Something that was not glaringly evident to the discerning eye until a couple of decades ago, but has become increasingly so now is the unhealthy interest that certain powerful circles of the international community have in the internal affairs of India.
One of the gravest instances of this in the relatively recent past was the condemnation that India faced in May 1998, during the era of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, for successfully conducting the Pokharan-II tests and declaring itself a full-fledged nuclear state. The hypocrisy was unmistakable when the United States – a country with arguably the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons – imposed economic sanctions on India for that reason. Washington repeatedly urged the Vajpayee government to roll back the nuclear program and sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
With Prime Minister Vajpayee well aware of the firm support of his nation on this front, New Delhi did not relent. Yet the legendary BJP leader successfully restored and improved India’s diplomatic ties with the US and other countries within two years.
When the prospect of a certain Narendra Damodardas Modi becoming the Prime Minister of India arose ahead of the 2014 general elections, the Western and liberal media churned out reams of stories about his supposed involvement in the Gujarat riots as the chief minister of the state. The outcome of the Lok Sabha polls that year, long before the Supreme Court of India upheld the clean chit Modi had got from the Special Investigating Team (SIT) that had probed the matter, showed just how much – rather, how little – the people of India bought those stories.
Yet the constant reference to Prime Minister Modi’s administration as a Hindu nationalist government over the past 8-9 years betrays the Western media’s inherent bias against him, its extreme wariness of what he stands for in his home country, and also his fast-rising stature as an influential global leader.
Now, with a year to the 2024 general elections, a good few interesting developments have transpired in fairly quick succession.
First, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) released on January 17 a two-part documentary series – titled ‘The Modi Question’ – which once again went back to the Gujarat riots and was clearly aimed at convincing its viewer that Modi was “directly responsible” for creating an environment conducive to the unleashing of violence in the state. The documentary focused on a previously unpublished British Foreign Office report, among other accounts by British and Western diplomats, that barely fell shy of accusing Prime Minister Modi of “ethnic cleansing”.
Within a few days of that came Hindenburg Research report on Adani Group, which shook up India’s stock markets, scared away the investors of one of India’s largest conglomerates but – more importantly – appeared to be a thinly veiled attempt at projecting the Modi government as a crony capitalist one.
And most recently, at the 2023 Munich Security Conference, US billionaire investor George Soros went on a rant, saying Modi was an undemocratic leader who would have to pay a price for his close ties with business tycoon Gautam Adani.
This series of developments is no coincidence; it is a concerted effort by forces whose interests are not best served by Prime Minister Modi being at the helm in India.
While it is nice to see Prime Minister Modi unbothered to respond to such unsubstantiated accusations and continuing to focus on his development agenda for the nation, it is rather satisfying to hear senior leaders of his government – such as Foreign Minister S Jaishankar and Minority Affairs Minister Smriti Irani – give befitting responses to those outlandish claims. But what is most reassuring is the feeling that the people of India are smart enough to know what is best for them.
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