How to tackle Anti-India Articles
I hope this is an appropriate thread.
I wanted to point out to the following article, which is intended to damage Indo-US Relations, especially in relation to India's standing in Quad.
How Long Will Joe Biden Pretend Narendra Modi's India Is a Democratic Ally?: Time Magazine
The article is by some Debasish Roy Chowdhury, who is co-author of the forthcoming "To Kill A Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism."
Such an article is being published by TIME Magazine. Then there are other articles coming up all the time intended to portray Modi as some dictator and India as some fascist country. In the years to come, there will be no paucity of similar hit pieces on India.
Question is how to counter them.
From my time on Twitter, there are some lessons that I have learned. There are two ways mostly Indians react to such articles in the Western press. By Indians, I mean, those who feel Indian.
1) Indians would explain the Truth, often with many details about the case.
2) Indians would cast aspersions on the author and charge the publication with anti-India bias.
3) Indians may use whataboutery and point out the flaws in the political systems of the West itself.
I don't find anything wrong with any of the above mentioned response types. However we need to keep in mind that media attacks in the future will only increase.
For the western public, it is not that much important to know, what are the details of the Farmers' Protests, what is the Truth. They are only interested in knowing whether their elite are in favor of India or whether they are against India. They want to know whether some leader is a good guy or a bad guy. That's all.
So when Indians protest at some article or to some tweet and try to explain the circumstances better, to the majority of the Western public, all that they perceive is that there are two opinions, and that of course Indians or Hindu nationalist trolls would try to paint the situation differently, but they as Westerners would rather believe the article published in the Western press, a magazine such as the Time. When Indians try to explain the reality in India to Western audience, the Westerners feel empowered. They feel like judges presiding over a court case against Indians, and their innate racism itself as well as their inability to process all the information offered by Indians, makes them sway towards the authority and opinion written in Western press. The whole experience of sitting as judges over Indians is probably so exhilarating that a Western audience would like more such charges to be "filed" against Indians, see more anti-Indian articles in Western Press. So all the Truth-telling by Indians does not really bear any fruit.
The second option of accusing the publication with anti-Indian prejudice also has mixed results. Even though from the tone of the article, it is clear that the article is a hit-piece, a protest actually provokes a feeling of chutzpah by the Western public, which identifies itself with the Western publication. So, even though the Westerner may secretly agree to the accusation of prejudice and bias, the biased article gives the Westerner an easy opportunity to claim that that is not the case, but is simply a higher Western moral standard with which Western people view themselves, and with which they view the world, and since Indians do not measure up to it, naturally Indians would make such accusations due to hurt feelings. The "hurt feelings" of Indians are especially satisfying for the Westerners.
The third option, one may hope, would better hit home, but it mostly triggers the Westerner to double down on the anti-Indian content of the article, because now the Westerner feels, he is being attacked. The Westerner would simply ignore all references to their own pathetic political system.
In all three cases, the Western public embraces the opinion of the article in the Western press and the response by Indians fails to be effective. What do I mean by effective?
The whole purpose of the article was to build anti-Indian opinion within the Western public. Considering the geostrategic situation between India, US and PRC, a negative Western opinion about India is useful for PRC, as an Indo-US defacto alliance does not take shape and thus does not challenge Chinese hegemony.
So what should Indians do?
We need to look at psy-ops in USA. Trump Presidency was destroyed by the Democrats simply by incessantly repeating that Trump was a puppet of Putin. Similarly Tulsi's Presidential campaign was also undermined by Hillary through her Russian asset smear against Tulsi. All such smears were without any real basis, but they were very effective nevertheless. Basically Dems took away the ability of these two leaders to claim any of their positions as a result of their own convictions, and instead showed both of them as externally controlled. The impeachment and media campaign against Trump, and the social media campaign against Tulsi eroded much of their credibility and standing among the Americans. Often a meme of Putin clapping was tweeted in response to Tulsi tweeting anything at all.
Similarly Trump also counter-attacked American media as Fake Media.
Similarly Indians too should counter-attack Western Globalist Neoliberal media which is critical of India. We need to force Westerners to strongly doubt that Western press is a representative of the Western people and thought.
All these hit pieces being printed in Western media may have been sponsored by George Soros or Hillary faction or even the CCP itself. Who knows?!
That is also what we need to claim. We should claim, that all anti-Indian articles written in Western press are not the opinion either of Westerners or of their Desi supporters, but rather of CCP. We should deny the Western publications their claim of having any opinion at all much less they being strongly opinionated. For all purposes, Western press should be considered as a pawn of CCP and be rejected as even having a Globalist Neoliberal ideology.
As such, we should go ahead and smear anti-Indian articles in Western press as a
#CCPsponsoredHitPiece and the Western press as a
#CCPMouthpiece. Xi Jinping clapping at the anti-India hit piece could be a powerful meme.
This strategy prevents Indians from being pitted against Westerners, at some level or another. It also erodes the respect Westerners may be having for the Western press.
With so many Indians active in social media, it should not be a problem for Indians to saturate Twitter and FB with Xi Jinping clapping.