India’s Hate Industry

THERE ARE TWO kinds of people who spew venom against India and Indians. The first are Indians themselves, for complex political and social reasons. The second are foreigners, who regard India as an upstart and resent its rise from an impoverished colony to the world’s fifth-largest economy, soon to be the third largest.

Consider the first cohort. India has always had its detractors, even traitors. The history goes back to Jaichand and Mir Jafar. But after Independence, India enjoyed a spell of goodwill.

Nehruvian India was patronised by the West for being secular, peaceful and non-interfering in global affairs. Nehru charmed the world. India was poor, needed financial aid but it held regular elections, avoided dictatorships and was a model ex-colony.

In India, Congress controlled the narrative. The rebellion against Prime Minister Indira Gandhi led by the powerful southern syndicate (Kamaraj, Nijalingappa and others) fizzled out. There was no social media, no internet, no satellite television.

Jayaprakash Narayan’s “total revolution” movement against Indira Gandhi created political and social dislocation between 1975 and 1979 but order was soon restored. Even when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was ensnared by the Bofors scam, condemnation was directed at him, not India generically.

It all changed in 2014. This point of inflection marked the end of the Nehruvian Consensus. No longer was India the good, earnest ex-colony making valiant strides towards economic prosperity.

Now, it was a majoritarian state run by a majoritarian BJP prime minister, Narendra Modi, who aspired to a seat at the global high table.

The Indian hate industry, which had lost its voice after the 2014 Lok Sabha election, grew wings. NGOs sprouted. So did news portals. Their single minded agenda: discredit India to discredit Modi.

The international media joined the chorus. The Economist had endorsed Rahul Gandhi as prime minister ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. It did not strike the British magazine that Rahul had never held an administrative or constitutional post in his life.

Not many, however, expected Modi to win the 2019 Lok Sabha election. BJP had just been soundly beaten by Congress in the November- December 2018 Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh Assembly elections. Opinion polls conducted in January 2019 gave BJP between 200 and 220 seats in Parliament.

The hate industry was rejuvenated. Modi’s prime ministership was surely going to be a short, bad dream. Nehruvian normalcy would soon be restored. News portals began to regurgitate the 2002 Gujarat riots. Saffron terror became political currency. Opposition leaders abused Modi openly. India was collateral damage.

The Indian Air Force strike against Pakistani terror camps in Balakot deep inside PoK on February 26/27 following Pakistan’s Pulwama terror attack changed the mathematics and chemistry of the 2019 Lok Sabha election. But 303 seats was too big an affront for the hate industry to swallow. Hate Modi morphed into Hate India.

The opposition, meanwhile, realised that Modi was beatable in 2024 only if it got together. India’s economic rise complicated matters. Despite two years of Covid and trade-disruptive wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, India remained the world’s fastest growing major economy. This was intolerable. When US President Donald Trump took office and threatened reciprocal tariffs on India, the hate industry took heart. Op-eds in business dailies gloated when the stock market slid.

One columnist wrote: “The India story is over.”

Another said gleefully with barely concealed venom: “Welcome to the New India.” A third gloated: “India’s growth is likely to hover at 5-6 per cent.”

Social media often takes its cues from commentary in Indian media. Caste and religion were weaponised. Online news soon became full of anti-India tirades. A temporary bear stock market and slowing GDP growth in 2024-25 gave the Indian hate industry reason to celebrate.

Its joy may be shortlived. Global financial institutions project that India’s annual GDP growth will recover over the next few years to more than 7 per cent. As Krishnamurthy Subramanian, India’s former chief economic advisor (CEA) and currently executive director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, wrote in his recent book India @100: “The next two decades present an unparalleled opportunity for India to emerge as a leading global economy, a prospect that arises only once in several centuries.”

The hate industry, local and foreign, will not relish that prospect.

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