Indian Government’s Propaganda Machine Boosts Israeli Genocide of Palestinians

Shortly after the Al-Ahli hospital massacre was committed by the Israeli Occupation Forces, killing more than 500 Palestinian men, women, and children, an X account, @Faridakhan, introduced herself as an Al Jazeera journalist working in Khan Yunis, Gaza. The supposed “journalist” then began to accuse Al Jazeera of lying about the Israeli missile strike. Soon after, the news network tweeted that no such journalist was associated with them. This account was, in fact, found to be operated by a man from India… but not before it garnered over 250,000 impressions, was embedded in several blogs and news reports, and was even reposted by Michael P. Pregent, a former American intelligence officer and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. 

This is just one instance of the Indian government’s dangerous propaganda strategy, which aims to dehumanize Muslims at home and abroad while bolstering economic and military ties with the Israeli regime. Massive billboards have been put up across central Delhi, bearing the message: “India stands with Israel in the war against terrorism.” Rallies have been funded and protestors have been bussed in to hail the India-Israel friendship as “holy,” while public Hindu prayers have been organized for Israeli Occupation Forces. The Israeli Ambassador to India allegedly received multiple requests from Indian citizens who wished to volunteer to serve in the Israeli army. One such request also came from Yati Narsinghanand Saraswati – a Hindu religious preacher notorious for hate speech and genocidal calls against the minority Muslim community in India. Along with his 1,000 followers, he expressed a desire to be allowed into Occupied Palestine as settlers.

The success of these campaigns is attributed to the recurrent Islamophobic trope of “fanatic” Muslim masculinities – tropes equally bought into by several left and liberal narratives in India and abroad – which these propagandists have perfected in their routine harassment and aggression directed against Dalits as well as Muslims of India and Kashmir, who are struggling against fascism and settler-colonial projects respectively. The governing Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) ideology draws its primary motivation from the belief that Zionism is the civilizational twin of Hindutva (Hindu extremism) and is a model to be emulated for “population management,” so as to achieve the ultimate goal of a Hindu Rashtra (an exclusive Hindu nation), in which minorities are tortured and expelled from their land and their homes are bulldozed, occurrences that have been accelerated since Modi’s rise to power in 2014.  This dehumanization policy also explains the government-sponsored circulation of images that celebrate and mock Palestinian suffering.

Today, India is the largest buyer in the world of Israeli weapons and surveillance technologies, purchasing over $3 billion worth of these products on an annual basis. The two states have maintained close strategic, trade, and militaristic ties, premised on the expansionist logic of colonialism and crony capitalism, consolidating their structures of imposing violent statecraft against civilian populations.  Several BJP leaders and Hindu supremacist groups are busy using the anti-Palestinian sentiment deployed by Western governments as an opportunity to push messaging directed at the upcoming 2024 general elections. Apart from #StandWithIsrael and #IndiaWithIsrael, specific hashtags such as #IslamIsTheProblem, and #HamasTerrorists are being utilized to fuse the Zionist and Hindutva narratives of manufactured victimhood against the perpetual Muslim enemy.

The world’s readiness to believe in propaganda has created the optimal conditions for the accelerated genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. With its real-time manipulation across language, algorithms, and images, the horrors of this state-sponsored propaganda lie not in its spectacle, but rather in its banality and industrial reproduction. In the ongoing genocide, evidence precedes the crime.

Every Palestinian testimony written and screamed in blood is caught in an asymmetric confrontation with tech bias, where all forms of exceptional and quotidian settler-colonial violence are being actively obscured by censorship, account suspensions, and shadowbans. Not only have Israeli-allied governments, tech firms, and weapons companies justified stealing thousands of Palestinian lives, but these disinformation campaigns are also robbing Palestinians of the right to mourn their dead with dignity, by forcing them to fight an unceasing stream of denialism and erasure, much of it pushed by Indian government bots. In this well-choreographed cyber warfare, the Israeli regime’s impossible insistence on “self-defense” is exalted, while every Palestinian cast as a “legitimate target” for this world-sponsored genocide.