Arise Bharat

-Amit Malviya

The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) has long positioned itself as a research institution, but a closer look at its funding sources, survey designs, and outputs reveals a troubling pattern.

1. Foreign Funding with an Agenda CSDS has received repeated infusions of funds from organisations like the Ford Foundation and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC, Canada), backed by global think tanks including the Gates Foundation, DFID (UK), NORAD (Norway), Hewlett Foundation and Dutch agencies. These are not disinterested donors. Their track record in India shows a clear pattern—inject money into institutions that can fracture society from within, especially along caste and community lines.

2. Caste as the Primary Lens — for Hindus Alone Much of CSDS’s survey work, especially under its Lokniti programme, revolves around slicing and dicing Hindu society into castes—OBCs, EBCs, Dalits, upper castes—and then publishing detailed polling data about their voting preferences. Every election cycle, “analysis” based on this so-called data is splashed across platforms like The Hindu and The Indian Express. The outcome is predictable: headlines and narratives designed to reinforce caste divides within the Hindu community.

3. Silence on Muslim Fault Lines Strikingly, while Hindu voters are relentlessly categorised by caste, no such effort is made to map caste divisions within the Muslim community. Dalit Muslims, Ashrafs, Ajlafs, Arzals — these realities are ignored. CSDS’s surveys present Muslims as a monolithic bloc, carefully shielding their internal stratifications from public debate, even while exploiting every fault line within Hindu society.

4. No Scientific Basis — Yet Given Legitimacy Survey respondents in India are never asked their caste with scientific accuracy. Coding caste into polling data is guesswork, yet CSDS parades this as hard social science. The fact that newspapers of record give this speculative data prominent coverage raises serious questions: is this research, or narrative-building dressed up as research?

5. Foreign Interests and Domestic Enablers Let’s be clear: Ford Foundation, global donor consortia and Western think tanks have a vested interest in weakening India’s social fabric. By funding CSDS, they ensure that caste fault lines among Hindus are kept alive and magnified in political discourse. Earlier it was Yogendra Yadav who churned out “scientific” but deeply misleading forecasts that suited Congress’s politics. Today, Sanjay Kumar continues the same tradition—feeding selective numbers and fake precision to reinforce Congress’s narrative.

6. Not Errors — An Agenda When CSDS gets its projections spectacularly wrong, as it often does, it is not a case of error. It is agenda gone awry. The game is simple: manufacture divisions, inject them into the bloodstream of public discourse, and weaken India from within. CSDS is not just another think tank. With its foreign funding, selective caste lens, and unscientific methods, it is an instrument of narrative warfare. Its output is not scholarship—it is strategy. And India must recognise the danger.

(Author is the Incharge of BJP IT & Social Media Division)

Source: https://x.com/amitmalviya/status/1957700395935101432