India becoming the propaganda battleground between Americans and Russians

A propaganda war isn’t a new phenomenon. Adolf Hitler, way back in 1933, hired a New York-based PR firm, Carl Byoir & Associates, for monthly payment of $6,000 per month, to give Nazi Germany’s global image a positive spin. Before him, Napoleon Bonaparte used to employ spin doctors to magnify his military exploits, often turning his mediocre wins into momentous victories. However, it was in the early 1990s, during Gulf War I, that one had a glimpse of the latter-day, near-pervasive malaise of ‘manufactured, manipulative truth’ when a PR firm, Hill & Knowlton, came up with a story about Iraqi soldiers throwing Kuwaiti kids out of hospital incubators. Later, it was found out that the firm was paid $11 million to carry out the hitjob against Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Over the years, especially after the advent of social media, the scope and the intensity of the information warfare have increased to the extent that it’s now difficult to distinguish between fact and faction. The ongoing Ukraine war is a case in study where a one-sided narrative seems to be the order of the day, with the alternative viewpoint completely barred, if not erased, from the mindspace.

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Amid this grim backdrop, it comes as no surprise to see the Mark Zuckerberg-owned Meta announcing its ban on Russian state-run media outlets citing “foreign interference activity”. Meta, which controls Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced on Monday that it’s banning RT and other Russian state-run media organisations, including Sputnik’s parent organisation Rossiya Segodnya, from its platforms for allegedly running the Russian government’s influence operations.

This was not the first time Zuckerberg had bowed to the diktat of the American government. As recently as last month, in a letter dated August 26, 2024, Zuckerberg had conceded that under the Biden administration’s pressure the Meta platforms “censored” the Covid-19 content during the pandemic.

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Interestingly, another media story reported last week said that the US had also approached India to ban Russian state-run media organisations. The Modi government politely refused, saying the debate on sanctions was not relevant to India.

The Meta ban episode brings to the fore two alarming aspects, especially for a country like India that is often the dumping ground for such “manufactured truths”: One, in this era of mass information, it’s a major handicap not to have any control over the social media content being catered to its citizens. Most social media companies are based in the United States, thus giving an undue American slant to the narrative.

The American control over news and narrative is absolute. Given the fact that 15 billionaires, in total, currently own the whole of America’s mainstream media, as former ambassador Rajiv Dogra writes in Autocrats: Charisma, Power, and Their Lives, it’s easy for the government to control them. Similarly, he adds, “71 per cent of the UK national newspaper market in 2015 was dominated by three companies: News UK, Daily Mail Group and Reach. By 2019, their market share had grown to 83 per cent, and by 2022, to 90 per cent.”

Given this skewed nature of the American/British media, it’s easier for their respective governments to control them — and this has been evident from their Ukraine war coverage. Add to this the social media arsenal at the US’ disposal, and the country becomes the undisputed information warfare superpower. The Russians too have upped their information warfare game, and the recent Meta ban is aimed to curtailing their rise; they are, however, no match to the great American propaganda war machinery!

This brings us to the second alarming aspect: Of India becoming a fertile propaganda battleground between the Americans and the Russians. India is not new to their propaganda warfare. It, in fact, had seen the worst in the 1960s and the ’70s when the CIA and the KGB, the intelligence agencies of the US and the erstwhile USSR respectively, vied with each other to control the narrative in India. The Mitrokhin Archive II, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitropkhin, talks in detail about the entrenched KGB presence in India’s corridors of power. Such was the level of influence that cash donations to political representatives and parties, honey-trapping of bureaucrats and defence personnel, and planting of stories in newspapers seemed normal. The KGB, for instance, could go to the extent of falsely implicating SK Patil, a senior Congress leader from Maharashtra, of Pakistani connections, besides being a recipient of CIA funds, through a forged letter allegedly from the US consul general to the US ambassador in New Delhi. Incidentally, Patil lost the 1967 elections soon after. Also, such was the KGB hold over the media that in the four years between 1972 and 1975, it planted as many as 17,000 stories in Indian newspapers.

The CIA wasn’t far behind. American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, makes a startling revelation about Morarji Desai being a CIA informer during the 1971 India-Pakistan war, for which he was annually paid $20,000. Similarly, American author Thomas Powers, in his book The Man Who Kept the Secrets, based on his conversation with CIA Director Richard Helms, writes about the presence of more than one “high-level source” in India who kept the Americans informed before and during the 1971 war.

While the CIA and the KGB may not expect the same kind of influence and leverage that they exerted way back in the 1960s and ’70s, they now have one additional advantage: They are armed with social media. The Americans, in this case, are doubly advantaged as most social media behemoths are headquartered in the US; they can, thus, not only control the social media handles but also weaponise them as and when they require. Worse, the countries that are often at the receiving end of such information warfares have little or no leeway in containing, if not controlling, them; they are forced to be a party to the “manufactured consent” which the deep state in the West comes up with in connivance with social media giants.

Thus, what has changed since the 1970s is not the motive but the means. With Big Tech, a foreign country can come up with an inimical narrative without having any physical presence in that country and weaponise it to the extent that those who disagree or dissent are summarily executed and erased from the social media world. And those who have to be propped up can rise Phoenix-like — just like Kamala Harris, who till the other day was an embarrassment for the Democrats to now revamped overnight as the saviour of democracy in America! Similarly, one needs to look at how a political clown with an authoritarian streak like Volodymyr Zelenskyy is projected as a saviour of democracy, while Sheikh Hasina, whose democratic credentials would shame the powerful Sheikhs of West Asia with whom the Americans take pride in associating themselves, is turned into a dictator who should be refused any asylum in the democratic West.

The bottom line is that foreign-operated social media is too powerful a tool to be left uncontrolled and unregulated, especially with the Americans and the Russians getting obsessed about hijacking the Indian narrative to their advantage. There are enough players in the West who are uneasy with democratic India’s rise as a geostrategic, economic as well as cultural powerhouse. With India gearing up to play at the big diplomatic table, and also moving towards becoming the third largest economy by the end of the decade, after the United States and China, and with Delhi refusing to shed the independent, autonomous mind of its own, its rise threatens not just its autocratic rivals like China but also unnerves democratic partners such as the United States.

It is this unique characteristic of India that makes it a foremost propaganda battleground. The country needs to realise that it can no longer rely on Western Big Tech companies that are often hand in glove with the deep state there. Time is, thus, ripe for India to take a cue from China and create the Great Indian Firewall to stop turning the country into a propaganda battleground. If not done now, the dangerously weaponised and utterly divisive Western narrative setting will consume India. It will be a battle which Indians will then be doomed to fight with one hand tied to the back and the mind numbed with a wokeist virus that distorts the reality — of oneself and the world.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.