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Modi govt to counter biased media narratives

Both the government and the party believe that western Left-Liberal media with support of the deep state will act as a force multiplier to a perceived weak opposition in a bid to oust PM Narendra Modi in 2024 general elections.

Published on: Jan 21, 2023, 12:17:48 IST
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The Narendra Modi government is undeterred by regurgitation of 2002 Gujarat riots by UK state broadcaster BBC and believes that more such political hit jobs are in the pipeline to target India and PM personally as New Delhi gets ready to host the G-20 and SCO summits this year and QUAD summit in January 2024.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

As external affairs minister S Jaishankar made it very clear in US last September that India’s reputation will not be decided by a newspaper in New York or even in Washington, the Modi government is expected to meet the challenge of what they call “white left liberal” force multipliers in the run-up to the 2024 general elections. The party and the government believe that Anglo-Saxon left-liberal media will try and create more political controversies in support of perceived weak political opposition to PM Modi and want a pliable regime in India in 2024 that does not show them the mirror.

“The old school political elite of India along with the western media thought PM Modi’s 2014 victory was a fluke and hence they pitched full support to Rafale fighter purchase and demonetization in 2019 elections but lost again. This time the Anglo-Saxons will be out in full strength to ensure that PM Modi does not come to power the third time. We believe that they along with the resident left-liberal ecosystem in India will throw all muck at the government and the party to discredit them in the run-up to the polls. The BBC documentary was the first installment in what will be a series of hit jobs to undermine India before the G-20 and the 2024 elections,” said a senior government and party functionary.

While UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak side-stepped the BBC documentary barb fired by a Pakistan origin British MP in Parliament, the Modi government knows that Britain still suffers from a delusion of a global power player and interferes in the Indian sub-continent as a legatee of the Imperial Raj. The support to Sikh separatist groups in UK by British deep state is common knowledge in the Indian national security circles. And India has not forgotten the role played by the British in the Taliban take-over of power in Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, by throwing the rights of Afghan minorities especially women under the bus.

That the BBC used former foreign secretary Jack Straw to rake up the Gujarat riots issue once again comes as no surprise as the former diplomat used to represent Blackburn, which has one of the largest Muslim population in UK, a large chunk of them being from Mirpur in Pakistan occupied Kashmir. It is the same Jack Straw who tried to impose himself as a peacemaker after India nearly went to war with Pakistan over attack by Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists on Parliament in 2001 and horrible massacre of women and children by Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorists at Kaluchak Army camp in Jammu in May 2002. Despite innocents were skinned alive by the Pakistani terrorists at Kaluchak camp, Straw, acting as a US chorus boy, preached diplomacy and dialogue to India without putting the then Pakistani military dictator Pervez Musharraf in the dock and declare the Islamic Republic a terror state.

“The western Left-Liberal angst against new India is that it does not take unsolicited advice from any third country be it on Ukraine war or dialogue with Pakistan or Covid vaccines or China. For Modi, India comes first,” said a Union Cabinet Minister.

  • Shishir Gupta
    ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Shishir Gupta

    Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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