With all due respect and a lot of love for India, a country in which I extensively travelled, I think a lot of it comes from India's geopolitical positioning in recent years.

Its strategy of multi-alignment, both with the Global South and the West, is meant to court people on both "sides" but the result - illustrated by the global reaction to the altercation with Pakistan - is much the contrary: everyone sees India as hedging its bets rather than standing on principle, ultimately breeding distrust from all quarters rather than the support it seeks to cultivate.

Let's be real: in the Global South people almost universally see India as the weak link in the BRICS, the country trying to undermine collective South-South cooperation whenever it conflicts with its parallel ambitions of being embraced by Western powers.

India's strong Islamophobia also obviously doesn't help when such a huge proportion of the Global South is Muslim...

And in the West it's much the same story: people look at things like Modi's record at home, its strong ties with Russia, and view India as a player that they don't really identify with.

And on top of that, when it comes to the West there's the fact that India is a) at a very different stage of economic development than they are and b) has a very different culture and historical context.

All this means that there's bound to be a persistent undercurrent of othering in how the West approaches its relationship with India: they tend to see India with a mix of colonial condescension and strategic necessity. And the gap in respective conditions and development status would anyhow prevent India from being fully embraced as a "natural ally" despite superficial diplomatic overtures.

Layered on top of this is the corrosive media environment in India itself and the experience most people have when they interact with many nationalist Indians on social media: to remain polite, one gets the impression that there's an insurmountable gap between how India sees itself on the world stage and how others perceive it.

I'm not going to be paternalistic myself and tell India what it ought to do but one thing is clear: when someone claims 'International Media has turned viciously against Bharat,' they should maybe reflect on whether it isn't the inevitable result of a multi-alignment strategy that has ultimately aligned India with nobody's true interests but its own. And whether the knee-jerk defensive victimhood narrative prevents honest self-reflection about precisely that.