India’s “Business Standard” Is Spewing Fake News About Bilateral Relations With Russia
All reports alleging that India inexplicably abandoned its passionate practice of principled neutrality towards the Ukrainian Conflict in favor of jumping on the US-led West’s anti-Russian bandwagon are always nothing but fake news.
The US’ information warfare campaign aimed at pressuring India into condemning and sanctioning Russia has completely failed, yet that hasn’t resulted in the declining unipolar hegemon changing its ways for pragmatism’s sake. State Department spokesman Ned Price admitted his country’s intent to continue meddling in its so-called “partner’s” foreign policy during a press conference last week, which appears to have just taken the indirect form of relying on one of its many proxies in that South Asian state after “Business Standard”, which describes itself as “India’s leading business daily”, spewed some egregiously fake news about bilateral relations in Russia over the pats few days.
On 23 August, it falsely reported that “India calls Russian invasion on Ukraine 'an affront to common security'” even though Delhi’s Permanent Representative to the UN wasn’t addressing the latest phase of the Ukrainian Conflict during that particular part of her remarks at the meeting on “Maintenance of International Peace and Security: Promoting Common Security Through Dialogue and Cooperation”, let alone from the US-led West’s perspective. Two days later, Business Standard then lied again when claiming that “India breaks streak of UN abstentions on Ukraine, votes against Russia”, which was a maliciously twisted interpretation of Delhi agreeing with 12 others to let Zelensky address them.
The objectively existing and easily verifiable facts are that India didn’t publicly condemn Russia’s special operation in Ukraine nor did it break its streak of UN abstentions regarding its special and privileged partner. What happened in the first-mentioned is that its Permanent Representative was speaking broadly about the subject of their meeting while the latter was a procedural matter that can’t honestly be compared to votes at the General Assembly. Only Business Standard’s team themselves can account for why they deliberately intended to mislead their audiences about India’s relations with Russia, but educated conjecture very strongly suggests that this was connected to the US’ infowar against both.
It was arguably the case that Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba’s condemnation of his Indian counterpart for defending his country’s purchase of Russia’s discounted oil was ordered by his American patrons, which means that the precedent exists for speculating that Business Standard’s fake news about its country’s relations with that Eurasian Great Power fulfilled a similar role in the US’ disinformation ecosystem. Furthermore, the author concluded in late July that “The Indian Opposition Is Doing America’s Bidding By Beating The Drums Of War Against China”, so it would therefore naturally follow that the US’ media proxies there would also do its bidding against Russia.
The takeaway is that all reports alleging that India inexplicably abandoned its passionate practice of principled neutrality towards the Ukrainian Conflict in favor of jumping on the US-led West’s anti-Russian bandwagon are always nothing but fake news. Nobody should ever expect India to do this since that rising Great Power’s grand strategic interests rest in comprehensively expanding its relations with its Eurasian counterpart for the purpose of jointly creating a third pole of influence in the emerging Multipolar World Order, which is aimed at maximizing their policymaking autonomy vis a vis the American and Chinese superpowers.
This isn’t wishful thinking either since India just assumed leadership of the global de-dollarization trend after the BRICS International Forum’s President confirmed that it’s already implementing a mechanism for mutual settlements in national currencies, thus becoming the first country to do so since she also added that China is still in the process of developing something similar. No fair observer would therefore predict that India will ever abruptly do anything of the sort that Business Standard just falsely claimed, though the casual information consumer might be more easily manipulated into thinking so, especially if they’ve fallen under the influence of the US’ infowar campaign against that country.
Nevertheless, such average folks have absolutely zero power to shape the course of Russian-Indian relations in any negative direction, which means that misleading them accomplishes nothing other than working against America’s own soft power interests upon them inevitably realizing that they’ve been lied to. Business Standard and other suspected US infowar proxies will therefore lose their audience’s trust once people learn that nothing of the sort that they falsely reported had actually come to pass. To the contrary, the opposite continues to unfold with respect to India comprehensively expanding its relations with Russia, which no artificially manufactured fake news narratives will ever be able to stop.