Our politicians must stop seeing a foreign hand in everything

There are enough real issues for the government and the Opposition to be at loggerheads — without invoking the mysterious, unexplained, & unproven foreign hand

There’s something incongruous about this moment. We are taking vicarious pleasure in the rise of Indians in America, but our politicians are quarrelling over the so-called foreign hand at home.

There is a deep mismatch between celebrating the wins of Indian-Americans in the US midterms and also taking the foreign-hand debate seriously at home. (AP)

This week, we claimed prideful ownership in the win in Los Angeles of Nithya Raman, a Kerala-born American who just became the city’s mayor. We have leapt with delight that the politicians at the helm of the US’s most significant cities — New York and LA — have Indian roots. And we are quite charmed when America’s first Muslim Senator, Abdul El-Sayed, invokes his wife Dr Sarah Jukaku’s desi links to Karnataka.

Now contrast this with the fact that the biggest headlines from domestic politics this week have been a heated confrontation between the BJP and the Congress over the so-called foreign hand. The BJP has alluded to secret meetings abroad, while accusing the Opposition of being supported by anti-India forces. Rahul Gandhi, in turn, has accused Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi of becoming and remaining PM because of foreign help.

As political bitterness deepens and Gandhi challenges Modi to a public debate, neither party has listed any empirical evidence to make their case.

There is a deep mismatch between celebrating the wins of Pia Dandiya in Florida or Suhas Subramanyam in Virginia — and delightfully sharing videos of his prayers at a temple the morning after — and also taking the foreign-hand debate seriously at home.

Of course, the original architect of the foreign-hand theory was Indira Gandhi. After being routed in the 1977 elections that followed the Emergency, she told an interviewer (as documented by historian Ramchandra Guha), “...They had a lot of money to spend….... Some sections in the Janata Party had the support of the Western press, Amnesty International, and other Western organizations. Another section was supported by the Soviets.”

In 2026, the BJP is obsessed — at least statedly — with how many times Rahul Gandhi has met US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who just got re-elected. The establishment has also accused the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) of being propped up by foreign funds. Ironically, the accusation has come from, among others, Union minister Jitendra Singh, who held talks with the CJP during the Jantar Mantar protests and even addressed a joint press conference with them.

Rahul Gandhi, for his part, has also made a sweeping set of allegations using the shadow of the foreign hand. He has accused the BJP’s financial systems of being fully controlled and supported by foreigners and foreign social media of fully backing the Modi government.

We could dismiss all of this as rhetorical noise in election season as the polls in Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand draw near. But, quite frankly, it does not behove a self- confident democracy to tilt quixotically at windmills. For those are not familiar with the eccentric hero of Miguel De Cervantes’s 1615 novel Don Quixote, the delusional knight Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza are travelling through Spain when they encounter a cluster of windmills. Despite Panza repeatedly telling Quixote that what he’s looking at are windmills, Quixote is convinced that they are monstrous giants and attempts to slay them. The arm of one of the windmills knocks Quixote off his horse, onto the ground.

The point is this. There are enough real issues for the government and the Opposition to be at loggerheads — without invoking the mysterious, unexplained, and unproven foreign hand.

None of this means you can’t demand transparency on sources of funding from political parties and public campaigns, young and old. It’s totally legitimate to find Ilhan Omar’s politics grating or her views on issues dear to Indians — such as national security or Jammu & Kashmir — offensive or disagreeable. It’s also completely relatable to find much of foreign commentary on India and our issues one-sided, cliched, and, for the most part, rather ignorant. And yes, we have all watched too many espionage series to be unaware that, on the odd occasions, intelligence agencies have had vested interests in the internal affairs of other nations.

But unless you can prove or substantiate this charge of a lurking foreign hand as puppeteer, a really serious issue descends into a joke. In the 1970s, parliamentarian Piloo Mody, one of the founders of the Swatantra Party (the pro-market-economy party of classical liberalism), walked into the house wearing a placard that read: “I am a CIA Agent.” This was in response to Congress Party members who would call him a Washington Parrot because of his pro-US views. When the chairman of the House ordered Mody to remove his placard, he quipped, “I am no longer a CIA agent.”

Unfortunately, in today’s age of organised troll armies on both sides, such wit and self-referential jokes are entirely absent.

As far as I am concerned, the only identifiable foreign hand I see these days is a man called Mathew Vandyke, an American national, accused by the NIA of imparting training to Myanmar-based armed groups in drone warfare and jamming technology, after illegally entering Myanmar through Mizoram. He, along with six Ukrainians, has been charged with conspiring to carry out terrorist activities against India. Despite being charged under the UAPA, a court allowed Dyke and his co-conspirators to return to their respective countries provided they would rejoin the investigation in India. In late October, Vandyke appeared before a Delhi court as stipulated. Is Vandyke a CIA agent, an intelligence asset, a double agent or simply a mercenary useful in undercover ops? Let’s be adult enough to admit we may never know.

Because, in the shadowlands where the foreign hand is real, the games run too deep to get a simple hold over them. In the meantime, please, can our politicians quarrel on issues of substance and treat each other — unless there’s hard public evidence to the contrary — as fellow patriots?

Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author. The views expressed are personal