The Prime Minister did what those having confidence in his integrity had predicted that he would do, which was to do nothing to rescue the business group.
SINGAPORE: A city state that has from the start opened its door to all four corners of the world and prospered as a result has become a crossroads of 21st century information warfare. From here, alternate realities that are cooked up by much bigger powers disseminate to the far corners of the globe, initially not in the form of press reports, but as cocktail gossip that subsequently provides fodder for social media tsunamis. The Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, has the unenviable distinction of being the primary target of both camps in the ongoing skirmishes of Cold War 2.0. Both the superpowers, China and the United States, operate freely in Singapore, a metropolis that was fashioned into a global commercial power by the genius of Lee Kuan Yew. In the case of China, only a single channel, that which is sanctioned, indeed sanctified, by the support of the top leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), dares to publicly expose its infowar talons. In the case of the US, very different power centres spew their own ersatz version of the facts in multiple directions, in the process utilising various channels. While those giving priority to global security interests are appreciative of the way in which India is being transformed by Prime Minister Modi, those whose family and friends feed at the trough of the authoritarian superpower and its subsidiary satellite powers and interests seek to bring down the image and resonance of India, including by generating vicious and unrestrained personal attacks on the country’s elected Prime Minister.
Within the higher levels of the PRC, those accustomed to judging international respect solely by GDP and other material indicators of success are unhappy that in Asia, there is a strong challenger to the effort by the CCP to portray its leadership as the tribune of the Global South while at the same time passing off the PRC as the best friend of the Global North. That challenger is Narendra Modi, and unlike in the case of the CCP infowar, the contest has not been waged on the basis of a well-funded, intensively researched trajectory of influence but purely on the basis of Modi’s strongly held beliefs that are steadily being translated into policies. Across the world, whether it be in Europe, US, Russia or the GCC and the rapidly rising continents of South America and Africa, the acknowledgment of the centrality of India in the global geopolitical calculus has not been viewed with favour within the Sino-Wahhabi alliance. This is a partnership of convenience of both political as well as religious extremists in a joint effort to dampen the trajectories of the moderates. International diplomacy conducted by both sides is showing up the reality of the Sino-Wahhabi alliance as well as their fellow travellers and sleeper cells in multiple media, academic and policy outlets, whose aim is to seek to characterise a country where the population of religious minorities has grown to 230 million as being marked by pogroms against this very important component of the national life. Interestingly, such misperceptions are being megaphoned in online and offline outlets by infowarriors from countries where minorities suffer intense discrimination and population percentile fall, whether it be Tibetans, Uygur or Mongolians in the PRC or Hindus and Christians in Pakistan, the two most relentless infowarriors against India.
Mathematics is of little concern to often unwitting agents of the misinformation spread by this extremist-authoritarian alliance about India and its Prime Minister. The BBC, which was born as the Voice of Empire which after de-colonisation, morphed into a nanny serving the interests of the former imperial power by chastising newly independent countries for not doing what Nanny thought was best for the “children” (i.e. decolonised countries) to follow. Small wonder that leaders in former colonies with a mind of their own are never favourites of the BBC. Its most recent production about India features an effort at reviling the country as a cauldron of hate in which minorities are in danger of vanishing. The BBC documentary in question would have sunk without trace but for an overzealous official in the Lutyens Zone drawing global attention to the documentary in question by blocking its viewing in India. After having watched both segments, it would have been clear to any individual outside the Lutyens Zone that the BBC production on Modi was a frank effort at defaming a country and the individual its electors have chosen to lead it in two successive general elections. Not for the first time, an overreaction by officialdom played into the hands of India’s foes in the information warfare raging across the world about a country that is on course to emerge as the third superpower by 2029, thereby giving the democracies a significant advantage over the authoritarians in Cold War 2.0. However, despite that misstep, the after effects of the BBC’s attempt to damage to India’s image have dwindled into insignificance. That opposition parties in India would try to milk the contrived controversy to their advantage was to be expected. The Congress Party, in particular, is not used to being out of power nationally for too long, and hence put in the maximum effort to try and revive a fire that had long since burnt out as a consequence of ten years of Congress-led official enquiries and multiple court verdicts affirming that Prime Minister Modi as Chief Minister of Gujarat was innocent of any complicity in the tragic events that took place in that state beginning with the burning alive of nearly sixty pilgrims returning by train from Ayodhya. The Congress Party leadership will need to do better than that if it is to have any expectation of securing a 2004 style upset in 2024.
A Track & Trace of those behind the BBC documentary on India would show the Sino-Wahhabi linkages of its principal protagonists, some of which has been revealed in The Sunday Guardian, which is why the publication is being repeatedly reviled by the Alliance of Extremes through its nests of facilitators across the world. Almost immediately after the effort at bringing back to life a false narrative involving Prime Minister Modi and the 2002 Gujarat riots failed to take off came the Hindenburg report listing charges against the Adani group. How much financial profit short sellers behind the report made is unknown. What became clear at the very outset of an orchestrated global media frenzy about a report by a little known operator was that the target of the media frenzy, if not the report itself, was not Adani Enterprises but the Prime Minister of India. His reputation for cleanliness has been an important factor behind public confidence in Narendra Modi, and it was this reputation that those behind the widespread dissemination of the Hindenburg conclusions sought to besmirch. Fed by false information that Prime Minister Modi had a connection with the Adani group deeper than that between any Chief Minister or Prime Minister with a prominent Indian business group that is a global player, the conspirators waited and waited and waited for Prime Minister Modi to launch an effort to rescue the group from the turmoil into which its equity had been plunged by the media firestorm following the Hindenburg report. Instead, the Prime Minister did what those having confidence in his integrity had predicted from 24 January that he would do, which was to do nothing to rescue the business group. Had Prime Minister Modi lifted a little finger to assist the Adani group, little of the turmoil that it has gone through since 24 January would have happened. Internationally, it has become clear that the numerous stories and memes about Prime Minister Modi being partial to the Adani group are false.
No matter how rosy reports are of economic revival in China and of business opportunities in that country by sections of the international media in which PRC interests are embedded, de-coupling of enterprises from the PRC has become inevitable as a consequence of the reality of Cold War 2.0. It is the fear that India would emerge as the default option for investors fleeing the PRC that is behind efforts at painting the country as a banana republic with tainted institutions. By the Hands Off approach of Prime Minister Modi and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in the Adani stock market imbroglio, global investors are beginning to understand that the Government of India is indeed a neutral umpire and not what hostile media across the world sought to portray.
The sooner all parties combine to ensure that Parliament functions in a manner beneficial to the people of this country, the sooner political grandstanding is substituted by the pursuit of performance, and in resolving the issues troubling citizens, the faster will be India’s climb to superpower status. There will in future be more poisoned darts after the BBC documentary seeking to link Prime Minister Modi to the Gujarat riots and the global media frenzy seeking to tie an uninvolved Prime Minister’s Office to the growth of the Adani group, a business enterprise that flourished even during the UPA period. Such calumny are part of the obstacles placed in the path of a rising power by another power anxious that its primacy not be challenged.