DECODING NARRATIVES: MANUFACTURED FACTS AND FALLACIES

Vidya Gonguntula
Jul 29, 2024
8 min read

INTRODUCTION – IDEOLOGICAL BIAS IN DISCOURSE As the world’s largest democracy approached its general elections in the month of April this year, we could notice a peculiar pattern of Western media coverage and commentary on Indian politics. Evidently aimed at manufacturing a particular rhetoric, bias, and mindset, an abnormally elevated level of “interest” was shown – particularly by the French media and prominently led by Le Monde, which alone has put out numerous Op-Eds, articles, and interviews around twisted themes and “realities” that “plague” India. “Ideology provides not so much values and beliefs but a theory or image of what the world is like”, where political ideology consisting of knowledge affects social ontology, which then affects political choice…and “what sets politically astute ideologues apart from the less astute is not that they know how their values and beliefs should produce opinions, but that they know what to believe given what they value”. (Martin and Desmond 6). Terms for India’s political dynamic such as “Democratic backsliding”, “Hindu Majoritarianism”, “Fascism”, “the undemocratic nature of the Indian state”, “growing authoritarianism”, “Religious Fanatism”, “threat to secularism”, all seem to have originated through the Western parley, and have become stock talking points presenting a slanted rhetoric in public discourse and academia. At the center of spinning these micro narratives that have garnered remarkable attention, publication, and significant volume distribution is one academician, political scientist, and Indologist, Christopher Jaffrelot. Moreover, following the patterns and benefactors of fundings received by organisations and individuals that produce colloquy, a congruency of ideology emerges. The role influence and incentives have in promoting certain dialogue cannot be underestimated, and therefore can be a great avenue to discover their inspirations, as elaborated ahead. CHRISTOPHER JAFFRELOT: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS AND THE NEED TO QUESTION FACTS Rankings from various global bodies such as the World index, EIU Democracy index and the Variety of Democracy indices, have also published evaluations on India, showing a decline in India’s scores, and its status dropping from “free” to “partially-free”. The Economic Advisory Committee to the Prime Minister has challenged these evaluation, arguing they are arbitrary, perception-based, non-tenable, and non-credible. These rankings are supposedly based on parameters such as “political rights, press freedom, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation, liberal democracy, electoral democracy, liberal component, egalitarian component, participatory component, and deliberative component” (Mukherjee). Thus, the placement of India as a “flawed democracy”, below various countries which are clearly less democratic or even newly formed, and downgrading India to the status of an “Electoral Autocracy” from 2014 to 2021 is shocking. As these facts remain perception based, the subjective nature of these indices that remained in the monopoly of few chosen experts, stands to be questioned.

Christopher Jaffrelot is at the centre of many eminent think tanks and institutions that specialise in South Asian politics. An alumnus of Sciences Po University and current Research Director at the Center for International Studies and Research (CERI) at Science Po, Jaffrelot is also the Chair of the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS), the Research Lead for the Global Institutes, King’s College London, and also Avantha Chair and Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King's India Institute. (DisinfoLab report). Closer home, Jaffrelot is a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University as well. Skewed rankings and agitprop-driven academic writings such as those of Jaffrelot and others, are widely cited, prominently referenced and cross-referenced, and featured by not only French media, but also prominent Indian prints such as The Hindu, The Indian Express, The Wire, Frontline, university portals and academic journals. The narratives promoted, show glaring evidence of so-called research that is warped, misinterpreted, and grounded in misinformation to fit a certain narrative. Take note particularly of the themes of Caste and Caste Census that Jaffrelot and his counterparts narrate to project impressions of Hindu majoritarian agendas of the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), alleging a proclivity to assert an undemocratic Hindu character in their governance. Nalin Mehta, a political scientist recently analysed and responded to Christopher Jaffrelot and his mentee, Gilles Vernier’s academic writings on the 2019 polls in which they suggested significant dominance of upper caste representation within the party. They declared, with factually inaccurate data, (as attested and published by Mehta in his three part series on the findings of the Mehta-Singh Index which can be accessed here) that “‘the last decade has seen the return of the savarn (upper caste) … and the erosion of OBC representation … along with the rise of the BJP.’ In Parliament, overall, they claimed that BJP dominance was driven by 36.3 per cent upper-caste MPs within the party and only 18.8 per cent OBCs (the lowest OBC representation in a major party, compared to the Congress and the regional parties) in a recent academic caste profile of the 2019 Lok Sabha” (Mehta).

It is evident from Mehta’s research, that these claims were based on erroneous data that was co-produced by Ashoka University’s Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD). The very credibility of the TCPD and other organisations publishing similar narratives is unreliable, as will be discussed further ahead in the article. Evidence suggests the BJP government in UP “… had almost exactly the same percentage of OBC+SC ministers (48.1 per cent compared to 48.9 per cent) as Akhilesh Yadav’s preceding SP government did. This is a striking number when you consider that the BJP has always been seen as a party of upper castes, while the caste-based SP purports to be a party of social justice, and explicitly so in OBC terms” (Mehta). Jaffrelot and his counterparts pushing a pontificated rhetoric of attributing BJP’s strategies to gain political power to playing caste politics through portals that should be sources of academic, unbiased, peer-reviewed knowledge, seem utterly biased, and when coupled with incorrect data, erode public trust. ROLE OF FUNDING AND INFLUENCE OF WESTERN FOUNDATIONS DisinfoLab has published an extensive report on the interference and interconnections between these dominant narratives in academia. Through this publication, we see that Jaffrelot’s writings on the caste census narrative suddenly intensified the caste discourse in India around 2020, around the same time as the Henry Luce Foundation (HLF), a US based “philanthropic foundation” doled out funding, which also coincided with the trending of other topics related to criticisms of the BJP and the elections. Jaffrelot, and many other organisations, coincidentally received similar funding from HLF in 2021, all for three years. What catches the keen eye, is that all these platforms focused on disseminating similar narratives about India, exposing a deep and troubling picture of extensive trails of “scholarly” bodies of work which are propagandized and biased. Allegations such as “religious nationalism”, “populism”, “authoritarian repression”, have been widely popularised by these organisations along the 2021 to 2024 election cycle. A noteworthy fact, the HLF, founded by Henry Luce who is the founder of TIME magazine and is currently staffed with US government officials, has deep historical roots within the American state. Even a participant in the CIA’s operation Mockingbird, Henry Luce is also closely affiliated with influential think tanks such as the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Council on Foreign Relations, the Asia Foundation etc. The exposé closely follows the money trail, which showed substantial grants being doled out to numerous recipients including the “Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs ($346,000), the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace ($160,000), Human Rights Watch ($300,000), and even fronts linked to radical Islamists and the Pakistani ISI. Even the widely discredited “Hindutva Watch” project found its way into these narratives” (Malik). Many individuals and organisations funded by the HLF also controversially receive substantive funding by the Open Society Foundations (OSF) of Hungarian-American billionaire, philanthropist, investor, and political activist George Soros, an open and widely influential critic of current Indian politics and governance, particularly under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. George Soros and others’ critically misinformed opinions and views on “authoritative tendencies” in India, comments on the abrogation of Article 370 to entail suppression of freedom and dissent, and criticisms of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) to discriminate against Muslims, are prominent proofs that these well-funded narratives are simply “scholarly trails” of predetermined condemnation. The TCPD, too, which is housed within Ashoka University, was set up by Jaffrelot’s mentee and student, Gilles Verniers. The self-dissolution of the TCPD and the resignation of Verniers from the University, has now led him to join the New-Delhi think tank, Centre for Policy Research as a Senior Fellow.

Numerous claims and narratives on topics that have the power to fuel divisions, tensions, and cause disenchantment and the loss of faith within the incumbent government have been traced by the DisinfoLab report, complete with the origins, members, and funding of affiliated organisations. A new domain called “Friends of Democracy” that seeks to save India from religious extremism, recently published an article ‘India spent $61.2 billion on Russian fossil fuels since the start of the Ukraine war’, another report titled ‘Reporting Guide on Hindu Nationalism’ by South Asia Scholar Activist Collective (SASAC), the Luce-American Academy of Religion (AAR) scholarship grant given to the project ‘Hindutva Explained: Creating public-facing digital materials for teaching about Hindu Nationalism’, a USD 370,000 grant from the HLF ‘to examine the fault lines between citizenship, religion in the public sphere, and belonging in contemporary South Asia’ to The Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative at the Center for Race and Gender (PCRes-CRG), 300,000 USD from HLF for ‘Renewed support for research about and documentation of religious intolerance and violence in three countries in Asia’ to the Human Rights Watch, 40,000 USD from HLF for the project ‘Religious Populism and the Future of Indian Democracy’ and ‘The BJP in Power: Indian Democracy and Religious Nationalism’ to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), funding by HLF for the report ‘THE HINDU RIGHT AND INDIA’S RELIGIOUS DIPLOMACY’ to the Berkeley Center for Religion (BCRPWA), and funding of the research project of the Sciences Po American Foundation named ‘Muslims in a Time of Hindu Majoritarianism’, spanning three years (2021-2024) of which Jaffrelot was also a part, are all examples IMPLICATIONS OF NARRATIVE BUILDING – CALL FOR ACTION While the list might be exhaustive and never-ending, it is clear, that the marvel of propaganda and narrative building happening through academic channels, those which we might hope to trust at face value, cannot be mindlessly accepted. While this article is not in any way an attempt to prove Christopher Jaffrelot wrong or deny the existence of a Hindutva base in Indian politics, this article simply wishes to shed light on the sources of our discourse – who runs them, who funds them, and who consumes them. It is but our responsibility and duty as active and informed citizens of this nation, to reconfirm, whose ideas and thoughts we choose to put our faith in. It is for this very reason, that it is important to educate ourselves enough, to create our own unbiased opinions. Opinions and loud voices such as these that simply call for the branding of our democracy as unconstitutional usually hold extremely narrow views, where any contradiction or difference in ideology or in the workings of our constitution is viewed to be utterly wrong. These one-sided, factually incorrect, and politically charged narratives are not few, and with a body of academia that has been built by referring each other’s’ works repeatedly, a biased and unmitigated opinion amongst the educated public is often created. Since these judgements are extremely powerful in influencing opinions amongst the youth and the general population regarding the various developments and policy strategies of the government, we must delve deeper than the narratives presented to us to make informed decisions. Critical engagement is a necessity to maintain our democratic integrity. Our civic responsibility thus lies in seeking knowledge, especially through diverse sources, cross-checking facts, and making decisions based on a comprehensive understanding on the context, and thereafter independently gauging what might be best for the future of our nation. BIBLIOGRAPHY Christophe Jaffrelot: ‘At stake is survival of Indo-Islamic civilisation’ - Frontline (thehindu.com) EAC questions India rankings by 3 global bodies, calls it ‘arbitrary’ | Today News (livemint.com) Founder forced to leave, says Ashoka University’s political data centre; varsity says he did not clear tenure process | Delhi News - The Indian Express Hindu nationalism and the ‘saffronisation of the public sphere’: an in (taylorfrancis.com) https://www.newindian.in/expose-reveals-massive-foreign-interference-in-indian-elections/