How the fake news factory spun the $21 million lie

Lies don’t have legs, they say. Maybe not, but they sure have wings. If you don’t believe it, just look at how the $21 million lie has been flying around the country and the world for the past two weeks.

While you’re at it, you might also get a masterclass in how this whole racket of deceiving the public works. It all started in the US. After becoming President for a second time, Trump assigned billionaire Elon Musk the task of cutting down government expenses.

Musk’s office began by announcing, through the US state department, that it was shutting down USAID—the government agency that distributes foreign aid. To showcase government waste, they released a list that included the cancellation of a $21 million (about Rs 170 crore) grant, purportedly meant to increase voter turnout in India.

Taking a jab at the previous administration, Trump himself repeated this example and questioned: Was Biden’s government trying to help “someone else” win elections in India?

That was it: in India, the news was spun into a sensational claim that the US government had tried to influence the outcome of the previous Lok Sabha election. It was a serious accusation. But who had the time to verify it?

No one even bothered to ask: how could the US government send money to defeat Modi right under the nose of his own government? Was the government sleeping? And then, all hell broke loose. BJP MP Nishikant Dubey, former minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the PM’s economic advisor Sanjeev Sanyal and IT cell chief Amit Malviya—quite a chosen army of hitmen— with sundry other loyalists and a sycophantic media in tow pounced on the story.

They pointed fingers at the Congress and/or the opposition. Soon enough, lists and photos of journalists and ‘andolanjeevi’ (professional) activists who had likely received “American money” were doing the rounds.

But the whole concocted narrative unravelled fast. Indian Express decided to fact-check the story and found that no such grant had come to India, and that a $21 million USAID grant had gone to a ‘Nagorik Project’ in neighbouring Bangladesh, ostensibly to increase election awareness. It seems Elon Musk’s office mixed up Bangladesh with India. The very next day, a finance ministry report for 2023–24 also surfaced, detailing all USAID funding in India—and guess what?

No mention of any election-related grants. Even more interesting, the very USAID that was suddenly being painted as a national threat has several ongoing collaborations with the government at the Centre and state governments in BJP-run states. They run joint projects, hold meetings—and their leader Smriti Irani has even been an ambassador for USAID. Dozens of photos surfaced of sundry BJP leaders posing with USAID representatives.

In an ideal world, those who spread this lie would have apologised, or at the very least shut down the fake news cycle. But instead of apologising, the BJP’s IT cell launched an attack on Indian Express for exposing the truth.

Even after the lie had been busted, India’s ministry of external affairs issued a statement saying the US claims were “concerning” and would be investigated. The lapdog media promptly published the government’s statement but made no mention of the Indian Express exposé. To cover up the lie, BJP’s loyalists came up with three new arguments:

#1. ‘The USAID grant was planned but got cancelled before disbursement.’ A laughable excuse. If the money never came, how could it have influenced India’s 2024 Lok Sabha elections? The Washington Post also corroborated that USAID had never planned any such grant for India.

#2. ‘The real issue is a USAID grant given to India in 2012, during Congress rule.’ Again, the Washington Post debunked this, revealing that the 2012 USAID grant was meant to help the Election Commission of India assist African nations in election management—not for India’s own elections.

#3. ‘Trump himself said it!’ This was the last desperate defence. ‘Trump said it, so it must be true!’ But let’s get real—Trump and lies go hand in hand. US newspapers track his lies like a scoreboard. One analysis counted that Trump had lied 30,573 times during his first term—about 21 times a day! And here’s the real kicker: Trump himself contradicted his own accusations.

Day 1: “The money was to help someone else win India’s election.”

Day 2: “The money was a bribe to US Democratic Party leaders, routed through India.”

Day 3: “The money was sent to my friend PM Modi to help increase voter turnout.”

Day 4: He changed the amount from $21 million to $18 million. The moment Trump mentioned Modi, our lapdog media froze.

Suddenly, even they could see Trump was lying. You might think, ‘The truth won in the end.’ But think again.

If a lie reaches a hundred people, its rebuttal gets to a much smaller fraction. Most people will only remember that there was some shady business involving American money. If nothing else, this distraction buried the news of the deaths caused by government negligence at the Maha Kumbh Mela and the stampede at New Delhi railway station. The fake news industry thrives for a reason.