United States relies on print media to Manufacture Consent because as Neil Postman argued from Tocqueville^[1], American Democracy, due to the rise of printing press, had a 'Typographical culture'. The reformist Muslim woe about some Ottoman fatwa declaring printing press Haram was an internalizing of one of those simplistic liberal narratives (like Ghazali against maths), congratulating themselves on adopting print media for mass circulation of their ideas^[2]. Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent burst this mythical democratic status of the press by careful analysis of the selection bias in the print media.

Indian Society or Homo Indicus had a different progression. Two things were fairly unique or much more pronounced in case of Indian society until late into the modernity:

1. Gatekeeping : The historical gate keeping of knowledge highlighted by Al-Biruni's Introduction to Kitab-Al Hind as well as the concept of 'Hindu Orientalism' in Sheldon Pollock and Irfan Ahmed^[3], India has been consistently on the decline from a literary society to an elitist society of greatest possible divide among the intellectuals and the masses.
2. Mythology: In such a culture, as Shahid Amin historicizes, myths are the language of the masses where consent is not manufactured but mythologized. Schmittian exception is not secularized, but mythologized like stories of Gandhi^[4] or Modi's daivik shaktiyan or non biological status.

Their survival this late into modernity can be credited to the structure and rhetoric of the nationalist thought, but a society so thoroughly seeped in mythology can be ridiculed enough to publicly reject particular beliefs like sati, but it never be truly disenchanted. The m decapitation of the transcendent has a hydra reaction of growing a more confused web of misenchantments. In every small, trivial political action, the stakes are maximized, raised into a fight between good and evil, between selfish/greedy and the selfless/sacrificial, between order and chaos, between the survivalist and the nihilist.

Gita Press

This culture also co-existed alongside a print culture whose history is being recovered by Akshaya Mukul in Gita Press and The Making of Hindu India which outlines how the bourgeois guilt led to leveraging the printing technology to kickstart a revolution to re-enchant the society. It not only moralized society into traditional roles, but encouraged a bourgois form of religiosity with chants and hymns for very specific worldly needs.

H-Pop

Treason of the Brahmin went from denial of passions to an indulgence therein. H-pop was born as the purest form of grassroots intellectualism where upper caste interests are sublimated into a war cry.

Seeing the Sangh

A recent project by Caravan Magazine called 'Seeing the Sangh' ^[5] explains the difficulty of uncovering how RSS operates:

The RSS formally acknowledges only about three dozen affiliates, even though it is widely understood to coordinate a sprawling network. Internally, RSS publications and leaders routinely describe this constellation as a unified entity; externally, they have consistently attempted to disguise, dilute or deny ties with many of these bodies.

As a result, we have never had access to a full picture of how this ecosystem functions—how resources circulate, where authority lies, and where the RSS’s influence begins and ends. To address this gap, Seeing the Sangh researchers spent six years excavating the network from the Sangh’s own documentary trail. All evidence was sourced from publicly available materials, with the Sangh’s own publications at its core, and then corroborated with academic literature, financial filings and government documents. The result is a public resource that offers, for the first time, a fuller picture of how this ecosystem operates. - Seeing the Sangh, The Caravan Project

This mythical dimension of the Indian context affords deep anonymity for RSS to engage with foreign government all the way to arranging bomb blasts. Here lies the true infection.