinduism.

To be honest, such is the complexity of the religion and philosophy of Hinduism that the western English speaking media cannot comprehend it leave articulating it. It is upon the Hindus to make an attempt to understand it and impart it to avoid any such anti-Hindu references in the global discourse.