HOW MUCH SPACE is there in India for citizens to question and dissent from the actions of their government in a time of war or near-war? Today the answer is not very much, or maybe none at all.
In the wake of the terrorist attack on 22 April in Pahalgam, in India-administered Kashmir, with India blaming Pakistan and hostilities erupting between the two states, Indian television news channels have further lowered even their already dismal standards, with anchors and guest panellists alike baying for blood and calling for vengeance. Not content with simply reporting the facts – a task that is admittedly not simple in the fog of war – they have vied with one another to up the ante.
As India launched “Operation Sindoor” on 6 May, with aerial attacks on Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, television studios reverberated with febrile and histrionic storylines churned out to soundtracks worthy of an action movie: Islamabad had been captured, Karachi port had been bombed, the former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan had been killed and Asim Munir, the country’s army chief, arrested. It was left to saner international media outlets to report as best they could the conflicting, and often unverified, claims made by both sides. Pakistan said that Indian strikes killed 31 civilians, including women and children, and injured dozens more. India insisted that it had targeted “terrorist infrastructure” – a term that, in the new world disorder exemplified most spectacularly by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, renders quaint the classical distinction between civilian and military targets in the rules of war. Lost in the battle of narratives was the tragic possibility that both sets of claims might be true.
India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), ever ready with belligerent rhetoric against Pakistan, set the tone and led the way. Nowhere was this clearer than in the “Bharat mata ki jai!” issued by the defence minister, Rajnath Singh, after India’s first strikes, deploying a Hindu nationalist slogan instead of the more customary and less communal “Jai Hind”. But hopes for saner counsel or calls for restraint even from the political opposition were disappointed. Almost without exception, India’s parties closed ranks to express support for the Narendra Modi government’s strikes against Pakistan in response to the Pahalgam attacks.
Indian National Congress politicians, conventionally expected to inhabit the more liberal side of the spectrum, jumped right in. “So proud of my country today,” the Congress’s Shashi Tharoor posted on X, his only departure from the BJP line coming in his use of a supplementary “Jai Hind!” When interviewed by the veteran journalist Karan Thapar, Tharoor lavished praise on the government’s handling of the situation rather than discharge his role of questioning the government narrative in his capacity as chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs. He later described Thapar as “belligerent” for his forensic questioning – which was as should be expected from any decent journalist.
Even the venerable Communist Party of India (Marxist) fell into line, missing an opportunity to remind us of how both India and Pakistan use their working classes as cannon fodder to maintain a rivalry that most benefits elites and extremists on both sides, including in the Hindu Right and the Pakistan military. It was left to the smaller Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation to caution against jingoism and call for an exploration of non-military, diplomatic options to defuse the confrontation and avert war between the two nuclear-armed states.
Meanwhile, capital did what it always does best: no fewer than seven firms and individuals filed applications to trademark “Operation Sindoor” with a view to using it for “entertainment”, among other purposes. Reliance Industries, the country’s richest corporation, went on to withdraw its application, sheepishly claiming that it had been “inadvertently” filed by a junior employee. The rush to capitalise on war’s apparent recreational value portends another spate of mediocre Bollywood blockbusters in the near future, just like the many there have already been, glorifying the Indian armed forces.
Gender was also pressed into the service of the war effort in a number of ways. “Sindoor” refers to the vermilion mark a Hindu husband places on his wife’s hair parting during their marriage ceremony, and which she ceases to wear if he predeceases her. Here the term referenced the many male tourists killed in the Pahalgam attack – including one on his honeymoon. No less a cultural authority than the Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan explained the government’s “brilliant” choice of name: “it signified that the demons wiped out the sindoor from the married women, made them widows and India through the attack, and naming it Operation Sindoor signified symbolically that we shall fight to restore it.”
If the operation derives its legitimacy from this narrative of Hindu patriarchal vengeance, in its execution the Indian armed forces tried to present a more liberal – one might even say secular and feminist – façade to the world. This was primarily through the delivery of press briefings by two women officers: Wing Commander Vyomika Singh and Colonel Sofiya Qureshi. This choice of putting forward two women, whose names signify their different religious backgrounds, sent the liberal commentariat into paroxysms of self-congratulation, and was hailed as a masterstroke in representing India as an inclusive nation – presumably in contrast to Pakistan. The two officers were sometimes joined by India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri – a Kashmiri Pandit, and so himself a willing or unwilling symbol in the narrative context of Hindu nationalist vengeance. The Pandits’ expulsion from India-administered Kashmir amid escalating Islamist militancy in the 1990s remains an emotive wound in the Hindu Right’s historiography.
Clearly the Indian government has uses for diverse faces in high places. But even their service to the state narrative has not insulated these individuals from the wrath of Hindu Right cyber mobs. After Misri announced the ceasefire agreed with Pakistan on 10 May – a ceasefire that hardline Hindu nationalists considered premature – he was viciously trolled online. His daughter, a lawyer, was doxxed, with her personal information exposed online, for having rendered legal assistance to Rohingya Muslims during the course of her work.
Other women have also found themselves in the firing line, including the newly married Himanshi Narwal, whose husband was among those killed at Pahalgam. When she spoke out against the rampant anti-Muslim and anti-Kashmiri sentiment that has swept India in the wake of the attack, she was branded an anti-national apologist for terrorism. Here the very object of Hindu patriarchal protection, the grieving widow, became that patriarchy’s target when she dared call for a different kind of response, one that did not seek to punish all Kashmiris and all Muslims for the acts of a handful of extremists.
The BJP, and even Modi himself, has since had to try to calm the war-mongering constituency down, a sign of how far out of hand the trolls and the deranged news channels have gotten. Misri was not the first to announce the ceasefire – that distinction went to Donald Trump, the US president, who declared online that both sides had agreed to pause hostilities after “talks mediated by the United States” without India or Pakistan having yet said a word on the matter. Cue outrage over the Modi government possibly having allowed third-party mediation on the fate of Kashmir, something India has long and vehemently refused, and over India securing no concessions from Pakistan in exchange for suspending military operations. Amit Malviya, the commander-in-chief of the BJP’s troll army, posted a shrill, “The pause is an UNDERSTANDING, it isn’t an AGREEMENT.” Modi, silent since the strikes began, felt the need to speak out and declare, “Any talks with Pakistan will focus on terrorism and PoK” – that is, “Pakistan-occupied Kashmir”.
This is what it has come to. Many will point to how Pakistan’s media and trolls have also been agents of the worst kind of disinformation and sabre-rattling through this crisis, and many will proclaim defiantly that Pakistan is no different. But that is precisely the point. India, which earlier prided itself on its maturity versus Pakistan’s dysfunction, which boasted a healthier media and greater room for public dissent than its neighbour, now mirrors more and more traits of its nemesis. Where Pakistan’s media, chained to the official line, has put out just what the country’s establishment wants it to, in India the government risks becoming chained to the war lust that it let loose in the first place.
And what happens at the next provocation, if these are the expectations that have now been set? Indian military retaliation against Pakistan has intensified with every major terror attack in recent years: crossing the Line of Control after the Uri attack in 2016, crossing the international border after the Pulwama attack in 2019, striking the Pakistani heartland after the Pahalgam attack. How much more space is there at the top of the so-called escalation ladder? Will it be all-out war next time, no questions asked, with no room left for any other solutions? Will that war be against Pakistan, or also against Indian Muslims, including Kashmiri civilians, and others whom the BJP continues to paint as the enemy within?
In 1917, at a time when it was taken for granted that nationalism was the vehicle that would liberate India from the tyranny of British colonialism, Rabindranath Tagore wrote a fierce and prescient critique of it. Tagore argued that nations were gigantic abstractions that transformed individuals into unfeeling cogs in a machine, capable of tremendous violence and brutality in the name of the nation because they had been alienated from their humanity. As he put it, “the idea of the Nation is one of the most powerful anaesthetics that man has invented. Under the influence of its fumes the whole people can carry out its systematic programme of the most virulent self-seeking without being in the least aware of its moral perversions – in fact feeling dangerously resentful if it is pointed out. … Men, the fairest creations of God, came out of the national manufactury in huge numbers as war-making and money-making puppets.”
THE ASKING OF difficult questions is particularly important during an operation like Sindoor because the Modi government has a poor record when it comes to the conduct of such operations.
In February 2019, when a suicide bomber killed 40 Central Reserve Police Force personnel travelling in a military convoy at Pulwama, India responded with retaliatory strikes on Pakistan that, it claimed, killed hundreds of terrorists and destroyed a training camp of the Islamist group Jaish-e-Mohammed in Balakot. Independent international analysts strongly disputed this, citing evidence that India’s touted “surgical strikes” had hit nothing of any consequence. Pakistan retaliated, and in an aerial skirmish an Indian fighter pilot, Abhinandan Varthaman, was shot down and captured. Efforts to ensure his safe return became a major focus of Indian military and diplomatic efforts. We now know that, in addition to losing one of its warplanes, amid the hostilities the Indian Air Force (IAF) also shot down one of its own helicopters by mistake, killing six of its personnel and a civilian in the process. Acknowledgement of this and other friendly-fire incidents did not come until a few months later, after the votes had been counted in India’s 2019 general election, from which Modi emerged victorious in part through presenting the Balakot strikes as a victory. As the journalist and military analyst Sushant Singh has argued in The Caravan, the strikes were a military failure but a political success.
Thus the Indian government’s present failure to respond to, and suppression of, reports of the downing of possibly five IAF jets during Operation Sindoor – including one of its prized Rafales – comes with a strong sense of déjà vu. While reports of Indian losses have circulated freely in the international press, with considerable circumstantial evidence, they have been suppressed at home. The Hindu was forced to delete a story on the question; The Wire’s entire website was blocked on account of a single story on this subject; and the defence analyst Pravin Sawhney was forced to take down a video discussing the issue. Questioned about losses at a press conference on 11 May, the head of the IAF responded evasively, noting that losses were part of combat, that the only material question was whether desired objectives had been achieved, and that to divulge losses in the midst of a combat situation “will only be advantage [to the] adversary.”
This is a narrowly tactical view of the situation, as befits a military officer, but an engaged citizenry should be concerned about the wider political context. In recent days, there has been talk of the need for de-escalation, but also a recognition that this is difficult in a context where both nuclear-armed states must be able to declare victory in order for their ruling powers to save face before their extremist constituents – and those constituents are not easily satiated. War is only more likely to be fodder for entertainment when it is narrated as a tale of endless victory, insulating the public from the stories of loss that are its cruel reality. In that regard, the question for India is not simply whether the government’s objectives have been achieved – although this, too, is a vexed matter, given that previous claims of success have turned out to be false. Rather, it is also at what cost these objectives are attained, and whether the price for success in war is worth it, especially when less bloody alternatives may be at hand.
Amid these and other calculations, Kashmir – the ground zero for the conflagration, whose inhabitants have long paid the highest price for the India–Pakistan conflict – recedes from view, as do the deeply political questions that terrorism raises. Indian mainstream public discourse has narrowed to the point where it can envisage an end to terrorism only via the physical elimination of every last terrorist, even as the meaning of that term is indiscriminately expanded to take in millions of innocents. To take the infinitely more difficult path of asking what makes someone turn to terrorism would force us to reckon with the failure of politics, not only in Kashmir but in India as well.
The article appeared in the himalmag