Chinese influence peddling, which is part of Communist China’s 24X7 political warfare is an insidious way of destroying rivals and competitors, in an effort to establish the Communists as the world hegemon. An American professor, Kerry Gershaneck, who has written a book on this, “Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to ‘Win without Fighting’”, describes China’s political warfare as “secretive and highly deceptive” where it seeks “to win without fighting”, primarily by ensuring that its targets “cannot or will not fight back”. Everything is permitted in this warfare, including “violence, coercion, bribery, propaganda, psychological warfare, legal warfare, and United Front work that builds coalitions of organizations globally to support the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) objectives,” Prof Gershaneck had told the Sunday edition of this newspaper. He had added that “its active measures include assassination, kidnapping, and terrorist attacks, as well as chemical warfare and biological warfare… They also include entropic warfare to demoralize and destabilize countries via corruption and social division, and other forms of coercive, destructive attacks.”
Looking back at the tumultuous last three years, especially the coronavirus pandemic, it is obvious that the world was hit by a China-unleashed biological warfare. As for “entropic warfare”, which is signified by a gradual loss of order and weakening from inside, it may not be wrong to categorize flare-ups like in Nuh or the prolonged unrest in Manipur as evidence of this entropy. In both these cases, outside influence—specifically China and China’s front, Pakistan—is not being ruled out by experts. And now come the Newsclick revelations, which show that a Chinese front man, Neville Roy Singham was funding this Indian news portal to act as a Chinese propaganda outlet. From trying to whitewash China’s role in the spread of Covid, to showing China’s handling of Covid in a positive light, and dictating how the India-China LAC should be shown to favour China, Singham was the puppeteer who was controlling the portal. In the process, he was allegedly pouring in crores of Chinese money into it.
But it’s only now that the New York Times has come out with its own investigation into Singham and brought out his Indian links. Much before this, Indian agencies had started probing the foreign funding of the news portal. Agencies even conducted raids at the offices of Newsclick and its owner’s home. After that, a certain section of the Indian media landscape, which calls itself “left liberal” or “liberal”, as well as many Opposition parties, went up in arms against the government, saying it was a case of muzzling the media and that a witch-hunt was being carried out against Newsclick because it was against the government. The issue was weaponised to the fullest extent possible to show the current government in a negative light. The matter was escalated to the global level, to add heft to the narrative that democracy was sliding in India. But now that the upholder of so-called “liberal” values, the New York Times has investigated the matter, many in India are scurrying for cover, trying hard to dissociate themselves from the news portal. Things need not have come to this pass if a little bit of application of mind had been done when the agencies started investigating the portal’s funding source. There should have been realisation that something was amiss—that it could be a matter of national security and not what the “liberals” were telling the world. In fact such has been the outcry from “liberal” voices in India on anything the incumbent government does, that India is being ranked most awfully by several indices. For instance, the international press freedom index ranks India even below Afghanistan—a ranking that is nonsensical and politically motivated.
China’s influence peddling is often invisible to the public eye. It’s good at playing on the faultlines that a boisterous democracy like India has, and create discord. The problem is, without realising China’s malintent, many play straight into its hands by amplifying the message it wants to convey to the world about India, thus jeopardising the interests of this country. This is China’s political warfare in action. Worse, this warfare is not restricted to one news portal. There is much more to it. The ongoing investigation may open a Pandora’s box. If that happens, it would be sensible to wait and watch what is revealed, before screaming from the rooftops that “India is a sliding democracy”. That’s exactly what China wants many Indians to do.