It was just one of the many such examples one could find of the foreign press reporting on India in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, which never succeeded in doing away with the predictable prisms. Though looking for Third World faces and events as rallying points for Western discourse has become too common in international media, what has really been more visible in recent years is an unprecedented alarmism in the Western media about freedom of expression in India. After the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government led by Narendra Modi was voted to power in May 2014, the bogey of an Orwellian state in India has been raised in some of the most recognised names of world media. Only two months after the new government took charge, for instance, The New York Times spotted the signs of the Big Brother regime in India in an editorial carrying the suggestive headline, “India’s Press Under Siege.”