India should fear its own media

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" said Franklin D Roosevelt.

The year was 1933 and the pivotal wartime president delivered his first inaugural address during one of the darkest periods in the history of the United States of America, when the great power was muddled in the Great Depression, facing a total collapse of its economic and psychological systems.

The point to take inspiration from the famous quote is to draw a parallel between two distinct yet similarly disruptive eras — the fear of fake news and misinformed media in the present-day world, India in particular.

While Roosevelt originally targeted fear as an unreasoning, internal barrier to economic recovery, today's digital age has replaced that internal sensation with an external, information-driven challenge: infodemic.

The Godi media, a term coined and popularised by veteran Indian journalist Ravish Kumar to describe biased Indian print and TV news media, is now recognised as the foundational architect of modern information disorder being spread by Narendra Modi's followers — thanks to modern technology, especially social media platforms.

But, has this strategy paid dividends? The answer is a thumping no. On key issues like Kashmir, post-Pahalgam attack and the Bondi Beach tragedy, we witness India facing a diplomatic isolation as the international community, particularly the West, is reluctant to accept its narrative due to inherent weaknesses in its initiatives and justifications.

Delhi has launched a sprawling and occasionally contradictory set of goals and rationales to respond to the Pahalgam attack, including "setting a new normal". But the metaphor of diplomatic prism dismantles India's disinformation warfare. This metaphoric prism helps the international community decipher the venomous propaganda into distinct, manageable components to understand its true intent.

Recently, Pakistan scores another diplomatic win when prominent UN experts brand India's May invasion as a direct challenge to the international rule of law, sovereignty and territorial integrity - principles that are highly valued by the global community.

Second, we need to analyse the end-results of fake media on the Indian society itself, and it would be interesting to make a comparison with the tools employed by the Nazi Germany to hold their grip onto the power. Just as the Nazi propaganda machine relied heavily on scapegoating — blaming specific groups, Jews in particular, for Germany's post-WWI struggles — to cultivate a unified national identity (the Volksgemeinschaft) based on exclusion and racial purity, the Hindutva ideology targets Muslim, bordering its prejudice along the same lines the Nazis drew.

History bears us that blind faith in distorted facts acts as a seismic force that can destabilise social cushions — the shared norms, institutional trust and human empathy — that act as a balancing force to maintain order in a society. When these pillars are weakened by state-sponsored disinformation, even small tectonic shifts in the political or economic landscape can lead to total societal collapse.

We have started to witness this collapse. The niqab incident in Bihar is a direct result of the Hindutva ideology. Had it not been to racial hatred, the justification of persecution and violence that is allowed to flourish under the watchful eyes of Narendra Modi, Nitish Kumar would not have had the courage to commit the shameful act.

India saw the unfortunate incident at Bondi Beach in Sydney as another opportunity to pitch the Big Lie technique at Pakistan. To its utter surprise, the whole dirty game boomeranged.

As did the Nazis, the BJP also understands the crucial role emotions play in shaping audience attitudes and behaviours in the field of journalism and communication, Modi's followers have been pitching emotional contagion -— a psychological term that refers to the automatic catching or sharing of emotions from one person to another, often unconsciously — to paint the Modi regime in a positive way, using generative Artificial Intelligence as an accelerant to supercharge the venomous nature of fake news.

Fake news and misinformed media thus carry with them the evil of all foolish, unpleasant and venomous things that India should fear.