By Tom Fowdy
The world has been shocked by the scenes which have come out of Nepal and China's Tibet over the course of the past week after the collapse of glaciers in the Himalaya triggered gigantic flash floods. Modern social media has provided an unprecedented visualisation of a harrowing tragedy as audiences watched villages and settlements be completely annihilated by massive mudslides in clear view. The aftermath is far from over, as thousands of people remain missing and the death toll mounts.
But if history does teach us one thing, it is that tragedy always leads to politicization and blame games, as vested parties seek to avoid accountability for outcomes and others, of course, seek to weaponise narratives to attack their opponents. It did not take long for the latter to emerge, one might note that very quickly across social media accounts of Indian origin began perpetuating a narrative that China was somehow directly to blame for the crisis, pushing false information that a Chinese-built dam had collapsed.
The fact that such claims would originate from India, at scale, is wholly unsurprising. India, as a developing country with a massive population, has emerged to become one of the most online-connected countries on the planet, without being locked into a different internet ecosystem like China is. This population scale has made the presence of Indians on Western social media platforms enormous, which is further amplified by the reality that Indians, as a former British colony, are widely capable of speaking in English and use it for formalised communication.
This supersedes the linguistic barriers which often undercut heavily digitalised, but non-English-affiliated populations such as China, Japan and South Korea, thus allowing the presence and influence of Indians to become ubiquitous. The massive digitalisation of India has also spearheaded political shifts in the country and is one of the driving factors behind the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Narendra Modi as a right-wing, populist leader. The BJP has succeeded in using India's newly developed mass connectivity to drive nationalist mobilisation by essentially creating a highly aggressive digital activist culture, of which is amplified by a large number of news outlets who have premised their business models on profiting from the views and engagement.
This has created a self-affirming feedback loop which has effectively established political misinformation as an industry in India, one which in my opinion, is probably the largest of its kind in the English-speaking world. It is therefore possible for the Indian state to engineer a particular narrative, target, or point of view, and for many false or loaded claims to then emerge, bandwagoning on the anger and go viral across social media, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop. If India's leadership wish to turn public opinion against a specific country or target, they are very much capable of doing so, and we have seen many times over the years in respect to both China (2020) and Pakistan.
As of present, the worst of Indian hostility to China, which surged following the COVID pandemic and the 2020 Galwan Valley Clashes, has cooled. The two countries have normalised diplomacy again, India has softened its tilt to the US as unpredictability has stemmed from Washington, and their leaders have made. However, there is one underlying structural factor which does not change: India will continue to view China as a regional competitor, even if not an outright enemy, and seek to contest it for influence throughout the South Asian sphere. New Delhi's national interest has always been to affirm what we might describe as a "backyard" policy in South Asia, which we define as the region comprised of the wider subcontinent including Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. This backyard policy assumes that India's security hinges upon maintaining hegemony over this geopolitical space, which is contested by Pakistan (as the primary adversary) and China (the great power competitor), and thus it is imperative New Delhi dominate the smaller states.
However, because China has more economic power and resources, India's traditional dominance over these states in recent decades has been challenged precisely because Beijing can offer them economic benefits they can't compete with in the form of trade and infrastructure investment. At the same time, these South Asian countries utilise ties with Beijing as a means to assert geopolitical leverage and autonomy against India and hedging. Nepal, for example, wants to diversify its trade as its limited geography has allowed India to impose trade embargos against it, as they did following the 2015 earthquake.
As a consequence, India's political sphere sees these tragic floods in Nepal and Tibet as an opportunity to push hostile narratives against China, as it remains India's long-term strategic goal to try and challenge Chinese influence in Nepal. This has produced a misinformation campaign which deliberately seeks to paint China as responsible for this natural disaster. As a result, India's very large social media and "fake news" ecosystem is capable of generating and pushing these baseless claims virally, and their presence is very easy to detect on the many social media posts regarding the disaster.
In reality, Nepal isn't going to be quick to jump to such a judgment. It has one goal: To receive as much assistance as it can get, which is not political despite the motives of the various parties who offer it. Kathmandu will likely continue an all-weather friend policy that will seek to maximise its fairly precarious geographic realities by fostering close relationships with China, India, the United States and others.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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