India's "Foreign Hand" Playbook Against Protests

Overview

Across seven decades, Indian governments — irrespective of ruling party — have repeatedly responded to mass protest movements with a recognizable three-step script: first, label the movement “foreign-funded” or infiltrated by “anti-national” elements; second, deploy financial and investigative agencies (FCRA cancellations, ED probes, CBI raids) against organizers and their support networks; and third, arrest key leaders under stringent anti-terror laws such as the UAPA, framing peaceful dissent as a security “conspiracy.” This report traces that pattern through the 2020-21 anti-CAA/Shaheen Bagh protests and the CJP (Citizens for Justice and Peace) network, the 2020-21 farmers’ protests against the farm laws, the 2018 Bhima Koregaon case, and the broader FCRA-based NGO crackdown, situating them in the longer history of India’s “foreign hand” narrative dating to the Emergency era.

The Recurring Script

The pattern has three consistent stages, each reinforced by sympathetic media amplification before formal legal action begins.

Delegitimization stage: Government spokespeople, aligned media, and officials brand a peaceful protest as backed by “anti-national,” “separatist,” or “foreign” forces before any evidence is produced, shifting public debate away from the protest’s substantive demands.¹²
Financial-choke stage: Enforcement Directorate (ED) money-laundering probes and Ministry of Home Affairs FCRA suspensions are opened against organizing NGOs and individuals, cutting off funding and creating a paper trail retroactively used to justify “conspiracy” charges.³⁴⁵
Leadership-decapitation stage: Named protest leaders and civil-society figures are arrested under UAPA, sedition, or IPC conspiracy provisions, often based on WhatsApp chat logs, “protected witness” testimony, or laptop files whose authenticity has been independently contested.⁶⁷⁸

Anti-CAA Protests and the CJP Network

The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests that began in December 2019 were led by student groups at Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University, and by the women-led Shaheen Bagh sit-in, before spreading nationwide; by early 2020, at least 27 people had died and over 1,000 were arrested or booked across states, mostly BJP-ruled. After the February 2020 Delhi riots, in which 53 people died, Delhi Police shifted its investigative theory away from spontaneous communal violence toward a “deep-rooted conspiracy” allegedly hatched by anti-CAA organizers, and arrested student leader Umar Khalid, JNU scholar Sharjeel Imam, and members of the “Delhi Protest Support Group” WhatsApp collective under UAPA.⁹¹⁰⁷

The police charge sheet alleged the riots were timed to coincide with then-US President Donald Trump’s February 2020 visit to “internationalize” claims of minority persecution and defame the government, with funding allegedly promised by the banned Popular Front of India (PFI). As of late 2025, Delhi Police escalated this theory further, telling the Supreme Court the riots were a premeditated “regime-change operation,” relying on encrypted messages and pseudonymous “protected witnesses” (Golf, Bravo, Helium) rather than direct forensic evidence. Activists and legal commentators countered that the case criminalizes ordinary organizing activity — coordination chats, public speeches, and attendance at Shaheen Bagh — treating participation itself as evidence of conspiracy, a pattern one analysis explicitly compared to the “Bhima Koregaon case model” of retrofitting protest participation into a terror plot.¹¹¹²¹³¹⁴⁷

Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), the civil-rights organization co-founded by Teesta Setalvad after the 2002 Gujarat riots, has faced a parallel, longer-running version of this pattern. CJP and its affiliated Sabrang Trust were investigated by the CBI for alleged FCRA violations from 2014 onward, with raids, a 2016 cancellation notice, and a formal charge sheet in 2016; Setalvad herself was arrested by Gujarat’s Anti-Terrorism Squad in June 2022 on charges of criminal conspiracy and fabricating evidence, before receiving Supreme Court bail. Critics, including The Week, characterized the sustained legal pressure on CJP as retaliation for its role pursuing accountability in the 2002 Gujarat riots against the Modi-led state government of the time. In July 2026, CJP again found itself at the center of protest-related legal exposure after threatening action against Delhi Police over the crackdown on the 20 July “Sansad Chalo” student protests, which the Supreme Court subsequently ordered released for detainees without criminal records.¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷¹⁸¹⁹

Farmers’ Protests: The “Khalistani” Frame

When farmers began camping at Delhi’s borders in late 2020 against three farm laws, media outlets and BJP spokespeople quickly reframed the agrarian protest through a “Khalistani” separatist lens, despite farmer unions explicitly rejecting the label with placards reading “We are farmers, not terrorists”. A DisinfoLab investigation traced the “Khalistan bogey” to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) wing and pro-Imran Khan social media accounts, which Indian mainstream media and right-wing influencers then amplified without verification, including a viral but unrelated old photograph misrepresented as a farmers’-protest scene. Attorney General K.K. Venugopal told the Supreme Court on January 12, 2021, that “Khalistanis have infiltrated” the protests, lending official credibility to a claim traced by researchers to foreign disinformation networks[cronology].²⁰²¹²²¹

Stage	Farmers’ Protest (2020-21)	Government/Media Action
Delegitimization	Protesters labeled “Khalistani,” “anti-national,” misinformed pawns¹²	TV anchors, BJP spokespeople, Attorney General statements²⁰²¹²²
Financial choke	ED money-laundering probe into protest funding and NGOs after Republic Day violence³	25+ FIRs against farmer leaders including Rakesh Tikait, Yogendra Yadav, Medha Patkar³
Leadership targeting	Prominent union leaders named in FIRs; hawala/foreign-fund surveillance alleged³	Government told Supreme Court banned Khalistani organizations had “infiltrated” protests³

Following the January 26, 2021 Republic Day tractor march that turned violent at the Red Fort, the ED opened a formal money-laundering investigation into farm-protest funding sources, and Delhi Police filed more than 25 FIRs naming virtually every prominent farmer-union leader, including Rakesh Tikait and Yogendra Yadav. A widely circulated claim that a “Khalistani flag” replaced the Indian tricolor at Red Fort was fact-checked as false by The Wire and other outlets, which found the flag was a Nishan Sahib — a Sikh religious symbol distinct from separatist iconography — but the false claim had already shaped television coverage for days. The government ultimately repealed the three farm laws in November 2021 without ever substantiating the foreign-infiltration allegations in court, though the “Khalistani” framing achieved its short-term goal of splitting public sympathy for the protest along communal and regional lines.²³¹

Bhima Koregaon: The Template Case

The 2018 Bhima Koregaon-Elgar Parishad case is arguably the clearest template for how caste or communal violence gets legally re-engineered into an anti-state “conspiracy” prosecution. Violence broke out on January 1, 2018, near Pune during a Dalit commemoration event; the original FIR named Hindu-right local figures as instigators, but within months Pune Police pivoted the investigation toward ten, later sixteen, human-rights lawyers, professors, and activists — dubbed “urban Naxalites” — alleging they had organized the preceding Elgar Parishad event with CPI (Maoist) funding and had plotted to assassinate Prime Minister Modi in a “Rajiv Gandhi-style” attack. The evidence centered on letters and files allegedly recovered from activist Rona Wilson’s laptop, but a 2021 forensic report from the US-based firm Arsenal Consulting found that a hacker had remotely planted at least 22 incriminating files onto Wilson’s computer using malware, casting fundamental doubt on the prosecution’s foundational evidence.²³²⁴²⁵⁸²⁶

Despite this forensic challenge, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) took over the case in 2020, filed additional charge sheets against Father Stan Swamy (who died in custody in 2021 without ever being convicted), Gautam Navlakha, Anand Teltumbde, and others, alleging ties to Pakistan’s ISI and international arms procurement from Nepal and Manipur. As of 2025, seven years after the arrests began, no charges have been formally framed and trial has not begun, with over 300 witnesses still to testify — an extraordinary delay that critics argue functions as “process as punishment,” incarcerating dissenters indefinitely without ever needing to secure a conviction. The Guardian’s in-depth investigation concluded that mounting evidence suggests the “initial conspiracy was a fiction,” constructed to link progressive Dalit-rights organizing with a fabricated Maoist assassination plot.²⁷²⁸²⁹²⁶³⁰

FCRA as the Financial Instrument of Delegitimization

Underlying nearly every case above is the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA), originally enacted during the 1975-77 Emergency out of fears that foreign powers were funding domestic dissent, and substantially strengthened by the Modi government in 2020. Since 2014, more than 20,700 NGOs have had FCRA registrations cancelled or left non-renewed, including Greenpeace India (2015, for “prejudicially affecting economic interests” after anti-nuclear and anti-coal campaigning), Amnesty International India (forced to halt Indian operations in 2020 after ED account freezes), Oxfam India, the Centre for Policy Research, and climate activist Sonam Wangchuk’s Ladakh-based NGO in 2025. In June 2026, the Ministry of Home Affairs adopted further FCRA amendments granting sweeping new powers to police NGO leadership and operations, prohibiting contributions for activities deemed “detrimental to national interest” — a deliberately vague standard that Amnesty International warns will be used to further suppress human-rights and minority-rights groups. Notably, only about 27.7 percent of all NGOs ever registered under FCRA remain active today, and organizations working on minority rights, environmental protection, and free legal aid have been disproportionately targeted.³¹³²⁴⁵³³³⁴³⁵

Historical Roots: The Emergency-Era “Foreign Hand”

This pattern is not a recent BJP-specific innovation but has deep roots in Indian political history. The FCRA itself was passed in 1976 during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, explicitly to police “foreign interference” following the JP Narayan-led movement and fears that Western intelligence agencies were funding opposition activity — the same “foreign hand” rhetoric Indira Gandhi famously invoked in the late 1970s and again after her 1980 return to power. The legal-financial infrastructure created then — an ambiguous, discretionarily enforced law nominally about transparency but functionally about control over civil society funding — has proven durable across governments of different ideological stripes, showing that the “foreign hand” and “anti-national conspiracy” narrative is a structural feature of the Indian security state’s relationship to dissent rather than a partisan tactic unique to any single administration.⁵³³

Assessing the Evidence and Competing Narratives

Government agencies maintain that genuine national-security concerns justify these interventions: officials point to documented cases of Pakistani ISPR-linked disinformation shaping the farmers’-protest narrative, and to real historical precedent of foreign intelligence funding domestic unrest, as grounds for vigilance. However, independent forensic investigation (in Bhima Koregaon), fact-checking organizations (on the Red Fort “Khalistani flag” and Trump-visit “regime change” claims), and years-long prosecutorial delays without formal charge-framing collectively suggest that in several marquee cases, the “foreign conspiracy” framing preceded rather than followed the evidence, and that prolonged pre-trial detention under UAPA — which makes bail nearly impossible — has itself become the primary punitive mechanism, independent of eventual conviction. The consistent targeting of financially vulnerable civil-society intermediaries (NGOs, unions, student collectives) rather than direct suppression of protesters themselves reflects a strategic choice: choking the infrastructure that sustains sustained dissent is more durable than confronting protests in the street.⁸²⁶²²²⁷²

Overview

The Recurring Script

Anti-CAA Protests and the CJP Network

Farmers’ Protests: The “Khalistani” Frame

Bhima Koregaon: The Template Case

FCRA as the Financial Instrument of Delegitimization

Historical Roots: The Emergency-Era “Foreign Hand”

Assessing the Evidence and Competing Narratives

Footnotes

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