Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar on Wednesday stressed the need for countering "doctored narratives" that seek to run down India's growth story and described the dumping of information as another way of "invasion".
He also cautioned that everything can be whitewashed and can "go down the drain" if people are not vigilant against such tendency.
India is rightly reckoned in the world as the land of opportunity and investment. "But all this can be muddied, if our information mechanism is not strong," he told a group of Indian Information Service probationers at his official residence here.
His remarks come against the backdrop of a political debate triggered by the BBC recently airing a two-part documentary on the 2002 Gujarat riots and India. The documentary was blocked by the government on social media platforms.
In the last two days, India's tax authorities carried out a "survey" operation in BBC offices in Delhi and Mumbai as part of an investigation into alleged tax evasion.
Without naming any organisation, the vice president said that in the last decade or so a narrative was set forth by a global news house that sought to "lay claim on its reputation".
The narrative was that someone possessed weapons of mass destruction and, therefore, an attack was just for the sake of humanity.
"Things happened, no weapons of mass destruction...," he said in an oblique reference to the Iraq war.
"Now, if India is on the rise, sinister designs are there to set afloat a narrative...we have to be alert.... Examine and you will find those reputations are not firm. Those reputations have failed humanity in recent years," he said.
The vice president asked the probationers to be the real protectors of democracy and nationalism.
He said, "A vicious tendency has grown, particularly amongst the so-called intelligentsia in our country. Anything coming from outside is sanctified, elevated...We have to question it."
"Friends, this cannot be allowed. This is not (freedom of) expression. If you examine our Indian Constitution every fundamental right is qualified," he told the probationers.
The vice president said that when the country was battling the Covid-19 pandemic, the narrative was "where is Covid?"
"It is a political tool to sidetrack the issue facing the nation. You have faced it," he said, adding that those who questioned the efficacy of Indian vaccines are "in the dock and our vaccines have done magic to us".
He told the IIS probationers that to fight misinformation, "we no longer have the luxury of delayed response".
"We cannot allow free fall of doctored narratives to run down our growth story. Now, if an India is on the rise, sinister designs are there to set afloat a narrative by free fall of information. We have to be alert. This dumping of information is another way of invasion. We have to boldly neutralise it," Dhankhar said.
Sometimes an industry is ruined because of the dumping of information, he noted.
"Now they have taken recourse to another - dumping of information which is untrue. You have now a more significant role than you ever had.... You are joining the service at a time when these challenges are on an incremental trajectory. In a split second, things get viral," he told the probationers.