Russia today, India tomorrow

According to the FBI, Tennessee-based Tenet Media, which describes itself a “network of heterodox commentators”, was little more than a front organisation for RT to funnel $10 million to three hand-picked MAGA YouTubers tasked with pushing anti-Ukraine narratives.

Once these explosive revelations surfaced, the US government wasted no time in levying additional sanctions on RT and its editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan. While Facebook parent company Meta banned all Russian state media from its platforms citing “foreign interference activity”, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken went a step further and urged Washington’s partners around the world to address “the threat posed by RT and other machinery of Russian disinformation and covert influence.”

The world’s most populous nation, and one with a giant Anglophone audience, India was almost certainly one of the intended targets of Blinken’s comments, not least as it’s a country where RT has significantly expanded its footprint since Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

There have been unsubstantiated claims that the US Department of State unsuccessfully put pressure on the Indian Ministry of External Affairs to revoke RT’s licence. While it’s unlikely that Washington ever made such a demand, Indian news channels sympathetic to the ruling ultra-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have taken the story and run with it, depicting the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as one that’s prepared to stand up to major world powers.

Apart from the outsized role it plays in hijacking public discourse vis-à-vis the Ukraine conflict, RT has initiated an integrated advertising campaign across India’s five biggest cities highlighting what it describes as the West’s neocolonial attitude towards the subcontinent and encouraging Indian citizens to ask more questions.

Although India is often referred to as the “world’s largest democracy”, the reality on the ground is somewhat different. Now serving his third-term in office, Modi is increasingly taking cues from Putin’s leadership style in Russia, becoming less and less tolerant of any criticism and cementing the BJP’s control across the entire apparatus of government. Meanwhile, a report published last year by the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan think tank based in Washington, found that an extraordinary 85% of Indians approve of authoritarian governments.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) recently described press freedom in India as being in “an unofficial state of emergency” amid the widespread kidnapping and torture of independent journalists, and with the country’s traditional media now largely under the control of pro-BJP billionaires. As things stand, the 2024 RSF Press Freedom Index ranks India 159 out of 181 nations — practically on par with Russia, which sits just three places below it at 162.

India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, now owns more than 70 Indian media outlets with a combined reach of at least 800 million viewers, while Gautam Adani, India’s second richest person, acquired the previously anti-establishment New Delhi Television in late 2022, prompting a mass exodus of employees. Both businessmen are close Modi confidants.

Even international broadcasters haven’t been spared the rampant politicisation of Indian institutions — the BBC had its offices raided by the Indian tax authorities last year in what was widely accepted to have been an act of retribution for its airing of a documentary critical of Modi.

While India is yet to introduce a Russian-inspired “foreign agents” bill, the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental organisation founded to combat money laundering, has accused the Indian government of instrumentalising its own anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism laws to investigate overseas-funded NGOs critical of the Modi government.

In recent years both Amnesty International and Greenpeace have had their Indian bank accounts frozen after publishing damning reports. By contrast, RT has maintained a studiedly positive tone in its reporting on Modi’s India rather than covering the country objectively.

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The parlous state of press freedom in India is but one example of the nation’s gradual “Russification”. Putin and Modi have both enriched their inner circles while hanging the rest of the population out to dry. Indeed, India’s income inequality is currently worse than it was under British occupation. Similarly, the World Inequality Lab estimated that in 2022 47.7% of Russia’s wealth was concentrated in the hands of just 1% of the population.

At the same time, Modi has a history of purging and snooping on prominent opposition figures who are overtly critical of his policies, including the de facto head of the Indian National Congress Rahul Gandhi. There is also a tendency on his part to scapegoat religious minorities when domestic problems arise, in much the way Putin did with Chechens at the start of his rule and then later on to Central Asian migrants.

Needless to say, the United States has legitimate concerns over RT working hand-in-glove with the Federal Security Service (FSB) to subvert elections around the world, as well as procuring military equipment for the Russian armed forces. However, India is likely to play the “non-alignment” card, should additional pressure be exerted on its government to ban what is fast becoming not only the voice of the Global South, but a convenient mouthpiece for the BJP.