The trajectory of India-US ties is a little baffling. Viewed from an angle, the relationship is in the pink of health.

And yet, a 360-degree view paints a different story.

The core issue remains Washington’s missionary commitment to promote its brand of cultural liberalism. Along with it, the unstated agenda of maintaining the post-Cold War liberal international order and its geopolitical and ideological hegemony through tools and mechanisms such as “human rights” and “universal religious freedom” that sublimate decision-making authority from sovereign nation-states to international institutions controlled and designed by it.

Trouble is, the ‘2022 Report on International Religious Freedom’, an annual exercise by the IRF (International Religious Freedom), a wing of the US State Department, is mostly based on discredited data, sloppy research, dubious statistics, citation loops and fake news.

If a rising India ‘concerns’ the US enough for it to issue such dubious, discredited reports based on sources that have clear conflict of interests, it stands to reason that a more powerful, strategically autonomous India, the world’s most populous nation and the largest democracy, may make the US even more insecure.

As soon as Garcetti landed in New Delhi, US embassy of India initiated a programme in partnership with IREX, an organisation supported by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and Ford Foundation, among others, for “teaching” Indian youths to “think critically”.