New Delhi: Renowned music conductor Zubin Mehta has claimed that The Times of India removed a crucial statement from an interview he granted to the newspaper, in which he expressed his desire for perpetual peace for Muslims in India.
Mehta voiced his concern during a conversation with Karan Thapar that was later brought to attention by The Wire. The conductor revealed, “Well, I speak to a lot of Indian friends, and I get my reports from them. I hope my Muslim friends in India will live in peace forever,” a line that was conspicuously absent in the published article.
“Listen, I’ll tell you frankly,” Mehta replied. “I gave an interview to The Times of India over the phone from Los Angeles two weeks ago. A very good interview; and I read it, it was verbatim perfect. The last sentence I told the man, and I met him recently, and he admitted, they took out the last thing I said: ‘I hope my Muslim friends can live in peace forever in India.’ And that was not printed in The Times. It was cut off, and the writer couldn’t give me a reason why.”
“They don’t want to offend Mr. Modi and the government,” Thapar responded.
He stressed the importance of ending religious persecution, referencing incidents of church burnings in Pakistan.
“How would that offend anybody? …This morning I read that they were burning churches in Pakistan. One has to get over this madness of religious persecution. Hopefully, things will change,” Mehta said.
The Times of India acknowledged the omission, attributing it to space constraints, and later included the quote in the online version of the interview.
The Times of India tweeted about it:
Responding to Mehta’s comment on X on Monday, The Times of India said that the interview had been “trimmed to fit the page” and “the line being referred to was towards the end of the interview and got left out in that process”.
It was restored in the online version, after Mehta spoke to the author about it.
The Wire confirmed that the quote did not appear in the newspaper’s print edition.
