How deep was western interference in 2024 elections? Enough smoke that warrants a thorough probe

India, the world’s largest democracy, just created a world record with 642 million voters exercising their franchise in the 2024 general elections. For perspective, that’s over 1.5 times the voters of all G7 countries and over 2.5 times the voters of 27 countries in the European Union, according to figures put forward by India’s Election Commission, a Constitutional body that conducts and oversees the humongous exercise. Let’s take a moment for the numbers to sink in.

Among those who cast their ballots to elect the next prime minister, a record 312 million were women, and the entire exercise that stretched over 44 days at the height of India’s scorching summer involved 15 million polling and law enforcement personnel. A staggering 68,763 monitoring teams, 135 special trains, more than 0.4 million vehicles and 1,692 air sorties were pressed into service to ensure that the world’s largest electoral exercise goes off without a glitch.

No other country can match India in terms of scale, complexity and intent to uphold the democratic rights of 1.44 billion people. In fact, no other country puts out a bigger advertisement for democracy by showing how it is done, by setting an example, instead of instigating colour revolutions around the world to “promote democracy.”

Strangely, the nations that are obsessed with “promoting democracy”, the US-led West, have almost nothing to say about India’s crucial role in upholding democracy at a time when the political system is in global retreat, but is instead obsessed with running down India’s achievements through clandestine funding of an array of insidious agents who seemingly work with an intricate network of global media outlets, think tanks, rating agencies, academicians, civil society activists and NGOs with the sole purpose of delegitimizing and undermining India’s democratic credentials.

Words such as “democratic backsliding”, “authoritarianism”, “rising intolerance” have been normalized to challenge the validity and vibrancy of Indian democracy, and ‘democracy ratings’ weaponized to achieve political objectives. For instance, Mexico, that has witnessed the assassination of 37 candidates ahead of voting on June 2, is rated by the V-Dem Democracy Index as an “electoral democracy”, while India, that carried off a much bigger, almost flawless exercise of representative democracy, is an ‘electoral autocracy’ according to the Sweden-based think tank.

This hydra-headed, globe-spanning anti-India narrative takes many forms. It could be uninformed rants or supercilious commentary by opinion writers or members of academia based abroad, slanted reports that cherry pick data or indulge in circuitous references to push a certain viewpoint, or it could be bot networks and social media influencers activated and/or contracted to fulfil vested interests. All these efforts have their root in once cause, the ostensible hatred of one man, Narendra Modi, who keeps winning elections defying all their efforts and expectations.

Everything is cloaked under the garb of an outpouring of concern for the ‘health’ of India’s democracy, and malignant interference takes on the appearance of benign anxiety. The terrifying reality is that not only have these foreign forces, in cahoots with their Indian minders and assorted parasites, been predicting the death of Indian democracy by manipulating discourse or issuing dubious ‘ratings’, they have been actively involved as partisans in India’s domestic politics – taking sides and trying to influence the outcome of polls in brazen acts of interference.

It’s not that Indians are unaware of the realities. The authorities know but haven’t spoken beyond generalities. The prime minister has spoken about foreign powers “not just giving their opinions but trying to influence our elections”. The external affairs minister, S Jaishankar, on more than one occasion has pointed out the ‘mind games’ being played from abroad, stressing that “western countries want a certain class of people at the helm of affairs in India but when the Indian electorate decides differently, they feel disturbed.”

The ministry of external affairs, normally a reticent and cautious wing of the government, has gone to the extent of publicly calling the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an American government entity, “a biased organisation with a political agenda” and accusing it of “interfering” in India’s electoral exercise. The USCIRF’s latest report classifies India as a ‘Country of Particular Concern’ and clubs it with Burma, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.

Yet not often is the true nature of these influence operations revealed in public domain. One such rare occasion presented itself on Monday as it came to light how foreign nations, from the US to the EU, have been pumping millions of dollars through western media outlets, think tanks and members of the academia through a sophisticated operation to blatantly interfere in the 2024 general elections and influence its outcome.

The details speak of breathtaking orchestration and audacious planning, and a large part of it is centred around French political scientist and academic Christophe Jaffrelot, a French national who is a key player and a source of the bulk of anti-India articles in western media that also find resonance in a section of Indian media.

By virtue of being an ‘Indologist’, Jaffrelot, whose animus towards Modi overpowers his objectivity as a political scientist, uses his influence to run insidious public discourses that are picked up and amplified by the Opposition. For example, one of the Opposition’s key planks in the current elections has been ‘caste’.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi staked his political future on a caste census and has carried out a relentless effort to hammer at India’s caste faultlines during campaigning. This was a clever move since caste remains a potent reality in India and may break up the consolidation of Hindu votes that BJP has been attempting to unify the country.

Interestingly, it turns out that in 2021 Jaffrelot had published a research report on the need for a caste census, and subsequently wrote many articles in Indian media, managing to mainstream caste-division narrative in public discourse (with some help from compatriot Giles Verniers, another Indologist, associated with the Trivedi Center at Asoka University).

It also emerged that the caste census narrative was ‘coincidentally’ timed with a fund from a US-based ‘philanthropic foundation’ – Henry Luce Foundation (HLF). Jaffrelot had received HLF funding for three years starting 2021, along with many other fronts and organizations who were all given a similar mandate – focusing on India with a set of predefined narratives.

In a measure of how the hydra-headed interference network works, with robust funding provided by the likes of HLF or George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, consider that noted DC-based think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) has received funds from HLF for projects pertaining to India on two occasions, 2018 and 2020. Two years later, CEIP produced a string of essays that centered on issues such as “faith and citizenship in India”, “religion”, “Hindu nationalism”, “Muslim attitudes”, “authoritarian repression”. Nearly all the literature hew to a certain pattern.

The attempts to sway public discourse, funding known anti-India elements, ISI moles or radical Islamists, trying to instigate colour revolution in India through demonstration of street power, or even campaigning in Europe against India’s buying of Russian oil, building macro and micro narratives, it seems that the narrative-peddlers will stop at nothing.

As India increases its national composite power and remains committed to its democratic credentials, it must strike at the roots of these insidious operations and go after the elements that seek to Balkanise Bharat. Start with a high-level probe into the revelations. Give it teeth. Bharat has enough leverage to make the perpetrators pay.

The author is Deputy Executive Editor, Firstpost. He tweets: @sreemoytalukdar.