RELENT LESS- INFORMATION WARFARE AGAINST INDIA BY SECTION OF WESTERN MEDIA

 

A full-fledged information warfare has been launched against India by elements inimical to India. Suddenly news reports are popping up internationally about how the India has been wanting “to sort out” the Gurpatwant Singh Pannun problem. The latest media report is about a “leaked” “Ministry of External Affairs memo” speaking of cracking down on “Khalistanis”, by listing the potential targets including Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was killed in Canada in June.

The MEA has rubbished the claim by calling the memo fabricated and part of a “sustained disinformation campaign against India”, by using a media outlet “known for propagating fake narratives peddled by Pakistani intelligence”. It’s becoming increasingly clear that these attempts are escalating in order to add weight to the fiction of a “rogue Indian government” plotting to kill  Mahatma Pannun on American soil.

The narrative of India carrying out “transnational repression” is gaining currency, and has the potential to have some impact on the strategic partnership between India and the United States.

The mainstream media in the US, does not make any mention of his threats to bomb Air India, the Indian Parliament or ordering hits on Indian diplomats. Surely these supposedly credible western media outlets are not so information-challenged that their research did not throw up facts about Pannun’s call to violence when writing articles on him. Surely death threats cannot be brushed under the carpet by describing these as freedom of speech. What’s going on is an attempt to influence American policy and opinion makers. In a very insidious manner western media is trying to glorify the Khalistani movement as a struggle against India for self-determination and justice.

In fact, this seems to be a case of the ISI, with backing from the Chinese are trying to derail India-US relations and this time with some western support.

There is another dimension to this information warfare, which is working at a much subtler level by instilling doubts on American minds about India as a trusted partner against China. The buzz in US think-tanks apparently is: India cannot be trusted for it will never stand with the US when it comes to any possible military confrontation with China. To think that this is being said about India, the only country in the world that has shown the appetite to fight back the Chinese  in Galwan inflicting large number of casualties and large number of soldiers in the icy heights of the Himalayas against the PLA for over three years. Interestingly, the seeds of this doubt were planted by some Indian origin people in the US, and the American ignorance about India has been doing the rest of the job.

The question on Indian minds is, whether, or not, the Biden White House has the appetite and the competence to rein in the anti-India lobbies and interest groups in Washington D.C., as well as those in Biden’s own administration running their agendas against India.