A Rising Power with a Retreating Voice

I read a New York Times report on 24 March 2026 documenting how Pakistan is scaling up its global information operations. New state-friendly media outlets with foreign journalists on their payrolls, expanded state television, and a new Social Media Protection and Regulatory Authority are pushing Islamabad's narrative to the world. At the same time, independent journalism at home faces systematic repression. Reading that piece from Mumbai, I found myself asking a question that should embarrass every Indian strategic thinker: why is a country with a fraction of India's economic weight running a more coherent global communication strategy than we are?

The answer is that India, a civilisation that invented structured discourse, has forgotten how to speak to the world. The consequences of that silence are no longer theoretical. They are arriving at our door.

The Empire You Have Not Noticed

Russia does not just have RT India. It has a global information empire operating in eleven languages: English, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Serbian, Chinese, Hindi, Portuguese, Indonesian, and Russian. It has dedicated channels broadcasting round the clock from Moscow, Washington, London, and Paris. RT en Español was the third language channel launched in 2009, years before German or French, because Moscow understood the strategic value of reaching 500 million Spanish speakers in Latin America before it worried about Western Europe. RT Arabic leads all Arabic-language television news channel websites in traffic, ahead of Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya. By 2025, RT was available to 950 million television viewers in more than 100 countries. Its online content received over 40 billion views, nearly double the previous year. Moscow is spending $388 million on RT in 2026 alone, part of a $1.77 billion state media budget that represents a new all-time high.

And that is only the visible layer. In February 2026, Forbidden Stories, the investigative journalism consortium, published its "Propaganda Machine" series based on 1,431 pages of leaked internal documents. The investigation revealed that a Russian network called "the Company," formerly run by Yevgeny Prigozhin's associates and now under the supervision of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), operates in more than 30 countries across Africa and Latin America. Nearly 90 "politologists," Russian spin doctors and PR specialists, travel throughout Africa and Latin America, maintaining a direct link to offices in Saint Petersburg. In South Africa, secret meetings took place between Russian agents and the ANC's secretary general. In Bolivia, seven operatives were dispatched to stabilise a friendly government. In the Sahel, Russian influence operations have transformed the media landscape of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.

The US State Department went further. In September 2024, it designated RT entities and individuals not for their journalism but for their covert influence activities, stating that RT had "moved beyond being simply a media outlet" and was now "an entity with cyber capabilities" engaged in "information operations, covert influence, and military procurement." RT uses proxy outlets that "purport to be independent from Russia" to disseminate content globally. One such platform, African Stream, is secretly run by RT. In Germany, RT covertly operates a Berlin-based English-language platform called "Red."

And then, on 5 December 2025, Putin personally inaugurated RT India from a studio in Noida. Former Indian Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid hosts the flagship geopolitical show. A multi-episode series on British colonialism features Shashi Tharoor. RT signed a formal MOU with Prasar Bharati for content exchange and joint live broadcasts. Its English-language channel already reaches a potential audience of 675 million through 18 Indian operators. A Hindi-language website targeting 500 million speakers is planned for 2026. The launch campaign splashed across six Indian cities. The slogan: "A new voice from an old friend." The X bio: "Not anti-western... just not western."

Russia is not doing something unusual. Russia is doing what every serious power does. The question is why India has nothing even remotely comparable. Not in Russia. Not in Africa. Not in Latin America. Not in the Gulf. Not anywhere.

The Global Arms Race India Has Not Joined

China spends an estimated $6 to $10 billion annually on what Xi Jinping calls the mission to "tell China's story well." CGTN broadcasts in six languages across more than 160 countries, with radio services in 65 languages. It has production centres in Washington, Nairobi, and London. Reporters Without Borders calls it a "65-language megaphone." A 2025 Graphika report found that Chinese state media uses generative AI to launder articles through social media accounts and disguise their origin. The content is often dull and the propaganda transparent, but the infrastructure exists and is constantly being refined.

Turkey has TRT World. Qatar has Al Jazeera, which, whatever one thinks of its editorial choices, is proof that a small state can build a globally credible news operation if it leaves its journalists alone. Pakistan, as the NYT documents, is building new media operations while positioning itself as a diplomatic mediator in the Iran war, which gives its communications real-world credibility that money alone cannot buy.

The United Kingdom recently added £11 million annually to the BBC World Service specifically for regions with "limited media freedom and rising disinformation." Britain treats the World Service not as a cultural luxury but as a tool of national influence, a strategic geopolitical asset funded because it delivers returns that no trade agreement or military exercise can replicate.

And then there is the American vacuum. In March 2025, the Trump administration gutted the US Agency for Global Media. Nearly 1,300 Voice of America employees were placed on leave. Radio Free Asia lost almost all of its 500 contractors. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty had its funding frozen, forcing the EU to provide a $6.2 million lifeline. The Atlantic Council called it "a massive gift to America's enemies." A Just Security analysis was blunter: "The Trump administration is unilaterally disarming by seeking to shut down U.S. international broadcasting." Russia and China are rushing to fill the void.

India could fill part of this vacuum. It has the language capabilities, diaspora, economic weight, democratic credentials, and geopolitical motivation. It has done nothing.

The Government That Speaks Only to Itself

This is not because the Indian government is silent. It is not. The Prime Minister has one of the largest social media followings of any world leader. The Ministry of External Affairs conducts daily briefings. The Press Information Bureau maintains a fact-checking operation. "Mann Ki Baat" reaches millions. The government speaks constantly and at great volume.

The problem is that it speaks only to the Indian audience. The entire communication architecture of the Indian state is designed for domestic consumption. The MEA briefing is aimed at Indian journalists covering foreign policy for Indian readers. Mann Ki Baat addresses Indian citizens about Indian governance. The PM's social media presence, while global in reach, is domestic in intent, designed to consolidate support at home rather than shape perceptions abroad. When the government says it wants to be Vishwaguru, the world's teacher, it has built a classroom with no windows or doors. The teacher is speaking. But the lecture does not leave the room.

A Vishwaguru needs to speak to the world in the world's languages, about the world's concerns, with credibility that transcends its own borders. India's current communication infrastructure does none of these things.

I explored some of these limitations in an earlier piece on this blog, "If India Were My Client," where I examined how India's foreign policy communication would look if assessed by a professional political communication strategist rather than a diplomat. The diagnosis was clear then and remains clear now: India communicates like a government talking to itself, not like a civilisation talking to the world.

151 Out of 180

India's inability to project a voice globally is inseparable from the credibility crisis in its domestic media landscape. You cannot build a global news service on a foundation that the world does not trust.

India ranks 151st out of 180 countries on the 2025 World Press Freedom Index, below Nepal, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. The trajectory is instructive: 142nd in 2021, 161st in 2023, a marginal recovery since. RSF cites political control, legal intimidation, and economic pressure as the primary factors.

The numbers are paradoxical. India has nearly 900 private television channels, half of which focus on news. About 140,000 registered publications. 20,000 daily newspapers in more than 20 languages. The world's largest English-speaking population after the United States. 32 million citizens living abroad, the largest diaspora in the world. By every raw measure, India should be an information superpower. What it does not have is a single institutional voice that speaks to the world with credibility, independence, and strategic intent.

The self-inflicted damage is accelerating. India's content takedown regime is now, according to industry executives, the shortest in the world. In February 2026, the takedown window was compressed from 24-36 hours to 2-3 hours. As of 24 March, the Indian Express reports the government is considering reducing it further to one hour. Simultaneously, multiple ministries, including Home Affairs, Defence, External Affairs, and Information and Broadcasting, are being empowered to issue blocking orders independently under Section 69A of the IT Act, a power currently held only by the IT Ministry. The government has escalated from blocking individual posts to withholding entire accounts, with multiple accounts critical of the government being withheld in recent weeks. X's blocking notice to users states it is "unable to provide additional information due to legal restrictions." Meta has privately called the new timelines "challenging" and noted the government did not consult industry before notifying the rules.

This is not a content moderation framework. It is a censorship architecture being built in real time, and the world is watching. RT India can position itself as operating in a "hospitable" country because India's own record of press freedom makes comparisons with Western countries favourable to Russia. India's information deficit is not just a gap in capability. It is a gap that others are exploiting.

The Legacy Nobody Has Built

No Indian government has ever built a global information infrastructure. This is not a failure of one party or one leader. It is a failure of every government India has had since 1947.

Nehru's India had All India Radio's External Services, which broadcast in multiple languages and carried genuine credibility in the Non-Aligned world. But it was never scaled, never modernised, and never given the institutional independence that would have made it a global force. Indira Gandhi, who understood power better than most, never invested in projecting India's voice beyond its borders. The Congress governments that followed treated communication as an afterthought, something diplomats did at cocktail receptions, not something institutions did at scale. Vajpayee's government, which had the vision to build the Golden Quadrilateral and launch the nuclear programme, did not think to build a global media presence. The UPA years, which coincided with India's economic rise and the explosion of digital media, produced nothing.

The irony is that the leader best positioned to build this is the one currently in office. Narendra Modi has the largest personal global brand of any Indian Prime Minister in history. He has presided over India's G20 presidency, its emergence as the fifth-largest economy, and the construction of digital public infrastructure, from UPI to Aadhaar, that the world studies and replicates. He has 32 million diaspora Indians as a ready-made global audience. He has repeatedly demonstrated the political will to build institutions at scale when he believes they matter.

If Modi were to build an Indian Global Media Service with genuine editorial independence, it would be a legacy that no predecessor attempted, and no successor could undo. It would do for India's voice what UPI did for India's payments: create infrastructure that outlasts the government that built it. The question is whether the same government that is compressing content takedown windows to one hour and empowering multiple ministries to silence social media accounts has the imagination to see that building a credible voice requires protecting the very freedoms it is currently curtailing.

That is the paradox at the heart of India's information deficit. The leader with the best chance of solving it is also the leader whose instincts on press freedom make the solution harder.

What a Serious Indian Information Strategy Would Look Like

If India came to us tomorrow and said, "We want to build a global information presence," this is what we would tell them.

First and foremost, do not build a television channel. Build an ecosystem. The BBC is not a TV channel. It is a global media empire: television, radio, podcasts, digital platforms, language services, training academies, and a brand that means something in 42 languages. Al Jazeera is not a channel either. It is an Arabic and English-language news operation, a digital platform, a documentary unit, a media training institute, and an investigative journalism brand that has broken stories from Abu Ghraib to the Pandora Papers. RT is not a channel. It is an eleven-language multimedia network with a news agency (Ruptly), proxy outlets across continents, a journalist training academy operating in 35 African countries, and a documentary film festival. Even Pakistan is building an ecosystem: state-friendly media operations, a social media regulatory authority, diplomatic positioning, and international mediation roles that generate organic credibility.

India needs an Indian Global Media Service. Not a government mouthpiece. Not a louder Doordarshan. A credible, editorially independent, strategically funded institution that operates at scale.

Here is what it would require.

An English-language global news operation is the obvious starting point, but only the starting point. The real power lies in Indian-language services broadcasting outward: Hindi to the Gulf and Africa, where millions of Indians live and work; Tamil to Sri Lanka and South-East Asia; Bengali to Bangladesh; Urdu to Pakistan and the broader Islamic world. India is the only country in the world that can speak natively in languages that reach South Asia, South-East Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. No other nation has this linguistic range. India is not using it.

A digital-first platform designed for the age of social media, not satellite television. The BBC World Service's recent funding increase was specifically targeted at digital. RT's 40 billion online views in 2025 came from social media, not television. The next global news operation will be built on phones, not television sets.

An investigative journalism unit with genuine editorial independence. This is the hardest and most important part. The lesson from every successful global news operation is the same: credibility requires editorial independence. The BBC World Service works because the BBC's journalism is trusted. Al Jazeera works, within its limitations, because Qatar is a small state with limited foreign policy interests and, on most issues, leaves its reporters alone. RT does not work in the West precisely because everyone knows it is the Kremlin's voice. CGTN does not work globally because, as one analyst put it, "the audience is always the bosses in Beijing, not the average viewer overseas."

India's model should be closer to Al Jazeera than to RT. Strategically funded by the state, editorially independent by statute. One that can cover the Iran war from the perspective of the 8 million Indians in the Gulf. One that can report on Africa from the perspective of India's growing economic engagement. One that can cover the Global South with the authority of a country that is simultaneously democratic, developing, and civilisationally ancient.

A media training and exchange programme that builds relationships with journalists across the Global South. RT Academy has already trained 1,700 journalists from dozens of countries. China trains African broadcasters through exchange programmes. India, with genuine expertise in democratic journalism and running the world's largest election operation, offers nothing comparable.

And critically, a fact-checking and verification infrastructure that operates in real time during crises. As I wrote on this blog in "The First War India Fought Twice," the May 2025 India-Pakistan crisis exposed our domestic media as a disinformation machine that destroyed India's credibility precisely when it mattered most. The Reuters Institute found that "almost no major news channel in India has any fact-checking desk of its own." That institutional gap is not just a media problem. It is a national security vulnerability.

This would require something that no Indian government has ever been willing to do: invest in an institution and then leave it alone. Fund it like the BBC World Service. Staff it with independent professional journalists, not bureaucrats. Give it editorial independence by statute, not by convention. Accept that a credible Indian voice will sometimes say things that the government of the day does not want to hear. And stop building censorship infrastructure, because every account you block under Section 69A, every one-hour takedown deadline you impose, every ministry you empower to silence dissent makes it harder, not easier, for India to be heard.

The price of credibility is tolerance. It is a price worth paying, because the alternative is what we have now.

The Teacher Whose Lecture Does Not Leave the Room

India wants to be Vishwaguru. The world's teacher. But a teacher whose lecture does not leave the classroom is not a world teacher. A teacher whose own students are reading from someone else's textbook has already lost the lesson.

Right now, Russia is telling India's story from a Noida studio and from 30 countries across three continents. China is telling it from Beijing in 65 languages. Pakistan is telling it from Islamabad while mediating a war. Turkey is telling it from Istanbul. The BBC is telling it from London. Everyone except India is telling India's story.

Every missile India builds, every satellite it launches, every trade agreement it signs, every diplomatic initiative it pursues is undermined by the fact that the country has no institutional mechanism to speak to the world in its own voice. India, the civilisation that gave the world the Arthashastra, which understood information as a sovereign capability two millennia before anyone else, now finds itself mute in the global conversation. In contrast, others speak on its behalf, about it, and occasionally against it.

This is not a media problem. It is a strategic vulnerability. And until India treats it as one, it will remain a rising power with a retreating voice, a Vishwaguru whose lecture never leaves the room.