Great work. Very valuable so people can see what has been going on.
Most people do not understand that Indian politics is being dragged into American media and social media for very specific political purposes. This is being done by paid propagandists who see it in the interest of their clients to control the media narrative about India outside of India. Those interests benefit specific political parties and oligarchs in India and elsewhere. But ultimately their propaganda target is the voter in India.
To give an example of that reversed: Imagine if paid American propagandists were given the job of invading the media discourse of other countries in order to steer the media narrative in that country about America. But instead of a media narrative that pushes a narrative of “America the good and pure,” instead it was a purely partisan operation which pushed the political goals of either Republicans in demonizing Democrats, or the Democrats in demonizing the GOP.
That is what is going on in American media now, ever since the BJP took power in India. Their political opposition has orchestrated a massive disinformation campaign targeting English speaking media, with the specific goal of demonizing their political opposition based on the idea that it will disrupt the BJP in their international relationships with other countries and other cultures — and that will aid them in their politics in India. They are not alone, Pakistan is doing the same thing. They also are not alone, other countries are doing the same thing targeting western audiences with disinformation campaigns about Indian politics. This has coincided with the rise of social media and common access to high speed internet around the world, because professional political propagandists realized its value in reaching huge swaths of the population, who were now able to easily watch video or read media from anywhere in the world. If the “advanced cool” Americans and British were hating on the BJP, Modi, RSS, then there must be a good reason!
The problem with Indian Media for so long, has been consolidation of media power, which developed due to the sheer length of time that the Congress Party had been ruling India as a more or less unrivaled political power. That in turn led to the development of Indian media houses being centered around that power structure in various ways, in fact dependent on that power structure for perks and so on. For them to see that political power structure suddenly collapse, along with their long held ties to that power structure being suddenly not there for their perks anymore, that led to various plans to regain what they suddenly lost.
That coincided with the rise of the use of social media and legacy media moving enmasse to online platforms. They saw a chance to use the ignorance of people outside of India when it came to Indian politics and culture, as a tool to manipulate them into supporting their agenda of toppling the new BJP power structure. Since the BJP had run on the long-time anti-colonial “Indian pride” platform that had developed in response to British colonial rule before independence— the opposition’s intellectual political leaders saw in that a way to stigmatize the BJP. The idea was to use the BJP platform of pride in India, which had been effective in politics — as a way to demonize the BJP as “Hindu supremacists.”
They did this by targeting the Muslim community first since they are by far the largest minority in India. Since the Muslims in India tended to see themselves as a separate community from the Hindus, the BJP political angle of pride in historical Indian culture or Hindutva, was twisted in propagandizing the Muslim community as really being about Islamophobia. Imagine if in Pakistan, that a political party recently ousted claimed that the new party in power who pushed a platform of pride in their cultural history, that they were in reality by that pride pushing hatred towards all non-Pakistanis. What if pride in Pakistan’s historical culture, becomes derided as a form of hate for everyone else? That is exactly what happened in Indian media opposed to the BJP. They began a massive disinformation campaign targeting Muslim voting blocs, and then the world to aid them, that Hindutva doesn’t mean “pride in Indian culture,” it means “hatred of everyone and everything else.”
The Congress Party idea was try to make it seem like the BJP were not running on traditional anti-colonial national pride. The BJP promoted pride in India and its historical culture — the Congress Party responded by riling up hate of the BJP by insisting that it was really about hating everyone else, especially Muslims. Hinduism was thrown under the bus by actual Hindus — all for money, power, greed.
Because liberal westerners have been conditioned to see those types of judgmental accusations of bigotry aimed at people as generally deserving it, they often developed a knee-jerk attitude towards anyone if enough propaganda had been digested about them if they were said to embody those characteristics. Many western media sources were targeted by the Indian Congress Party affiliated media and the professional propagandists they employed to create a narrative of the BJP, Modi, and all things “Hindu” as the embodiments of all the things liberals in the west claim to despise.
The goal was to get people to equate the BJP and Modi with “Hindu Supremacism” rather than Indian pride, and then “Hinduism” itself with bigotry, and all things bad. They did this by a massive amount of media manipulation in English language media which was resold to western nations as “the inside story of Indian politics.” This would be like if the GOP and Fox News in America created a massive propaganda campaign in French aimed at the French media and French speakers, all to push an Anti-Democrat Party agenda for unspoken hidden reasons.
The Congress Party was unsurprisingly happily joined by other nations who already had a long time anti-India political agenda. They joined the Congress Party anti-Hindu media agenda since it played into their already long-standing anti-India propaganda aimed at the big powers. The world was swamped by their various propaganda machines with endless disinformation campaigns pretending to be unbiased news. The goal for the Congress Party establishment was easy to understand — it was purely political — they sold out their own culture for purely partisan power politics.
Pakistan and other nations joined them in pushing disinformation for political reasons utilizing the Hinduphobic template that was so kindly enabled for them where previously they were usually too circumspect to do so in western media. Now it’s a no-holds barred Hindu hating extravaganza. The Congress Party establishment have successfully demonized their political opposition to such a degree that media people around the world see nothing wrong with blindly labeling anything or anyone who doesn’t go along with their anti-Hindu, anti-BJP, anti-Modi hate, as all being loathsome bigots. Hinduism is now equated with ugliness. Thanks a lot guys. Great plan.
We saw that for example, displayed boldly in Pierre Omidyar’s The Intercept when they had a Hinduphobic writer declare that all of the people who gave donations to Tulsi Gabbard with “Hindu sounding names” were all therefore BJP-Modi-RSS “fascist” bigots — simply because of having Hindu sounding names! Nothing else was known of them, they had “an expert in Hindu names” check to make sure they weren’t mistakenly being bigoted to non-Hindus!
They literally wrote that. No one, at one of the premier *progressive* news outlets in the world, had a problem with that. It wasn’t until a lot of online outrage over their open hate-mongering towards Hindus from *non-Hindus* became loud enough that they were humiliated enough to apologize, but they had to be practically dragged to admit fault.
And they have continued on with more hateful Hinduphobic rhetoric ever since. They are blind to it now. Hindu=Ku Klux Klan, apparently, to The Intercept, and to much of the left-wing English speaking media. They praise yoga as the greatest thing since sliced bread — but have become convinced that Hindus are beneath their contempt.
But unless — you are “one of the good ones.”
That type of openly bigoted disinformation is a new phenomena in western media. You would never see that in prominent news outlets until very recently — all due to the concerted propaganda campaign to demonize Hinduism, blindly, in their greed for power and prestige — by the political opponents of the BJP. How many times have I seen Hindu writers publish diatribes against Hindus in western media from the perspective of “an enlightened Hindu” as opposed to the regular savage hateful Hindus. It is really astonishing to see what has become acceptable in previously polite society, in India and the world.
With the rise of Tulsi Gabbard’s presidential campaign that has brought new players into the Hinduphobic hatefest in western media. All the nations who see Tulsi Gabbard’s anti-war platform as a threat to their own agendas to coerce America for their own foreign policy goals, now feel they have a free pass to promote hatred of BJP-Modi-RSS-Hinduism towards Tulsi because of what the Congress Party disinformation campaign has accomplished.
It is perfectly alright now to demonize Hinduism because Hindus are now successfully categorized as “Right Wing Fascist Bigot Supremacist.” And it isn’t just the propaganda ministries of those nations who are spreading Hindu hate, it is American propagandists who support candidates running in opposition to Tulsi Gabbard. That has been going on in Hawaii media for many years. In the past 3 election cycles each of Tulsi Gabbard’s Democratic and Republican opponents have engaged in massive online Hinduphobic smearing campaigns following in the footsteps of Pierre Omidyar’s (again) hometown Hawaii news outlet Civil Beat. Those Hawaii media campaigns have now successfully crossed over into mainstream media in America, with their smears being pushed by everything from New York Magazine to Vox. With no end in sight. Hinduphobia is now a sport. Who can denigrate them more successfully, is now seen as a good careerist in media houses around the world.
