India, May 30 -- There is a playbook, well-documented and repeatedly tested, that hostile networks, both domestic and foreign, deploy across the developing world when they cannot win at the ballot box.

The objective is never to win a single argument. It is to manufacture a permanent sense of national unease, a slow and creeping suspicion that the country is failing, its leadership is corrupt, and its institutions are broken beyond repair. India, to its credit, has proven harder to break than most.

Having failed to defeat Prime Minister Narendra Modi across three consecutive electoral mandates, these forces have shifted their attention to a softer target: the smartphones of young Indians who form their political opinions almost entirely ...