 "‘Counter disinformation’ or betraying trust? US embassy’s meddling in India’s domestic politics deserves greater scrutiny")
American national security adviser Jake Sullivan was in India last month to attend the second meeting of the India-US initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET). Sullivan, who had earlier postponed two scheduled trips to New Delhi, met his counterpart Ajit Doval and foreign minister S Jaishankar. He also had a meeting with the prime minister, signifying the importance India places on the bilateral relationship.
On being asked at a recent security dialogue about the health of US-India relationship in light of Narendra Modi’s recent visit to Moscow, that has caused some heartburn in Washington, Sullivan said while “we never want to see countries that we care about, who are partners and friends of ours, show up in Moscow and hug Putin… in terms of our relationship with India, we see enormous opportunity on technology, on economics, and in the statecraft and geopolitics of the wider Indo-Pacific region".
“And we want to deepen that relationship as equals, as two sovereign countries who also have relationships with other countries.”
Sullivan’s stress on the nature of the partnership as one between two “equal” sovereigns, is significant.
Because for the world’s sole superpower, whose grand strategy at its core is an assertive liberal hegemony that brooks no structural restraints while pursuing foreign policy objectives, it is difficult to withhold interventionist impulses even while dealing with “friends”, “partners” and “allies”. Here ‘equality’ or respect for ‘sovereignty’ does not count.
The motivation for “ progressive liberalism” is ingrained so deep in American foreign policy establishment, and the exceptionalism so structural, that the United States hasn’t yet been able to come to terms with, and modify its behaviour in accord with the perceptible shift in international system towards multipolarism. It has created a situation where rising powers, even if they are partners and fellow democracies, are finding themselves at odds with America’s predilection for exporting “values” and plotting social engineering.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsWhat do I mean by that?
Eyebrows were raised recently when the US embassy in India posted on X a call for social media influencers and content creators to attend a workshop at the American Center, New Delhi, on “impactful content that drives real change” and how to become an “active citizen” by learning “from the best”, which in this case meant YouTuber Akash Banerjee ( TheDeshBhakt). The ‘Influence to Impact’ event was scheduled for July 25 and a link was provided for registration.
That a foreign embassy would arrogate to itself the heavy burden of enlightening the populace of the host nation on “disinformation” and ‘correct’ political discourse is peculiar. Prima facie, the US embassy in India holding an event to “drive real change” through social media content and “boosting digital engagement on social issues” is not a problem.
What makes one sceptical is the man at the helm, Eric Garcetti, who has earned notoriety for exceeding his brief as the US ambassador and for generally being a showboat, meddlesome and preachy.
No one minds Garcetti, who has a controversial past as the mayor of Los Angeles and was largely considered unfit for the current job, roaming around reviewing eateries, exaggerating glee and sharing pictures on Instagram.
This is a man, however, who had vowed to engage with “groups fighting for human rights” and raise his voice against “discrimination against Muslims in India” during his long nomination process.
He was sent to New Delhi to do a certain job. Given the excellent relationship he shares with Biden, it is hard to believe Garcetti acting on his own in, for example, warning Indian companies of “consequences” if they don’t sever ties with Russia or lecturing India on the futility of ‘strategic autonomy’ during a conflict. Messages are being sent from Washington.
It is also curious that a partisan propagandist who is not known for factual accuracy was chosen to conduct the so-called workshop on ‘driving real change’. The registration link led to a Google form that had further details about the event. In its website, OpIndia posted the content of the (now unavailable) form that read: “Don’t miss this unique opportunity to connect, learn, and collaborate with like-minded youth, influencers, and experts in the field. Let’s harness the power of social media for a meaningful change together!”
It is interesting that the US embassy is providing a platform for youths of certain political and ideological persuasion (like-minded) to “connect, learn and collaborate” and “drive real change”. This may be interpreted as an operation to shape public opinion and encourage a civil society discourse that has a bearing on India’s internal affairs. In other words, the American embassy is seeking to interfere in India’s domestic politics through proxies.
The embassy’s efforts seem to be geared towards creating political pressure groups inside India that may act as force-multiplier for American criticism in the arenas of “democracy, human rights and religious freedom” – concepts that have been weaponized by the US to subvert sovereignty of target states and justify interventionism – and may even amplify the voices of the political Opposition. Washington’s attitude towards India’s democratically elected NDA government, led by the BJP that is identified as a ‘Hindu nationalist’ force, is well known.
DisinfoLab (@DisinfoLab), that calls itself an open-source intelligence (OSINT) organisation has in a series of posts revealed an intriguing pattern. It turns out that this ‘workshop’ mentioned above is part of a string of similar efforts sponsored, organised and hosted by US embassies and consulates across the length and breadth of India.
Claiming to battle ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’, subjective concepts that are open to interpretation and weaponisation, the embassies are pressing into service to conduct these events political partisans and “far-Left” ideologues who have a track record of disseminating disinformation, half-truths and fake news.
And that’s not all.
DisinfoLab digs further into the massive ‘counter disinformation’ exercise launched around 2019 – the year the BJP government led by Modi retained power with a thumping majority – and finds that through meandering tentacles and circuitous routes, these events are linked to foundations such as Omidyar Network, Ford Foundation or Goerge Soros’s ‘Open Society’ – entities that have inextricable ties with the US deep state and often function as lubricants or the cat’s paw for triggering ‘colour revolutions’, covert operations or behind-the-scenes manipulations for regime degradation to facilitate American objectives, but with a degree of separation and moral justification thrown in.
It is not hard to imagine that BJP’s near total domination of the political space may have acted as a strong stimulant, and accordingly an urgent programme to expand and strengthen anti-government and pro-Opposition civil groups and voices was launched to take on and dilute the BJP’s political dominance. This may sound implausible, but it is moored in strong liberal logic that seeks to eliminate ideological competition everywhere.
For the US that practices liberal hegemony, the squeezing of the Opposition’s political space – even though it is a fellow democracy (the world’s largest that just held a flawless, humongous electoral exercise) and a strategic partner to boot – is cause enough to intensify interventionism. This is because principles of liberal hegemony impose a premium on ‘human rights’ everywhere that, the hegemonic state believes, transcends state borders or sovereign rights.
And even in a democracy, from the American point of view, a state of internal tension and structural weakness is preferable over politico-ideological domination by a single force. For instance, Keir Starmer, the Labour leader in UK who has shepherded his party to power with a massive majority, has already been accused of authoritarianism by American newspapers.
The BJP might be the choice of Indian people who have elected the party to power, but for liberalism that sees ‘nationalism’ as a rival ideology, political freedom is perceived to have eroded under the ‘Hindu Nationalist’ outfit. This is motivation enough.
In his book ‘Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities’, professor John J Mearsheimer writes, “The prominence that liberalism accords to the notion of inalienable or universal rights means that a foreign policy based on liberal principles requires careful monitoring of other countries’ human rights performance. When the rights of foreigners are threatened, a powerful state pursuing liberal hegemony will likely feel compelled to intervene to protect the rights of those individuals… This logic leads straight to an active policy of regime change aimed at toppling autocracies and replacing them with liberal democracies.”
Mearsheimer, of course, refers to American regime change operations against autocracies, but it is just as applicable to a fellow democracy ruled by an outfit that is detested by the American perma-bureaucracy, Christian evangelists and progressive liberals alike. American academics nonchalantly compare India under Modi with the policies of racial segregation of the Jim Crow era in the US, however unmoored from reality it is.
But the bigger sleight of hand lies elsewhere. As the DisinfoLab investigation into the labyrinths of the ‘counter disinformation’ exercise sponsored by the US embassies and consulates reveals, the non-government organization engaged by US Embassy for conducting the ‘ counter-disinformation’ job – the International Research and Exchange Board (IREX) – is founded by the Ford Foundation”, funded by Soros (among others) and has as its office bearers many ex-US government officials. By dint of also being funded by US embassies around the world, the IREX is also spending American taxpayers’ money on India.
The incestuous, labyrinthine network of US government bodies, non-government entities, the deep state, regime change operators and shadowy figures working in conjunction with civil society activists and partisan social media influencers to “counter disinformation” in India sounds bit of a stretch.
It raises a fundamental question on the nature of the exercise. How can we be sure that under the garb of countering disinformation, the aim is not to choke the open flow of information in a democracy and spread only a certain kind of narrative? In other words, is the counter-disinformation project launched by the US government in India an effort to spread disinformation and manipulate the political discourse?
Jacob Siegel, in his noted work on state-sponsored disinformation, A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century, writes in Tablet magazine: “Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise… The crime is the information war itself, which was launched under false pretenses and by its nature destroys the essential boundaries between the public and private and between the foreign and domestic, on which peace and democracy depend.”
On May 1, 2024, the US House Judiciary Committee (headed by a Jim Jordan, a Republican lawmaker from Ohio) on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released an interim report titled ‘The Censorship-Industrial Complex: How Top Biden White House Officials Coerced Big Tech to Censor Americans, True Information, and Critics of the Biden Administration.’
The findings are startling information on how the Biden administration brought to bear its entire might on Big Tech platforms such as Meta (Facebook), Google (YouTube) and Amazon to censor or demote questions that raised doubts against or criticized the functioning of the Democratic government on key issues such as Covid-19 or the Russian influence hoax in 2016 US presidential elections.
The revelations are eye-watering accounts of how far the US government went in manipulating information and changing the course of public discourse through what Siegel calls a “digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms.”
In what way did the Biden administration carry out industrial-scale censorship in legacy and social media? The Weaponization Committee report reveals that Biden White House forced Big Tech to change their content moderation policies, censored true information, satire, and other content that did not violate the platforms’ policies, also clamped down on books and other literature and the entire campaign had a “chilling effect on other speech”.
The final report further states that all three companies – Facebook, YouTube and Amazon – “identified the Biden White House’s censorship requests as ‘pressure’ or noted a fear that things could ‘spiral out of control.’ And while there is a difference in how long and in what ways each company succumbed to the White House’s pressure, by September 2021, Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon had each adopted new content moderation policies that removed or reduced viewpoints and content disfavored by the Biden White House.”
The pulling of invisible strings meant that only a certain kind of information was being mainstreamed through multiplier effect while dissident views were silently downgraded.
Katrina Trinko, editor-in-chief of The Daily Signal, a conservative American newspaper, writes, “What’s telling is neither the White House nor Facebook appears to be calling here for outright banning and blocking… If The Daily Wire or Tomi Lahren or Tucker Carlson had content fully blocked on Facebook, they could publicly share that content elsewhere with their large audiences and draw attention to Facebook’s censorship. Instead, Facebook, pressured by the White House, manipulated the algorithm. For anyone without access to the Facebook algorithm, it would be impossible to prove that any particular piece of content’s reach was artificially suppressed.”
The insidiousness went deeper and further still, and tools of “countering disinformation” were subverted in the name of defending democracy and truth.
Michael Shellenberger, one of the three journalists who delved into the internal documents of pre-Elon Musk Twitter (#TwitterFiles) to shed light on the company’s decision-making process that led to downgrading and banning articles on Hunter Biden laptop or banning then US president Trump from the platform, gave a testimony to The US House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
In his testimony, Shellenberger alleged that the US government “funds groups seeking to divert advertising dollars from disfavoured to favoured news organizations.”
One of the examples of this is Newsguard, that calls itself as an organisation powered by AI that provides “tools to counter misinformation for readers, brands, and democracies” and has as its client legacy brands such as Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Bloomberg, among many more.
According to Shellenberger’s testimony, “NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, both US taxpayer-funded, are urging advertisers to boycott disfavored (sic) publications, and direct their funding to favored ones The organizations have been caught spreading disinformation, including that the COVID lab leak theory is a debunked conspiracy theory, and seeking to discredit publications which accurately reported on Hunter Biden’s laptop, such as the New York Post.” The journalist also alleged that in September 2021, “the US Defense Department gave a government contract worth $750,000 to Newsguard.”
We should now circle back to the original question on the reliability of the ‘counter disinformation’ project that has been launched with such gusto by the US embassies and consulates in India. The revelations indicate that not only are discredited and dubious organizations involved in the exercise, but the motivation of the Biden administration in carrying out such an operation is suspect. It sounds more like a sophisticated influence operation designed to trigger institutional and political transformation in blatant violation of India’s sovereignty and betrayal of New Delhi’s trust in the strategic partnership.
There are many ways for the US to needle a ‘friendly’ country while maintaining plausible deniability. As is evident, toolkits abound. When it takes place at the embassy level, it becomes difficult to counter without inviting charges of ‘conspiracy theory’. Such acts of subversion, however, erode mutual trust and heighten reflexive scepticism. The ‘most important bilateral partnership in the 21st century’ deserves better.
The author is Deputy Executive Editor, Firstpost. He tweets @sreemoytalukdar. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
 "Russian drones over Poland: Trump’s tepid reaction a wake-up call for Nato?")
 "As Russia pushes east, Ukraine faces mounting pressure to defend its heartland")
 "Why Mossad was not on board with Israel’s strike on Hamas in Qatar")
 "Turkey: Erdogan's police arrest opposition mayor Hasan Mutlu, dozens officials in corruption probe")
 "Russian drones over Poland: Trump’s tepid reaction a wake-up call for Nato?")
 "As Russia pushes east, Ukraine faces mounting pressure to defend its heartland")
 "Why Mossad was not on board with Israel’s strike on Hamas in Qatar")
 "Turkey: Erdogan's police arrest opposition mayor Hasan Mutlu, dozens officials in corruption probe")
