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6 - Peddling Propaganda: The Information Research Department and India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2024

Paul M. McGarr
Affiliation:
King's College London
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Summary

This chapter focuses attention on covert or unattributable propaganda conducted in India by the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department. Between the outbreak of the Sino-Indian border war in 1962, and the Indian general election of 1967, IRD operations in the subcontinent peaked. At the time, the Indian government welcomed British support in an information war waged against Communist China. However, cooperation between London and New Delhi quickly waned. Britain’s propaganda initiative in India lacked strategic coherence and cut across the grain of local resistance to anti-Soviet material. The British Government found itself running two separate propaganda campaigns in the subcontinent: one openly focused on Communist China; and a second, secret programme, targeting the Soviet Union. Whitehall found it difficult to implement an integrated and effective anti-communist propaganda offensive in India. The chapter also recovers the importance of nonaligned nations in the story of Cold War covert propaganda and reveals that India was never a passive player in the propaganda Cold War.

Type
Chapter
Information
Spying in South Asia
Britain, the United States, and India's Secret Cold War
, pp. 124 - 152
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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