Tensions working their way into the American ties with India
The writer is a former caretaker finance minister and served as vice-president at the World Bank
Going back to last week’s article titled ‘The story of other India’, I will today examine why Washington may be distancing itself a little from India. The operative phrase in the previous sentence is ‘a little’, since the main reason for Washington pulling New Delhi into its orbit, remains in place. The United States is building its relations with India to counter the growing power of China.
This is happening despite some of the negative reporting about India in the American press. This has begun to affect the way official Washington views India. The latest manifestation of this is the decision by US President Joe Biden to turn down the invitation he had accepted to attend India’s Republic Day celebration. The day is celebrated when New Delhi left the British Commonwealth and opted to become a republic. The day also marks the process that was to lay down an inclusive political order in the country. For the Republic Day in 2024, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi invited Biden to be the guest of honour. Biden accepted the invitation when the two leaders met for a bilateral meeting in New Delhi on the sidelines of the G20 summit, the group that was chaired by India at that time.
To turn this day into an important event, New Delhi usually invites a prominent person to attend the ceremonies. President Barack Obama in 2015 became the first US president to attend the Indian Republic Day. Until the arrival of Modi on the national political scene, the Indian claim that it had found a way to devise a system of governance that accommodates the country’s extreme diversity was largely correct. India needed a system that was all inclusive rather than exclusive. This is what Sunil Khilnani, a distinguished Indian historian, had described as the “idea of India” in a book that carried that title.
Why did Biden cancel his promised visit to New Delhi? In a meeting with the press, Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s National Security Adviser, said that “scheduling demands” would prevent the American president from travelling to New Delhi. But the reason was the press India was getting in the United States as well as Western Europe.
To understand why Washington is developing doubts about its relations with India, I will follow up with the research of Gerry Shih and his colleagues that has resulted in several long stories in The Washington Post. In the one carried by the newspaper on December 18, Shih and his colleagues wrote as follows:
“Since 2020, an opaque organization calling itself the Disinfo Lab has published lengthy dossiers and social media posts claiming to reveal the personal relationships and funding sources behind U.S.-based critics of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”
The organisation operates out of a modern office in New Delhi and was created by Colonel Dibya Satpathy, who uses the pen name of ‘Shakti’ to write for the InfoLab. He was once a member of the Indian intelligence service.
The Disifo Lab has combined fact-based research with unsubstantiated claims to paint U.S. government figures, researchers, humanitarian groups, and Indian American rights activists as part of a conspiracy, purportedly led by global Islamic groups and billionaire George Soros, to undermine India.
The group’s research has been widely circulated by right-wing Indians and Hindu nationalists.
The Lab’s activities show how the online propaganda campaigns conducted by the BJP, Modi’s party, have expanded beyond their traditional domestic aims of shoring up popular support for the Indian prime minister and now seek to influence attitudes far beyond the country’s borders.
The organisation has emerged as a sophisticated player attempting to influence the way prominent foreigners and institutions, both official and non-official, look at India. In 28 reports it has published to date, it paints an India under attack by a sprawling combination of conspirators funded by Pakistani intelligence, the Muslim Brotherhood and the billionaire George Soros. It has identified the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) as an organization New Delhi should watch after it recommended the United States State Department to designate India a ‘country of particular concern’ for the Modi government’s treatment of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and other minority groups. Not just the Washington Post, but several other western newspapers have given prominent space to what are seen as official Indian efforts to eliminate, through assassinations, some Sikh activists who live in Canada and the United Sates and are in favor of creating an independent Sikh state in the Indian Punjab to be called ‘Khalistan’. Timely exposure by the United States intelligence saved the life of a Sikh American who had been identified by the Indian intelligence as a target for elimination. It would have been awkward for the United States to have its president visit New Delhi when Washington was putting pressure on India to own up the officially sponsored assassination attempts that had already taken an important Sikh life.
The Disinfo Lab published a detailed report in April 2023 denouncing Sunia Viswanath, the New York-based founder of the human rights group, Hindus for Human Rights, that has criticized the BJP’s Hindu-nationalist ideology as antithetical to Hinduism. Two months later, Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition Congress Party — the grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, one of the founders of modern India and son of Indira Gandhi — when on a visit to the United States, called on Viswanath. The meeting drew a strong response from the Lab. “Who is she exactly?” asked a paper published by the organisation. It provided an answer: “She is nothing but a proxy for George Soros, who has committed $1 billion to meddle in India’s internal affairs through a network of opposition leaders, think tanks, journalists, lawyers and activists.”
In another post it attacked The Washington Post for carrying long, essentially negative, reports about India.
To go back to The Washington Post’s article about InfoLab: By late 2022, “the Indian government was coming under intense international criticism for revoking the semi-autonomous status of Muslim-majority Kashmir, and around that time a polished national security official began introducing himself as ‘Shakti’ to foreign correspondents in New Delhi, telling them he wanted to help them understand India’s perspective.”
He offered to arrange a meeting with Prime Minister Modi’s national security adviser and coordinate a rare visit to Kashmir which was then off-limit to foreign reporters and pitched ideas about Kashmir’s economic recovery under India’s direct rule.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 1st, 2024.
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