Telangana Chief Minister Revanth Reddy is on an official visit to the United Kingdom. During this visit, CM Revanth Reddy arrived at the Blavatnik School of Government and met professors Maya Tudor and Faisal Devji as a part of the state’s “global education outreach”. CM Reddy’s meeting, however, has triggered outrage back in India.
The Telangana Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) informed that CM Revanth Reddy visited the Blavatnik School of Government, which is an institution affiliated with the University of Oxford. CM Reddy was accompanied by a delegation, including K Ramakrishna Rao, the advisor and ex officio special chief secretary to the chief minister, among others.
తెలంగాణ యువతకు ప్రపంచస్థాయి విద్య, పరిశోధన అవకాశాలు.. హైదరాబాద్ను ప్రపంచస్థాయి విద్యా కేంద్రంగా తీర్చిదిద్దే దిశగా మరో ముందడుగు. ఆక్స్ఫర్డ్ యూనివర్సిటీకి చెందిన ప్రముఖ విద్యావేత్తలతో సమావేశమై, తెలంగాణలో అంతర్జాతీయ విద్యా కార్యక్రమాలు, పరిశోధన, నైపుణ్యాభివృద్ధి రంగాల్లో… pic.twitter.com/7bFj3SkhzC
— Revanth Reddy (@revanth_anumula) August 22, 2026
CM Reddy presented the overview of Telangana Rising and the plan to transform Hyderabad into a global education hub.
However, the meeting between Telangana Chief Minister Revanth Reddy and Maya Tudor and Faisal Devji has triggered outrage in India over the duo’s record of peddling anti-India propaganda. The BJP has accused CM Revanth Reddy of coddling anti-India propagandists.
‘Maya Tudor believes under the Modi government, ‘India’s Democracy is dying’
Maya Tudor is a professor of Politics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and a Fellow of St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. Tudor’s research and work centres on the origins of effective and democratic states, with regional emphasis on South Asia.
Tudor, however, has received flak earlier for her biased assessment of India’s democracy.
In July 2023, Maya Tudor published an article headlined “India’s Democracy Is Dying” in the Journal of Democracy. The piece contends that India exemplifies global democratic recession and emphasises that India has been downgraded to a hybrid regime.
Maya Tudor cited dubious democratic freedom indices like Freedom House that downgraded India to the “Partly Free” category, and V-Dem, which declared India an “electoral autocracy”.
Back in 2021, according to the ‘renowned’ think tank Freedom House in Washington, India’s freedom score had been downgraded from “free” to “partly free,” with the organization citing attacks on Muslims, the use of the sedition law, and the government’s response to the coronavirus, which included the lockdown, as reasons why rights and civil liberties “have been eroding since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in 2014”.
Freedom House had made this outrageous assessment about India’s democracy based on the reports published by Islamo-leftist propaganda rag The Wire.
Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar slammed Freedom House for their “hypocrisy”. He called them “self-appointed custodians of the world who find it very difficult to stomach that somebody in India is not looking for their approval”.
Interestingly, back in November 2022, Freedom House, which had downgraded India from ‘Free’ to ‘Partly Free’ based on The Wire’s now retracted reports on Tek Fog, said it had updated its FreedomOnTheNet 2022 report and claimed that Tek Fog stories had no impact on India’s score. It, however, was evident that Freedom House was attempting to distance itself from The Wire’s Tek Fog fiasco.
Freedom House’s downgrading of India’s status also relied on the fake news peddled by Alt News co-founder Mohammed Zubair, The Wire, and several other left-leaning websites about the assault of an elderly man in Ghaziabad. It also relied on crowdfunding scam-accused Islamist propagandist Rana Ayyub to tarnish India’s reputation internationally.
Maya Tudor’s journal also relied on the George Soros-funded V-Dem Institute’s report to back up her claim that somehow India’s democracy is ‘dying’ under PM Modi’s watch.
The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute is an independent research organisation created in 2014 and funded by many other institutions and governments. Fund contributors to the institute range from the Canadian International Development Agency to the World Bank Group.
The Open Society Foundation, which George Soros leads, also funds the institute. Soros is a self-proclaimed philanthropist and Hungarian-American investor who has sworn to ‘fight nationalists’ and conservative governments throughout the world, which he commonly refers to as ‘authoritarian governments.’ Soros has publicly expressed his disdain for India and the Modi government.
According to V-Dem, India had ‘lost’ its status as an electoral democracy and had devolved into an electoral autocracy.
The credibility and unbiasedness of V-Dem’s reports can be understood from the fact that back in 2022, it placed Pakistan and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan above India in the Academic Freedom Index
Coming back to Maya Tudor, in her journal ‘India’s Democracy Is Dying’, she audaciously equated ‘Modi’s India’ with the June 1975 to March 1977 Emergency imposed by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi-led Congress government.
“No country is a better exemplar of our global democratic recession than India. Most unlikely at its founding, India’s democracy confounded legions of naysayers by growing more stable over its first seven decades. India’s democratic deepening happened in formal ways, through the consolidation of civilian rule over the military as well as decades of vibrant multiparty competition, and informal ways, through the strengthening of norms around Electoral Commission independence and the increasing participation of women and other social groups in formal political life. India has also witnessed two significant democratic declines: the 21-month period from June 1975 to March 1977 known as the Emergency and a contemporary decline beginning with Narendra Modi’s election in 2014,” Tudor wrote.
“During Modi’s tenure, key democratic institutions have remained formally in place while the norms and practices underpinning democracy have substantially deteriorated. This informal democratic decline in contemporary India stands in stark contrast to the Emergency, when Indira Gandhi formally eliminated nearly all democratic institutions- banning elections, arresting political opposition, eviscerating civil liberties, muzzling independent media, and passing three constitutional amendments that undermined the power of the country’s courts…While democracy-watching organizations categorize democracies differently, they all classify India today as a “hybrid regime” that is, neither a full democracy nor a full autocracy. And this is new,” she added.
Back in 2021, Maya Tudor had written an article headlined “How India exemplifies the world’s democratic recession”. This piece was riddled with usual Islamo-leftist villainisation of Hindus, Hindutva and ‘Hindu nationalism’. Tudor argued that India is witnessing a democratic decline because “Hindu nationalism has today become the fundamental currency of India’s politics.”
Citing Freedom House’s propaganda, Tudor peddled the typical Islamo-leftist one-sided Muslim victimhood bogey.
In addition to writing journals and op-eds steeped in anti-India and anti-Hindu bias, professor Maya Tudor has also been actively participating in events and seminars to further her apocryphal ‘India’s democracy under threat’ narrative.
In May 2023, Maya Tudor appeared as a speaker on an online event titled “Democracy – at death’s door in Modi’s India?” While the title itself is quite self-explanatory about the kind of anti-India and anti-Modi alarmist propaganda must have been peddled during the event, the discussion organised by ‘Index on Censorship ’ was attended by ‘journalist’ Salil Tripathi.
Salil Tripathi is the contributing editor at the leftist propaganda magazine ‘The Caravan’. Back in August 2024, when Islamic fanatics were killing, raping, and looting Hindus, and vandalising Hindu temples after PM Sheikh Hasina’s forced ouster, Tripathi was at the forefront of peddling the Islamist narrative of ‘Muslims protecting Hindu temples in Bangladesh’ without highlighting the religious affiliation of the attackers. He also downplayed Islamic mob attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh.
From opposing Narendra Modi’s UK visit in 2013 to villainising his government, Faisal Devji pushes Islamo-leftist narratives with nuance
Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History, Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford (previously St Antony’s), Faisal Devji is a Canadian citizen of Indian origin.
Faisal Devji has also been churning out propaganda pieces vilifying Hindutva and the PM Modi-led ruling dispensation.
In his 2024 article, “The end of India’s politics of necessity”, Devji characterised the BJP’s electoral rise as linked to Hindutva. He insinuated that the ‘Hindu nationalist’ BJP is essentially opposed to and intolerant of Muslims and Christians.
While the article hailed Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for focusing on “unity, justice, and love in large, country-wide rallies that hark back to the Mahatma’s still living political tradition”, it calls Hindu Nationalism’s vision of collective identity a tool for ‘self-interest’.
Faisal Devji claimed that Hindu nationalism turned out to be about granting impunity to its adherents to attack ‘minorities’, by which he essentially meant Muslims.
Cited by Islamist organisation Justice for All in its 2020 article, Faisal Devji opines, “Increasingly associated with violence in the west… Islamophobia’s brutality is most readily seen in Asia, a continent awaiting its recognition as capitalism’s new home.”
Interestingly, Justice For All has been at the forefront of the ongoing campaign against Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat ahead of his New York visit.
Faisal Devji has earlier been interviewed by Pakistani-born American imam, author and media operator Imam Malik Mujahid, who is also the founder of Justice For All, the outfit that equates the RSS activities and ideology to Nazism. Mujahid, who was born and educated in Sindh, was also the president of Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba (IJT), which is affiliated with Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan. Jamaat-e-Islami was created in British India to implement Islamic Law.
In the interview uploaded on Muslim TV Network’s YouTube channel, Faisal Devji peddled nuanced propaganda against the RSS, painting it as an Islamophobic militia.
This interview was also published on Sound Vision, an offshoot of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) that has intimate links with terror groups such as Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat-e-Islami, and other Islamic terror organisations.
Back in 2015, Faisal Devji authored an article headlined, “Fighting terrorism with the big boys”. In this article published in The Hindu, Faisal Devji claimed that despite its apprehensions, India is not a “serious target” for various Islamic terrorist outfits like the Islamic State (ISIS), Al-Qaeda and others.
He even argued that India was desperate to be seen by the world as a victim of globalised terrorism and thus an ally of Europe and America in the counter-terrorism fight.
“India isn’t a serious target for al-Qaeda and now ISIS despite appearing on their imaginary maps. But instead of being thankful for this situation, a number of Indian journalists and policymakers seem anxious that the country be recognised as a victim of globalised terrorism, and so an ally of the Europeans and Americans fighting against it,” Devji wrote.
Faisal Devji framed India’s supposed longing to join the “all-white club of terrorism’s leading enemies” as a “perversion of the older desire that India take her place among the great powers.”
In this one article, Devji not only villainised the countries actively involved in the counter-terrorism fight, dismissed the fact that India indeed is a victim of Islamic terrorism and has been on the radar of ISIS, Al-Qaeda and other such jihadist groups, but also described the 26/11 Mumbai attacks “a novel form of militancy”, which was “coordinated, yet random, killing.”
In a 2023 article headline, The Fate of Muslim Politics in India, Faisal Devji lamented how Muslims have lost their ability to “mobilise” and are thus emptying their “political lives”. He claimed that Muslims were cowed by the Babri Masjid demolition-related violence and the 2002 Godhra riots, and did not mobilise despite the BJP government’s decisions like a ban on Triple Talaq, or the court-ordered construction of Ayodhya Ram Mandir, or the Hindu side’s pushback against Love Jihad.
He described the 2020 Anti-CAA protests as somewhat a partial return of Muslim mobilisation. While contrary to Devji’s observation, Muslims have in the last decade resorted to mob violence against Hindus over the BJP government’s policy decisions concerning Muslims, the Oxford scholar essentially lamented that Muslims are not violently pushing back against their supposed ‘persecution’.
Interestingly, the BJP has highlighted that Faisal Devji was also among the signatories of the 2013 letter opposing then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s UK visit.
BJP MP from Telangana’s Nizamabad, Arvind Dharmapuri wrote on X, “Meet Faisal Devji of Oxford University. In 2013, he along with others had written an open letter opposing @narendramodi Ji’s visit to the UK. He in one of his interviews, said, “Indians repeatedly say India is great, but it really doesn’t look like that to many people. Shame on Revanth Reddy for meeting such a venom-spewing dimagi naxal.
Meet Faisal Devji of the Oxford University. In 2013, he along with others had written an open letter opposing @narendramodi Ji's visit to the UK.
— Arvind Dharmapuri (@Arvindharmapuri) August 21, 2026
He in one of his interviews said, "Indians repeatedly say India is great, but it really doesn't look like that to many people”.… pic.twitter.com/UZccDLzHYt
It appears that Congress leaders, including Chief Ministers like Revanth Reddy, are following their boss Rahul Gandhi’s pattern of coddling anti-India and anti-Hindu elements during foreign visits, apparently because of their shared disdain for the Modi government and Hindutva.
