Newspeak 2.0: How Pro-Modi Cheerleaders in the Media are Steering His Government Toward Diplomatic Disaster

Prime Minister Narendra Modi strides onto the global stage, only for Donald Trump to seize the moment. In May 2025, after India’s Operation Sindoor unleashed missile strikes on Pakistani terror camps following the Pahalgam massacre that claimed 26 lives, Trump claimed he personally convinced both nations to avert a nuclear catastrophe. India flatly denied it. Within days, Trump retaliated with 50% tariffs on $48 billion of Indian exports. At international summits, he mocked Modi’s economy as dead and escalated H1B visa fees to $100,000, obliterating 70% of Indian tech jobs and tearing families apart, a crisis India’s foreign ministry branded as humanitarian. Yet Shubhangi Sharma, News18’s foreign policy editor, spins this string of humiliations as strategic autonomy. Through her polished Worldwise podcast and Finepoint columns, she paints Sindoor as a triumphant masterstroke, barely acknowledging Pakistan’s downing of an Indian Rafale jet or the hastily brokered ceasefire.

Sharma’s relentless propaganda mirrors a dangerous trend among pro-BJP media figures who sidestep the glaring failures of Modi’s foreign policy. Her work leaves India vulnerable, caught in a tightening vise of China’s territorial grabs, Pakistan’s nuclear posturing, and America’s trade assaults. Far from patriotic, this blind loyalty undermines the nation by concealing critical missteps that demand urgent correction. Modi’s 2019 Howdy Modi extravaganza in Houston, where 50,000 Indian-Americans rallied to bolster Trump’s re-election, promised a golden partnership. Trump won in 2024, but India reaped only tariffs and insults. Sharma and her allies would do well to heed this lesson or follow Vivek Ramaswamy’s path to ruin. The Indian-American entrepreneur mimicked Trump’s rhetoric on borders and culture wars, only to crash out fourth in Iowa, rejected as insufficiently MAGA. History warns that sycophancy backfires.

Pahalgam Disaster

Operation Sindoor unfolded after the Pahalgam attack, with India targeting nine Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba camps, claiming over 100 militants killed. Sharma describes it as a model of precision. Republic TV’s Arnab Goswami hails it as a benchmark victory, while Aaj Tak’s Sudhir Chaudhary declares it flawless. The reality stings. The strikes galvanized Pakistan’s military cohesion. Chinese-supplied air defenses downed an Indian Rafale, exposing technological weaknesses. Pakistan now labels Modi’s actions as provocations, backed by Chinese weapons fueling fresh cross-border raids. Islamabad secured a diplomatic coup, extending its nuclear umbrella to Saudi Arabia through a September 2025 defense pact, aligning the kingdom with Gulf powers far beyond India’s influence. Trump compounded the insult, praising Asim Munir, the army chief whose inflammatory rhetoric sparked Pahalgam, as his favorite field marshal during White House events and Egyptian summits. Without relentless scrutiny, India remains trapped in a cycle of bold gestures yielding no enduring security.

China’s grip tightens further. The 2020 Galwan clash, which killed 20 Indian soldiers, allowed Beijing to seize 2,000 square kilometers of Ladakh, with incursions persisting into 2025. June talks for disengagement stall as China constructs railways and bases at Doklam, the Bhutanese plateau where a tense 2017 standoff nearly erupted into war. Sharma fixates on Modi’s BRICS summit successes, downplaying China’s jet and drone supplies to Pakistan that forge a suffocating alliance against India. In April 2020, China’s rare-earth export ban derailed India’s electric vehicle ambitions. Despite vast reserves, India lacks processing facilities and scrambles for supplies. Sharma dismisses these setbacks as minor hurdles, typical of her propagandist gloss that buries India’s strategic wounds.

The U.S. delivers a crushing blow. Trump’s August 2025 tariffs, retaliation for India’s reliance on Russian oil, shuttered factories in Tiruppur, leaving thousands jobless in garment hubs supplying one-fifth of U.S. leather goods. India’s purchase of 1.7-1.9 million Russian barrels daily secures cheap energy but freezes Quad technology transfers and excludes India from AUKUS, weakening efforts to counter China. Sharma emphasizes a Modi-Trump camaraderie, ignoring the cascade of humiliations: Trump’s false ceasefire claims, his dead economy taunts, and visa fee hikes that broadcast Modi’s global embarrassment. Opposition leaders denounce it as economic blackmail, but Sharma’s cohort recasts it as fierce independence. This refusal to confront reality delays critical reforms, from diversifying energy sources to strengthening technological self-reliance. Covering up these failures invites further damage as China exploits the chaos.

Sharma’s calculated analyses carry the same fervent loyalty as the bombastic outbursts of Goswami and Chaudhary, just wrapped in a cooler veneer. Goswami sets Republic TV ablaze with theatrical rants, transforming every Modi move into a saga of unbreakable resolve, as when he labeled Sindoor a benchmark victory that rewrote regional power dynamics. Sharma, by contrast, slices through global summits with a propagandist’s precision, framing Sindoor as strategic clarity and Modi’s outcome-oriented action against Pakistan’s threats. Yet her columns, like the laughable July 2025 Finepoint screed “How India Cracked Trump’s Tariff Playbook And Avoided Japan’s Mistakes,” where she buffoonishly claims Modi “understands Trump’s psychology” and “outmaneuvers” him with “fierce autonomy,” sidestep the human cost—jobless workers in Tiruppur’s garment slums. 

What a clownish farce: while factories shutter and exports crater, Sharma peddles this delusional drivel as savvy diplomacy, turning economic carnage into a Modi fairy tale and exposing her as the ultimate regime buffoon whose hot air hurts India more than helps it. Chaudhary’s Aaj Tak DNA show takes a darker tack, once spinning wild tales tying Muslims to Pakistan’s plots or COVID origins, all under Modi’s decisive halo. His Sindoor praise, unmatched, ignores how it unified adversaries. Together, they form a relentless machine: Goswami’s pyrotechnics ignite the narrative, Chaudhary fuels it with conspiratorial venom, and Sharma refines it into typical Indian propaganda, all shielding Modi from accountability while India’s strategic ground crumbles. This trio’s refusal to question Modi hands rivals easy wins, hurting the nation they claim to champion.

In India, loyalists dismiss Modi’s 2024 rally remarks calling Muslims infiltrators stealing your wealth as tough security talk, ignoring UN hate-speech warnings that flagged the rhetoric as dangerously divisive. BJP’s Amit Shah brands migrants termites, further inflaming tensions.

The rot deepens with figures like Suhel Seth, a vile, self-styled brand guru and alleged serial predator, propped up as a strategic expert despite 2018 #MeToo accusations from seven women detailing his grotesque predations— alleged groping at Delhi parties, forcible kissing, and luring vulnerable young professionals to his lair with deceitful job promises. Tata Sons dumped him, but by October 2025, no legal justice has pinned him down.

Yet Seth slithers onto Times Now’s The Newshour with Navika Kumar, hyping Sindoor in May 2025 beside BJP’s Gaurav Bhatia and deflecting Trump’s tariffs in August. He also oozes into NewsX’s Cover Story in December 2024 on 2025 challenges, Republic TV’s Plenary Summit in March 2025 to pontificate on AI for Limitless India, and India Today’s Agenda in June 2025, smirking alongside BJP stalwarts on economic policy. Kumar’s pro-Modi echo chamber crowns him a sage, turning discourse into a cesspool where a loathsome creep thrives and regime propaganda festers unchecked.

Mirroring Sean Hannity

Fox’s Sean Hannity mirrors this rot with a sycophantic fervor that buries Trump’s blunders in a haze of blind devotion. In May 2025 on Air Force One, he lapped up Trump’s claim of brokering India-Pakistan peace over nuclear threats, ignoring India’s outright denials. In August, he parroted Trump’s “save lives” spin on Sindoor, glossing over how U.S. pressure forced the ceasefire while inflating Trump’s role to messianic heights. Hannity once hailed Trump’s tariffs as “the greatest, most successful threat operation ever in history,” dismissing market panic as whining from “stupid people” too feeble to grasp the genius. He spins chaotic trade policies that cripple allies like India into strokes of brilliance, visa fee hikes that devastate families into acts of fairness, and credit grabs for other nations’ diplomacy into towering victories. In a July 2025 Fox segment, he cheered Trump’s “unmatched deal-making” in global trade, ignoring how tariffs tanked India’s textile exports and fuelled unemployment. This mirrors Goswami’s border-loss epics and Chaudhary’s trade-war heroics—both camps shield their leaders from scrutiny, obscuring the wreckage and leaving their nations to pay the price.

They also bury bigotry that poisons alliances. In India, loyalists dismiss Modi’s 2024 rally remarks calling Muslims infiltrators stealing your wealth as tough security talk, ignoring UN hate-speech warnings that flagged the rhetoric as dangerously divisive. BJP’s Amit Shah brands migrants termites, further inflaming tensions. Modi’s 2023 U.S. visit triggered protests over minority treatment, with Biden raising human rights concerns that dented his strongman image and fueled opposition gains in 2024. Unaddressed, this bigotry risks critical Gulf oil supplies, as key partners like the UAE and Saudi Arabia grow wary of India’s domestic rhetoric. 

In the U.S., Hannity’s defense of Trump’s 2020 Chinese virus label as “factual” fueled anti-Asian attacks, costing suburban voters in key swing states. His dismissal of Trump’s 2016 Mexican rapists remark as mere “campaign heat” alienated Latino communities, sparking Fox boycotts and weakening coalition-building with diverse trade partners. In an October 2025 Fox segment, Hannity doubled down, framing Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric as “straight talk” that “cuts through globalist nonsense,” ignoring how it alienated allies like Canada and Mexico critical to U.S. trade networks. For both leaders, sycophancy backfires: Modi’s anti-Muslim rhetoric threatens energy security; Trump’s racial venom undercuts trade with diverse nations. Whitewashing hate isolates them, turning potential allies into adversaries and shrinking their global leverage.

India deserves raw, unfiltered truth, not a parade of cheerleading lies. Shubhangi Sharma’s propaganda, alongside Arnab Goswami’s bombast and Sudhir Chaudhary’s conspiracies, buries the harsh reality of Operation Sindoor’s failure, which only strengthened India’s enemies. It ignores China’s relentless land grabs in Ladakh while diplomatic talks drag on without progress, and it glosses over U.S. tariffs that expose India’s dependence on Russian oil, risking devastating price surges and supply disruptions that could unleash crippling inflation and choke economic growth. Genuine journalism would rip these failures apart, demanding solutions from all sides, instead this sycophantic fog fuels India’s collapse while handing rivals easy wins. In a world of contested borders, half-truths don’t protect; they leave India exposed and vulnerable.

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Vikram Zutshi is an American journalist and filmmaker specializing in religion, art, history, politics and culture.