A recently published investigative article on Substack revealed that some prominent American journalists were given funded trips to China by the China-United States Exchange Foundation for pushing a pro-China narrative in the American media. The article written by Natalie Winters listed the names of American journalists who went on these funded trips. The list includes the name of Indian-origin American journalist, columnist, and policy analyst, Shikha Dalmia.
The article relies on U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings, which disclosed that the CUSEF hired Washington lobbying firms with the stated objective of generating “favorable coverage” and “positive messages” about China in the American media.
The list continues:
— Natalie Winters (@nataliegwinters) July 27, 2026
– Craig Gilbert, former Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Washington bureau chief
– Tony Semerad, Salt Lake Tribune reporter
– Shikha Dalmia, former The Week columnist
– Jonathan Broder, former Newsweek senior writer
According to Natalie Winters, the FARA filings did not directly name the American journalists who received these sponsored trips. To identify these journalists, she cross-referenced the FARA filings with archived trip rosters, program brochures, and lobbying disclosures.
She examined archived participant lists for China exchange programs, internal planning documents describing media outreach objectives, and the articles written by some of these journalists following their visits. According to Winters, these articles were relatively favorable toward China.
Among these articles was an article written by Shikha Dalmia, titled “China bashing is for Losers”, published in Forbes. Dalmia wrote the article the same year she traveled to China. In the article, she argued that China bashing had become a “bipartisan sport” for the election season at that time.
“Republicans and Democrats are sowing the seeds for their own destruction by running on an anti-China platform. Rather than vilifying China, they would do themselves – and the American economy – a world of good by trumpeting the benefits of trade with it. There is not just a very good economic — but also a very good political — argument for taking a more enlightened approach to China,’ Dalmia wrote in the article after arguing at length about how bashing China was self-damaging for American politicians.
Who is Shikha Dalmia?
Shikha Dalmia has written for publications like Reason, The Week, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Bloomberg Opinion. Shikha is popular among the liberal circles for her articles ‘bashing’ Prime Minister Modi, the BJP, and the Hindutva ideology. She has written articles accusing the Modi government of weakening India’s liberal democratic institutions, eroding religious pluralism, and encouraging majoritarian politics.
In February 2020, during US President Donald Trump’s visit to India, Dlamia wrote an article titled “While Trump Was Praising Modi for Religious Freedom, Modi-Supporting Hindus Slaughtered Muslims in the Streets”. In the article, Dalmia wrote about the Delhi anti-Hindu riots and gave her own distorted and whitewashed version of the riots. She claimed that “Hindu militants” clashed with ‘protestors’ agitating against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).
She described the CAA as Modi’s plan to “strip an untold number of India’s 140 million Muslims of their citizenship rights and perhaps throw them in detention camps”. Brazenly pushing her anti-Hindu propaganda, Dalmia wrote, “The militants lobbed petrol bombs at Muslim homes in northeast Delhi, set a mosque on fire before hoisting a Hindu flag on it, and looted Muslim-owned shops.”
She went on to claim that “Anti-Muslim violence has become a depressingly regular fact of life in India” since the Modi government came to power. She also slammed Trump for not preaching to the Indian government about the allegedly deteriorating human rights situation in the country.
A month before, in January, she wrote another similarly vile piece titled “Indian Prime Minister Modi’s Lawless Reign of Terror,” claiming that PM Modi had implemented his Gujarat Model across the country. According to Dalmia, the Gujarat Model led to “the slaughter of more than 1,000 men, women, and children, mostly Muslims, over the course of a few days in 2002”. Dalmia blaming PM Modi for the Gujarat riots is a peculiar characteristic of the so-called Left-Liberal cabal that Dalmia is a part of.
Moving on, Dalmia went on to describe student clashes at JNU as a case of Modi’s “private militants” and members of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) going on a rampage in the campus, targeting Muslim students and those having pictures of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in their rooms.
PM Modi and his party are not the reasons that Dalmia’s is unhappy about; her hatred naturally extends to the Hindutva ideology. In an article titled “Hinduism sheds its gentle image in the name of nationalism”, Dalmia makes a bogus claim that religious freedom in India was facing an increasing threat from “Hindutva-Hindu nationalism”.
This is followed by another bogus claim, presented as a fact, that “Hindu militants” have been unleashing unspeakable violence against Muslims since the partition of India.
Dalmia’s hatred of Modi peaked soon after he was elected as the Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy with a landslide victory. She expressed her disappointment over PM Modi’s visit to the US after taking charge as the Prime Minister. She claimed that the visit was not a step towards improving the bilateral ties between the two countries but instead was an expression of what she claimed was Modi’s need for star attraction, self-aggrandisement, and ego inflation.
In an interview featuring her fellow Left-Liberal Siddhartha Vardarajan, Dalmia first expressed deep shock that “somebody like Narendra Modi” became the Prime Minister of India. She then whined about how, in her (clearly biased) opinion, India had become similar to Pakistan with shrinking minority religious rights. The two together ranted about how, according to them, India had changed for the worse under PM Modi’s rule.
Dalmia’s venomous outpourings regarding PM Modi and Hindutva make sense in light of the revelation about her sponsored trips to China.
