There is an urgent need for a credible global regime for synthetic political content, cross-border influence operations, and behavioural profiling of populations for political ends.
As India hosts its first Global Conference on AI Impact and identifies safety, trust and responsible AI as one of its “priority chakras,” it is important to draw attention to cognitive warfare, what it is and how to collectively combat it. Cognitive warfare, broadly defined as the weaponisation of neuroscience, AI and information to alter how people think, act and perceive reality, is becoming a central concern for international security as it is for the delivery of other global public goods. The United Nations struggles to prevent and end wars that broadcast themselves in real time. It is even less equipped to tackle narrative “wars on the mind” that hide inside malicious social media feeds, rumours, memes, algorithmic manipulation, deepfakes and data weaponisation.
The UN Summit of the Future held in 2024 addressed this in some measure, including in the Pact for the Future and the Declaration on Future Generations, and set in motion some processes like the Independent International Panel on AI and the Global Dialogue on AI to identify its elements, evolve common understanding and disciplines, and govern it through international cooperation.
However, as one who has inhabited the world of multilateral diplomacy for decades, I see that the UN was meant to govern a global order where violence was visible, borders were legible, and attribution was slow. That world has moved on. Today the most damaging attacks on democratic societies, one of the global public goods, arrive as persuasion, distraction, engineered outrage, synthetic confusion and narrative invasion. This imperceptible cognitive warfare, often waged by unseen and unidentifiable adversaries, can be nearly as deadly and ruinous for social coherence and peace, national unity and territorial integrity as conventional war.
India is the world’s oldest, largest federal democracy, and the most populous, diverse and youth-rich society in the world. It shares land and sea borders with nine states. It is, therefore, of utmost importance to master this newly emerging domain and frontier of internal and external security. It is also of vital and enduring importance for its trajectory towards a Viksit Bharat, or developed country by 2047, its democratic endurance, a sustainable and peaceful present and future, and its great power aspirations.
India sits at the centre of this shift because it is uniquely exposed. Our openness is an asset, but it is also a vast and vulnerable attack surface. Cognitive warfare is being waged against democratically elected governments from within, with or without external help and volition, often through local grievances that can be turned into national rupture.
The objective is not to sell one line, but to drive narratives and use prefabricated toolkits to make orientation unstable, trust fracture and public decision making erratic, as was seen during the farmers’ agitation in India, where genuine reform and progress, previously agreed upon, was blocked. There is also the government change agenda, effectively carried out in Bangladesh and Nepal, for example, and said to be pursued in other countries as well.
Kautilya well understood the chemistry behind legitimacy. “प्रजालुखे सुखं राज्ञ: प्रजानां तु हिते हितम्। नात्मप्रियं हितं राज्ञ: प्रजानां तु हितं प्रियम्” In translation, the ruler’s happiness lies in the people’s happiness, his welfare lies in their welfare. His good is not what pleases him, but what pleases them. Cognitive warfare targets that bond. It seeks to separate citizens from institutions, and citizens from one another, until the state loses freedom of action, existing fissures are exacerbated and new fault lines created, assailing the very sense of one nation and one people. These dynamics existed earlier as well, but the difference now, with the digital and AI revolution, is that the velocity and scope of action and impact are unprecedented.
The same Kautilyan tradition names its instruments without apology: “साम दान दण्ड भेद”, conciliation, inducement, division and punishment. Influence comes first, coercion comes last, and the cheapest victories are those where judgement is bent before force is metal.
The Modi government at the Centre and in most states, and the BJP as a political party, has in the last 11 years been an exemplar of visionary, stable, unifying, infrastructure building, public goods providing, prosperity and welfare enhancing governance as never before. This is a crucial bulwark against cognitive warfare from within but also makes the opposition impatient.
It is the external threats, however, that compound and make more dangerous the surge of cognitive warfare within. Such external wars can be state directed, intelligence enabled, state linked, or driven by private entities, including finance and influence firms and criminal ecosystems. Their collaborators within large countries like India are challenging enough to monitor and neutralise, but even more intractable are those controlled, financed and technologically animated from abroad.
This is why the European Union’s term FIMI, foreign information manipulation and interference, matters. The G7, a grouping of developed Western countries, in its 2024 Summit Declaration, which India attended as an invitee, expressed concerns about FIMI, “attempted interference campaigns, malicious cyber activities, and transnational repression that collectively undermine sovereignty and democratic values”. The G7’s Rapid Response Mechanism reflects a parallel recognition that foreign interference is now a standing pressure on G7 democracies, not an occasional scandal.
These concerns resonate deeply with India, which is targeted from multiple foreign sources, East and West, in the cognitive domain as well. Generative AI makes this cheaper and faster. It enables believable fabrication in local dialects, at scale, with tailored emotional triggers. Deepfake political clips have circulated in India and caused damage, including character assassination and the defamation of institutions such as the judiciary and electoral processes by opposition forces every time they lose.
To deal with cognitive warfare Western military platforms like NATO have developed templates that are useful as signals of seriousness. The Indian military establishment, learning more recently from Operation Sindoor, has incorporated cognitive warfare, or non-contact warfare, into its doctrine and strategy through institutional shifts, rapid response mechanisms, training and simulation, and the building of a technological backbone for countering such warfare and its adjunct terrorism in peace and war.
There is an urgent need for a credible global regime for synthetic political content, cross-border influence operations, and behavioural profiling of populations for political ends. The problem is that no country wants to disarm or give up its own cognitive warfare options while complaining about attacks on itself. Moreover, the capabilities are cheap, dual-use and widely distributed. India could take the lead in proving that governance is possible, such that governments accept disciplines without selectively weaponising rules.
What is practical is targeted restraint in verifiable areas, including provenance standards, disclosure rules for synthetic political content, and cooperative incident response for major elections and other sensitive periods. On provenance, Digital and AI platforms can be required to label synthetic political media, preserve chain of custody metadata, and share rapid takedown and archive data with authorised researchers. Governments, including India, should push common standards so that today’s deepfakes become tomorrow’s traceable artefacts by design.
India has a stronger basis than sceptics concede, and this should be acknowledged. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India’s digital public infrastructure has shown that scale, inclusion and sovereignty can coexist, improving delivery and participation. The IndiaAI Mission, approved with an outlay of Rs 10,371.92 crore over 5 years, signals intent to expand compute access, datasets, skills and innovation. India’s satellite programmes are competitive. The National Critical Mineral Mission, approved with an outlay of Rs 34,300 crore over 7 years, recognises that secure supply chains are now national security.
Yet much of the attention economy shaping Indian youth, from social media to gaming and streaming, is foreign owned, and cultural inputs are global, from Korean entertainment to Chinese and American games. Culture is not the enemy. Dependence, and the new “virtual imperialism”, is the risk and increases India’s susceptibility to cognitive warfare. India’s response must be firm and democratic, prescriptive without panic. It must build multilingual detection and attribution capacity to track coordinated manipulation across platforms and regions, and connect this to election management, cyber response and law enforcement.
Deterrence against impersonation, coordinated inauthentic behaviour and coercive synthetic content should be tightened, with judicially reviewable thresholds so security tools cannot be repurposed for political convenience. Foreign platforms should be pushed, and Indian platforms developed, towards enforceable transparency on paid amplification, provenance signals and rapid takedown lanes for clearly harmful synthetic impersonation. That is the least they can do to remain and operate in India. Investment is also needed in civic resilience, media and public literacy, and verification habits, because cognitive security is also human capital.
Finally, the macro dots must be joined. AI-driven influence runs on processing power and data. Processing power runs on satellites, the nervous system of information dominance, data centres, grids, chips and supply chains. Chips and hardware run on critical minerals and processing capacity. Cognitive sovereignty, therefore, sits alongside strategic autonomy, and the same contest runs through both. Who owns the infrastructure of persuasion, and who can keep societies thinking clearly under pressure.
Kautilya would have recognised the logic and today’s India does too. The task for a modern democracy like India is to defend the mind without abandoning liberty, and to do so faster than adversaries can industrialise manipulation.
*Lakshmi Puri is a former Assistant Secretary-General at the United Nations.
