‘Foreign funding’ farce: The hypocrisy of the Modi government’s allegations against protesters

It’s that time of the year again, when well-heeled Delhiites start fleeing the capital for cleaner air, schools close, offices ask employees to work from home and air purifiers fly off the shelves. Once more, Delhi’s air is thick with the unbreathable – and, this year, with conspiracy too.

Besieged by youth protests against SIR that has disenfranchised 130 million people so far, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s regime has launched a vicious counter-offensive alleging foreign conspiracies to unseat the government. The Bharatiya Janata Party says the opposition Congress party is colluding with a global “red-green ecosystem” of disruptive organisations – which Fox News calls “Chaos Inc” – engineering social unrest in many countries to cause regime change.

The foreign conspiracy charges are wilder and more creative in India’s notoriously Modi-friendly news channels and social media. In this universe, the protests are being orchestrated by desi “anti-nationals” funded by all sorts of foreign adversaries, real and imagined, from “US deep state”, China and Pakistan to George Soros, Greta Thunberg and Elon Musk.

Modi himself fans these fantastical claims by his periodical tirades at what he calls “Dimagi Naxals” as foreign-funded enemies of the state. The spurt of student protests in Europe has only strengthened this argument, with a choreographed chorus of Modi’s devotees demanding to know who is...

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