Our friend, Vivek Wadhwa, has just written an op-ed in Hindustan Times. He attacks the Western media and the diaspora for predicting a revolution that major Western outlets never forecast.
In an op-ed “The revolution that the West is imagining,” published in the Hindustan Times on October 21, Vivek Wadhwa argues that Western journalists and Indian intellectuals in America have been predicting a revolution in India that has failed to arrive. Actually, none of the major Western outlets predicted a revolution.
Wadhwa’s argument is familiar. Many Indian commentators and pro-government media outlets treat criticism from abroad as ill-informed, biased or malicious. On the same day Wadhwa’s piece appeared, the RSS-affiliated Organiser accused Western outlets of hypocrisy in their coverage of India’s protests. It also amplified Republic TV’s attack on The Washington Post’s crowd counts. Wadhwa, an American citizen known in Silicon Valley, gives that argument a respectable cosmopolitan face.
Wadhwa misleads his readers
Wadhwa writes this op-ed during a trip to Delhi. He reports that life there is normal apart from traffic jams. He faults those who criticize India from abroad.
Wadhwa assigns his targets (Western media and diaspora) a prediction they did not make. He then treats the failure of that imagined prediction as proof that criticism of the government was wrong. Wadhwa interprets the normalcy in Delhi produced by heavy policing as evidence that nothing is amiss. The op-ed rests on anecdotes from a narrow slice of India. And it exempts its author from his own rule that people abroad should stay out of India’s politics.
Point by point
1. No major Western outlet predicted a revolution. The only outlet Wadhwa names for the current protests is The Washington Post. The Post reported that the youth protests were the most serious challenge Modi has faced since 2014. That is a statement about political pressure, not regime change or revolution. Other coverage also explicitly ruled out the outcome Wadhwa says the West expected:
- Reuters noted that the government remains stable and the next election is not due until 2029. It added that analysts consider comparisons with Bangladesh and Nepal imperfect.
- Foreign Policy wrote in July that the Indian protests were unlikely to become a mass movement like those that ousted governments in Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. In October it added that the key difference between India and its neighbors is that Modi’s government remains popular.
- Ian Bremmer’s GZERO concluded that the protesters are not likely to bring down Modi’s government.
The sharpest Western verdict probably came in a Foreign Policy opinion piece. It said the protests marked the end of Modi’s unchallenged dominance. That is a long way from a revolution.
2. The word “revolution” came from protesters, not reporters. Reuters quoted a young man shouting “Long live the revolution” as police bundled him into a bus. It is likely a translation of Inquilab Zindabad, a slogan heard at Indian protests routinely. Reporting a slogan is not predicting a revolution.
3. The normalcy Wadhwa saw was enforced. Ahead of the October 16 Tiranga march, Delhi Police deployed more than 6,000 personnel around Connaught Place, on top of 26,000 central armed police already stationed in central Delhi. The Hindustan Times, Wadhwa’s own publisher, quoted a police officer calling it among the largest deployments in the capital since the 2020 riots. Police asked people to stay away and detained about 150, picking up the organizers Abhijeet Dipke and Neha Bora before they reached the protest. Even so, the Associated Press reported that thousands thronged Connaught Place. That is hardly the picture of a quiet city. The traffic jams Wadhwa posted about on October 10 also had a cause: The Washington Post reported that metal barricades choked the streets that day as police moved against young demonstrators.
4. How “normal” was Delhi on October 10? On the day Wadhwa says everything seemed normal, the UN human rights office voiced concern about mass detentions of demonstrators, protest leaders, lawyers and journalists in Delhi.
5. Wadhwa’s Kashmir example is undercut by the facts. Wadhwa calls New York Times’ reporting on sinking houseboats misinformation. Actually, Indian newspapers also reported the plight of houseboats in Kashmir. In December 2020 the Daily Excelsior counted ten houseboats sunk in two months, which owners blamed on a ban on repairs. In February 2022, the year of Wadhwa’s visit, more collapsed under heavy snowfall. The full houseboats Wadhwa saw along the lakefront do not refute that.
6. Wadhwa’s Gallup statistic is beside the point. Wadhwa is right that two-thirds of Americans have little or no confidence in the mass media. But public distrust of the media is not evidence that any particular story was inaccurate or biased.
7. Wadhwa concedes the substance. Wadhwa acknowledges that the Election Commission faces legitimate questions and that democracy may be at stake. Those are exactly the matters the Western press coverage reported. Having conceded the substance, Wadhwa’s only remaining objection is to who is saying it.
Wadhwa’s own vantage point
(a) Access and interest. Wadhwa presents himself as an observer reporting what he sees. He is not a disinterested observer. In 2023 he wrote in Fortune that “all of India” was joining his cancer-research quest. The column was illustrated with a photo of him discussing the project with Prime Minister Modi. He is an adjunct professor at IIT Kharagpur, a government institution, and a contributor to the Observer Research Foundation. He is building his company, Vionix Biosciences, in India.
Wadhwa’s cultivation of those in power predates Modi. By his own account, then–education minister Kapil Sibal handed him his own Aakash tablet in 2011. This is not to imply bad faith. But an entrepreneur whose venture depends on official goodwill in India has a vested interest that readers should take note of.
(b) Wadhwa’s narrow window. Wadhwa’s evidence is nearly three weeks spent mostly at IIT Delhi and IIT Kharagpur, with students and faculty, and in marketplaces and hostels. Elite engineering campuses are not India. Casual conversations with a visiting American entrepreneur may not be where students would share their politics. That some students could not name the protesters’ demands tells us about those students, not about the country.
(c) A rule for others. Wadhwa counts himself among “we expatriates” with American passports who should leave India’s democracy to Indians. Yet here he is commenting on Indian politics in one of India’s largest newspapers. He also says he offered his 2022 Kashmir account to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Foreign Policy and Fortune. Commentary from abroad, it seems, is welcome when it defends the government.
(d) Wadhwa’s record of overestimation. In 2012 Wadhwa said the $35 Aakash tablet had the potential to revolutionize India by putting millions of Indians online instantly. He predicted it would drive tablet prices down worldwide. The first model was mired in controversy over its premature release, and the device never delivered the transformation he forecast. In 2023 he described Vionix as more ambitious than what Theranos pretended to achieve, and said he could build early versions of it in India for $1 million. That would be revolutionary.
Bottom line
India’s protests deserve accurate coverage, and the Western press deserves criticism when it gets things wrong. Wadhwa’s op-ed does not show that it did. It invents a forecast, mistakes enforced normalcy for contentment, and asks critics abroad to remain silent while its author keeps speaking. That is not a correction of the record. It is a defense of the government presented as one.
— John Laxmi
October 21, 2026
* Wadhwa was a member of the NewSA-USA email group until he left it a few years ago.
