The British Broadcasting Corporation harbours an anti-religious attitude, with its correspondents having little understanding of religious issues and soaps ridiculing religion, a parliamentary committee on the future of Britain's public broadcaster has been told.
Representatives of the Hindu, Sikh, Christian and Muslim faiths, all broadcasters and contributors to BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day, gave oral evidence on Wednesday to the House of Lords select committee on the BBC charter review about the coverage of faith and the role of religious broadcasting.
The anti-religious attitude is apparent in the way religion is featured in the BBC's entertainment output, said Chakravarthi Ram Prasad from the department of religious studies at the University of Lancaster.
He said BBC soaps "tend to use stereotypes -- Christians are mad fundamentalists and Hindus are in arranged marriages."
Referring to one such soap, Indarjit Singh, the editor of the Sikh Messenger and patron of the World Congress of Faiths, said, "East Enders' Dot Cotton is an example. She quotes endlessly from the Bible and it ridicules (religion) to some extent."
Singh argued the BBC should use its resources to educate people about religion in order to combat prejudice, saying, "The BBC should look at the removal of ignorance about religion."
"We need to know and understand what essential beliefs are and how they contribute to society. The BBC should do a lot more of that. It is so easy in atmosphere of ignorance for prejudice to arise," Guardian daily quoted him as saying on Thursday.
Singh added that he would like to see the BBC take a more "robust" approach to religion, tackling wrongdoing and weeding out wrong practices in religions.
One select committee member, Lord Maxton, said, "religion is treated at the BBC with kid gloves and is rarely criticised."
Ram Prasad said the BBC repeatedly made a fundamental error in reporting the India-Pakistan conflict as a clash of religions, because its reporters lacked adequate understanding of the situation.
Mona Siddiqui, the chair of the Scottish religious advisory committee, argued for the BBC to present religion in a way people can identify with, to "make programmes about the way people live and believe" and to show how religion "sits side-by-side in contemporary debates."
"People are hungry for real debate, they want to know how religion makes a person tick."
The hearing was a second tier of inquiries into religion, sport, regional broadcasting and the World Service being carried out following the publication of the Lords' report, published on Tuesday.
That report called the government's plans for the BBC confusing and misguided, the daily said.
