The foreign hand

On March 3, 1976, The Indian Express ran the headline “Foreign critics told to stop interference”. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in the middle of her Emergency, was likely upset at being called an autocrat and was hitting back. “We don’t care for their criticism,” she said. “Whenever we had taken steps to make the country strong and united they opposed us.”

Four years later, having come back after being reelected, she said on August 29, 1980, that riots in Moradabad were likely the result of a “foreign hand”. Closer to our time, on February 24, 2012, India Today ran a headline “Foreign hand nuking Tamil Nadu nuclear power project, says Prime Minister Manmohan Singh”. The blame here was on non-governmental organisations who were presumably up to no good.

Leaders in trouble have often blamed the outside world, and perhaps this was the product of a newly decolonised nation. It was the blame of last resort. Perhaps for this reason it is not easy to find many references to such things in the past, unlike in Pakistan, about which more later. “Foreign hand” references appear to have been used in extreme frustration for the most part. Secondly, they always came from the top, meaning there was no great buy-in from the media or the population that “foreign interference” was a major problem or a serious one. This has changed in new India.

The New York Times this month joined the BBC as being motivated and involved in spreading propaganda against India. As the Union minister for information and broadcasting explained, foreign media were “spreading lies about India and our democratically-elected Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi”. They were doing so because they were “nourishing a grudge against India”. What the grudge was and what the lies were, was not explained. The newspaper had published an opinion piece by a Kashmiri editor, Anuradha Bhasin, whose newspaper was forcibly closed by the government in October 2020 and has not reopened.

A few weeks earlier, the BBC broadcast a careful and thorough documentary (in which I participated) on the condition of minorities in India. It was accused by the government of having a colonial mindset, of pushing propaganda and a discredited narrative. After a comment by billionaire-philanthropist George Soros on the Hindenburg affair, the foreign minister said he was dangerous because his Open Society Foundation “invested in shaping narratives to go about their agenda”. Mr Soros was calling for more democracy, but the foreign minister’s response was “we are a country that went through colonialism, we know the dangers of what happens when there’s outside interference.”

The idea that the outside world is conspiring to discredit India or actively working to undermine the nation, especially the Prime Minister, has taken hold not just in the government, but also in large sections of the media. The prime time shows have reflected that in recent weeks.

Illustration: Ajay Mohanty

The foreign hand is also showing itself in the various indices on which India has fallen under the present government. When India fell behind Pakistan and Bangladesh on the Global Hunger Index, the index was accused by the government of “misinformation” that was a “consistent effort to taint India’s image.”

The World Bank’s Human Capital Index’s findings that India was behind Bangladesh in child mortality, health and education was similarly dismissed. When India fell on the World Press Freedom Index, it was accused by the NITI Aayog of bias. The bipartisan United States Commission on International Religious Freedom’s finding that India was a “country of particular concern” on the issue of minority rights was also responded to with the claim of bias. After its report on India’s Covid response, The Lancet was told to remain “politically unbiased”. Freedom House’s finding that India was only partly free because of suppression of civil liberties was met with the response, “We do not need sermons”. When V-Dem called India an electoral autocracy like Pakistan and behind Bangladesh, the foreign minister blamed “a set of self-appointed custodians of the world, who find it very difficult to stomach that somebody in India is not looking for their approval”.

It should be pointed out that the NITI Aayog tried at first to improve India’s standing on the various indices, believing this to be a problem of perception (see “Modi govt plans media blitz for image correction to boost India’s rank on global lists”, The Print, August 20, 2020). Apparently, the solution was a “massive publicity campaign”. Alas, this did not work and India continued to fall. The response switched to blame and denial and the current claims of bias and agendas and propaganda against the nation and the Prime Minister.

New India has come to reflect in many ways the Pakistan of the 1980s. Both in terms of the state’s intense focus on majoritarianism and its propensity to believe that it is the victim of foreign conspiracy.

In a speech in Bengal’s Haldia on February 7, 2021, the Prime Minister said, “An international conspiracy is being hatched to malign India’s image. It’s a well thought-out conspiracy against our country.” The next day, speaking in Assam, he spoke again of “conspiracies against the nation”.

Usually democracies, especially large ones, do not speak this language. It is the vulnerable and the autocratic state that looks for hidden enemies. It is unable to understand why it is not being lauded, as it aches to be, but castigated for the performance it has actually delivered.

The writer is chair of Amnesty International India