Editorial: Monkeying with foreign policy

It’s a long-established convention for Indian political parties to leave foreign policy well alone, leaving it to the government to shape it in the broader national interest while considering current expediencies. That is why the BJP-led government’s debatable handling of relations with its neighbouring nations over the past decade, and with important countries like the USA and Canada in recent months, have by and large not been used as ammunition by the opposition in the day-to-day serve-and-volley of politics.

This being the convention, the BJP caused dismay last week with a bizarre online rant in which it alleged that the US State Department was behind targeted attacks on Prime Minister Modi to destabilise India. Prefacing this startling accusation, the party claimed to have discovered an unerring coincidence: Apparently, every attack on Modi by Rahul Gandhi on the Adani and Pegasus issues is preceded by the release of an adverse report by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an international coalition of investigative journalists.

It's the kind of coincidence you might find in Enid Blyton's The Secret Seven series. After elaborately sketching a nexus between Rahul Gandhi and OCCRP, supported by flow charts, tour dates and time stamps, the party promises to “expose the truth”, which turns out to be: “It has always been the US State Department behind this agenda.” The BJP based this extraordinary allegation on a report by the French investigative media group Mediapart which recently reported that the OCCRP is funded in part by the US State Department's USAID, as well as the George Soros and the Rockefeller foundations. “In fact, 50% of OCCRP's funding comes directly from the US State Department. OCCRP, therefore, functions as a media tool for carrying out deep state agendas,” said the BJP.

If indeed there was a basis to the charge that agencies funded by the State Department were carrying out “deep state” campaigns against the Indian government, it was a matter best left to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) to respond to. While it’s possible that the rant was outsourced to the party to allow for the use of language that the MEA cannot employ, it was a rather alarming escalation by a ruling party to say, “The Deep State had a clear objective to destabilise India by targeting PM Modi.”

The State Department’s “disappointment” with the BJP’s accusation was clothed in diplomatic language, but it pointedly noted that it was levelled by “the ruling party in India”, leaving little scope to distance the government from an ill-judged rant. But going forward, the ground was cut under the BJP’s feet when Mediapart issued an outright denial. The French agency condemned the party for “exploiting” its reporting and said there were “no available facts” in its report to support the allegation of a conspiracy involving the State Department, George Soros and the Congress Party.

It may be true that diplomatic relations with the departing Biden administration in Washington count little in the calculations of the BJP at this moment. The use of classic alt-right dog whistles like “deep state” and “George Soros” in the BJP’s social media volley hints that this may be a ploy to cosy up to the incoming Trump administration. If so, it is naive to believe that the Trump 2.0 regime can be seduced with silly, overused buzzwords. And the use of Soros as bogeyman has now become a joke like the Monkey Man who terrorised Delhi many years ago.