Who decides who governs you? And what happens when some of that deciding is quietly done from outside, years before you ever get a vote?

Let me start by killing the fun version of this story, because I don’t want it anywhere near what I’m actually trying to say.

There’s a claim doing the rounds that Narendra Modi is some kind of CIA project — that he was “recruited” on a trip to America and the agency has been running India ever since. To be honest… that’s nonsense, and I checked. The thing he actually went on was a programme run by the American Council of Young Political Leaders (ACYPL), a Washington nonprofit funded mostly by the US State Department.¹ Not the CIA. There is no document, no leak, no declassified anything that ties ACYPL to the agency. People who say otherwise are pattern-matching to a different scandal — the genuine one from the 1950s and ’60s, when the CIA was secretly funding student and cultural outfits like the National Student Association and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, until it all blew up in 1967.² ACYPL isn’t on those lists. It was founded in 1966 and its money is openly government money.¹

So if you came for a smoking gun, there isn’t one. Sorry.

Here’s the thing though. The smoking-gun version is a distraction, and I think it’s worse than useless — because while everyone argues about a conspiracy that didn’t happen, the ordinary, fully-legal, on-the-record version sails past unexamined. And the ordinary version is the one that actually bothers me.

What the programme is, in its own words

ACYPL and its much bigger sibling, the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), exist to do one thing, and they’re not shy about it: find promising foreigners early, bring them over, show them around, build a relationship, and bank it for later. The State Department’s own framing is to “identify and establish rapport with future world leaders early in their careers.”³ Early. That’s the whole point.

And it works. Something like 500-plus IVLP alumni have gone on to become heads of state or government — Thatcher, Blair, Sadat, de Klerk, Ardern, the list goes on — and the program cheerfully cites an eleven-to-one return on the money.³ This is not a fringe operation; it’s one of the most successful instruments of American soft power that exists, and it runs in plain sight.

Modi went on it in 1993 — or 1994; the sources genuinely can’t agree, and I’ll come back to that, because it matters less than people think. He was a nobody then either way — not an MLA, not a minister, no office at all, just a full-time party organizer from Gujarat. He became Chief Minister in 2001, and Prime Minister in 2014.⁴ Which means, to be clear, this was before any public role — so the “conflict of interest” angle people reach for doesn’t actually apply. He had no office for it to conflict with.

But that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is the word before.

The unsettling thing is that it’s legal

Think about what “cultivate future leaders early” really means. It means the most powerful country on earth runs a standing, professionalised programme to build warm relationships with the people most likely to one day run other countries — and it gets to them while they’re still unknown, still forming, still cheap to impress. A free, curated, flattering tour of American power for a 42-year-old organizer who’d never seen any of it. NASA, the Pentagon, senators, governors. Of course it leaves a mark. Modi himself has said for years that the trip shaped how he thinks.⁵

I don’t need to allege anything sinister for that to sit badly with me. Influence doesn’t require a handler and an envelope. It mostly works the way it worked here — exposure, access, goodwill, a sense of these people took me seriously when no one else did. You don’t have to be bought. You just have to be shaped. And a programme explicitly designed to do the shaping, aimed precisely at the pre-power moment, with a track record of producing heads of government… that’s not a conspiracy. It’s a strategy. A good one. That’s what makes it worth staring at.

And yes — maybe I’m biased here. I’m instinctively twitchy about a single hyperpower having a polished pipeline into the formative years of other countries’ leaders, regardless of who’s at the other end of it. If it were Modi or anyone else, the discomfort is the same. The history matters too: a government that did once secretly fund civil-society fronts, and got caught, doesn’t get to be trusted by default the next time it runs an “open” version.² The openness is better. It isn’t the same as harmless.

The part nobody signs off on

Here’s where it actually lands for me, and it’s bigger than one man or one party.

Nobody asked us. Not the Indian public, not the American public — us, the masses, the people who are the supposed point of all this democracy. These relationships get built over our heads, in rooms we’ll never see, about a future that will eventually be governed in our name. We find out, if we find out at all, decades later and as trivia — a viral old photo of Modi outside the White House, “did you know?” And then we move on, because what is there to even do about it?

That’s the real powerlessness. Not that something illegal happened — it didn’t. It’s that the entirely legal version is also something we never got a say in, and never will. The influence is structural, deniable, and quiet by design. By the time it matters, it’s already old news. And the honest answer to “what can the masses do about it” is, mostly… nothing. You can’t vote on who flatters your future prime minister in 1993.

What his critics in India actually say (and where they slip)

Here’s a twist worth sitting with: the loudest people pushing a foreign-hand story about Modi aren’t his fans — they’re the opposition. In early 2025 the Congress party openly questioned why Modi met ACYPL “in 1993 when he was just an RSS pracharak,” and called ACYPL an outfit “practically funded by USAID.”⁶ Other Congress voices have gone further over the years — that the CIA and Mossad engineered their 2014 defeat,⁷ that the CIA bankrolled an RSS rally back in 1966.⁸

I’ll be honest: I went in sympathetic to the suspicion, and I still am to the general one. But the specific factual claim falls apart the moment you check it. ACYPL isn’t funded by USAID. It’s funded by the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs — different agency, different mandate, even a different federal grant code (the “19.x” series is State; USAID is “98.x”).⁹ USAID does development aid; this is public diplomacy. Close, but not the same, and the difference is exactly the kind of thing that gets blurred when the point is to score a hit rather than to be right.

That’s the trap on both sides, and it’s why I keep harping on precision. The BJP’s people wave the trip away as a feel-good “young-leader exchange.” The opposition inflates it into USAID-funded foreign meddling. Both are reaching past what’s actually documented. And the boring, accurate middle — State Department soft-power program, overtly funded, aimed at future leaders, no evidence of anything covert — is somehow the version nobody wants, even though it’s the one that should worry a thinking person the most.

(The date, by the way — 1993 or 1994 — is itself a tiny monument to how sloppy this all is. Reputable outlets say both.¹⁰ So does Kishan Reddy, who was on the trip, and has publicly dated it to each year on different occasions.¹¹ If the people who were physically there can’t keep it straight, maybe sit lightly on the grander certainties too.)

So what’s the takeaway

Don’t waste the outrage on the CIA fairytale — it’s fake, and chasing it just makes it easier to wave away everything attached to it. The thing that deserves the scrutiny is the boring, legal, well-funded reality: powerful states invest, early and deliberately, in who governs other people — and the other people are never in the room.

I don’t have a clean fix for that. I’m not sure there is one. But I’d rather we look at the real machine clearly than keep swinging at a ghost next to it. “Nothing illegal happened” was never the same sentence as “nothing here should worry us.” Those are two different claims, and the gap between them is where most of the world’s quiet power actually lives.

---

References

A note on method: several primary sites (acypl.org, the State Department’s ECA pages) block automated retrieval, so a few details here lean on secondary reporting and search-indexed copies pending a verbatim read. The year of the trip is honestly contested — solid sources say 1993, equally solid ones say 1994, and the co-delegate has said both — so I’ve flagged it rather than fake certainty. If any of this turns out wrong, I’ll correct it. I’d rather be accurate than right.

Footnotes

1. American Council of Young Political Leaders, listed as an official U.S. Department of State exchange — International Exchange Alumni (state.gov). See also ACYPL’s own site, acypl.org. ↩ ↩²

2. “Foreign Policy Fallout From CIA Funding Disclosures, 1967” — U.S. National Archives; and “Congress for Cultural Freedom” — Wikipedia. ↩ ↩²

3. International Visitor Leadership Program — purpose, head-of-state count, and stated return on investment — Meridian International Center; U.S. Department of State, ECA. ↩ ↩²

4. “India–United States relations” — Wikipedia (Modi as Gujarat CM from 2001, PM from 2014). ↩

5. “How a 1993 US programme shaped PM Modi’s global vision” — ZeeBiz; “Legacy of a US program” — India Empire. ↩

6. Congress questions Modi’s ACYPL meetings, calls it “practically funded by USAID” (Feb 2025) — Deccan Herald; The Sunday Guardian. ↩

7. Former Congress MP Kumar Ketkar blames CIA and Mossad for the party’s 2014 defeat — Zee News. ↩

8. Congress (Pawan Khera) alleges CIA funded a 1966 RSS rally — National Herald. ↩

9. ACYPL federal assistance listing, CFDA 19.403 (“19.x” = U.S. Department of State; USAID programs use the “98.x” series) — federal grant catalog. ↩

10. Sources dating the trip to 1994 — BOOM fact-check; WION. Sources dating it to July 1993 — see [5]. ↩

11. G. Kishan Reddy, who travelled with Modi, dating the visit to “1994” — Facebook post; he has elsewhere referred to a 1993 tour. ↩