A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-air-india-crash-how-to-spin-doctor-and-peddle-narratives-the-western-way-13912025.html
There has been a virtual masterclass lately in the creation and dissemination of biased narratives. Not only in the case of the ill-fated Air India 171 (Boeing 787, June 12, 2025) that crashed, but also in some other, unrelated instances. The age-old practices of "truth by repeated assertion" and "dubious circular references" as well as "strategic silence" have all been deployed in full force.
The bottom line with the Air India flight: there is reasonable doubt about whether there was mechanical/software failure and/or sabotage or possible pilot error. Any or all these caused both engines to turn off in flight. But the way the spin-doctors have spun it, it is now "official" that the commanding pilot was suicidal and turned off the fuel switch. Boeing, the plane maker, and General Electric, the engine maker, are blameless.
This is, alas, not surprising. It is in the interests of western MNCs to limit reputational damage and monetary loss related to their products. They do massive marketing by unleashing their PR agencies. We also saw how they protect themselves in other instances. A leaked Pfizer contract for their Covid vaccine insisted that if anything happened, it was the user's problem, not Pfizer's: there was no indemnity.
Incidentally, a report on July 19th said that the Pfizer COVID vaccine can lead to severe vision problems. Oh, sorry, no indemnity.
What is deplorable in the Air India case is that the AAIB, the Indian entity investigating the disaster, chose to release a half-baked preliminary report with enough ambiguity that a case could be (and definitely was) built up against the poor dead pilots. Any marketing person could have read the report and told them that it would be used to blame the pilots and absolve the manufacturers.
Besides, the AAIB report was released late night on a Friday India time, which meant that the western media had all of one working day to do the spin-doctoring, which they did with remarkable gusto. Meanwhile the Indian media slept. Whose decision was this? Clearly, Indian babus need a remedial course in public relations if this was mere incompetence. Of course, if it was intentional, that would be even worse.
There is a pattern. In earlier air accidents, such as the Jeju Air crash involving a Boeing 737-800 in South Korea in December, the pilots were blamed. In accidents involving Lion Air (Boeing 737 Max 8, 2018), China Airlines (737 200, 1989), Flydubai (737 800, 2016), ditto. I am beginning to believe that a lot of Asian pilots are poorly trained and/or suicidal. Ditto with the F-35 that fell into the ocean off Japan.
Truth by repeated assertion is a powerful force for gaslighting the gullible
I wonder what excuses we’ll hear about the Delta Airlines Boeing 767 whose engine caught fire in the air after take-off from LAX on July 20th. The pilots didn't die so they will speak up. Besides, they were westerners. I am eagerly awaiting the spin on this.
I also noticed with grim amusement how the BBC, WSJ, Bloomberg and Reuters and so on were busy quoting each other to validate their assertions. This is a standard tactic that India's distorians (see Utpal Kumar's powerful book 'Eminent Distorians') have perfected: B will quote third-hand hearsay from A, then C will quote B, D will quote C, and before you know it, the hearsay has become The TRUTH. But if you wind it back from D to C to B to A it becomes, "I hear someone told someone that xyz happened". Out of thin air, then.
There is also the lovely tactic of strategic silence. It has been used to un-person people who ask inconvenient questions. It has also been used to defenestrate inconvenient news. Just days ago, under the Deepstate-installed new regime in Syria, hundreds of minority Druze were brutally massacred. There was video on X of armed men in uniform forcing Druze men to jump off tall buildings, and desecrating their shrines.
Similary, there is a brutal reign of terror, rape, murder and thuggery against Hindus, Buddhists and others under the Deepstate-blessed regime of Mohammed Yunus in Bangladesh: a clear genocide. Neither Syria nor Bangladesh gets any headlines. There are no loud human-rights protests as in the case of Gaza. This is not news. It is un-news.
"Manufacturing Consent" all the way.
India is particularly vulnerable to this gaslighting because Indians consume a lot of English-language 'news'. Scholars have long noted how the US public has been maintained in a state of ignorance so they could be easily manipulated. The same is true of the Indian middle class. So there is yet another reason to do less in English. Fooling, say, the Chinese or Japanese public is a lot more difficult.
The fact is that even though Indians may be literate in English, they do not understand the context and the subtext of what is fed to them by the likes of The Economist, NPR, The Financial Times, the New York Times, etc. The best way I can explain this is the 100+5 analogy in the Mahabharata: they may fight with each other on domestic matters, but Anglosphere and Deepstate are in cahoots when it comes to international matters.
Things are both getting better and getting worse. On the one hand, social media and its imprint on generative AI mean that it is ever easier to propagate fake news (in addition to deepfake audio and video, of course). On the other hand, despite the problem of charlatans and paid agents provocateurs getting lots of eyeballs, the large number of Indians on social media may push back against the worst kinds of blood libel against India and Indians, of which there's plenty these days often created by bots from 'friendly' neighbors.
This is a serious matter indeed. One solution is to do a version of the Great Chinese Firewall and ban wholesale the worst offenders. Indeed, a few of the vilest handles have been ejected from X. However, the pusillanimity with which notorious Pakistani handles were unbanned, then re-banned after outrage, shows there's something rotten in the Information Ministry. Almost exactly the same as the unbanning of Pakistani cricketers, then rebanning after outrage. Is there anybody in charge?
Information warfare is insidious. Going back to the Air India case, I think the families of the maligned pilots should sue for gigantic sums for libel and defamation. The sad state of the Indian judiciary may mean that, unfortunately, this will not go far. However, there is precedent: Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore used to terrorize villainous western media by suing them in his courts. They learned to toe the line.
If this tactic does not work, India should eject the hostile media. The Indian market is increasingly important to western media (not vice versa) because soon there will be more English-reading consumers in India than in the Five Eyes Anglosphere. I should say that in quotes because as I said above, most Indians are blissfully unaware of the hidden agendas, and naively believe them. But "Judeo-Christian" culture is very different from Dharmic.
I keep getting emails from the New York Times with tempting offers to subscribe to them for something really cheap like Rs. 25 a month. They need Indian readers. I have been shouting from the rooftops for years that one of these charlatan media houses needs to be kicked out, harshly, with 24 hours notice to wind up and leave. As in the Asian proverb, "kill the chicken to scare the monkeys". The monkeys will notice, and behave. Otherwise the information warfare is just going to get worse.
1290 words, Jul 22, 2025
Share this post