The question today is not only a response to terrorism but to a growing propaganda that seeks to position India as the next target after Israel.
Two things will be remembered long after the current crisis over the Pahalgam terror attack that has killed 28 people in Kashmir.
First, the terrifying photograph of the young woman sitting beside the dead body of her newly-wed husband, their honeymoon turned into a nightmare for no fault but that they chose to spend it in Kashmir, and second, the abysmal reportage especially in the American (and some other Western media) on one of the deadliest terrorist attacks on Indian soil. The Associated Press, America’s main news wire agency, deemed fit to put the words terror attack within quotes suggesting that the murder of tourists who were sun-soaking in a grassy meadow at a place described as “mini-Switzerland” was merely Indian government opinion.
For many Indians this underlines something which has been felt for a long time, large sections of the so-called liberal press do not emphasise the dastardliness of terrorist incidents in non-Western countries as they do in the West. This is especially pronounced against countries which are deemed to be under “right-wing” governments. There was a concentrated effort in many parts of Western media and academia to promote Pakistani talking points to show the deadly attack in Pulwama in 2019 which killed 40 Indian security personnel as a “false flag” attack—meaning conducted by Indian agencies but shown as a terror attack.
This canard would have taken greater root if India had not responded seriously by sending fighter jets to bomb terror camps inside Pakistan. But it has never quite disappeared by the global left sees the Modi government as part right-wing governments that need to be fought and questioned even when under terror attack. It also has an older history. Long before Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, previous Indian administrations had complained for years that the West, especially America and the UK do not take India’s long history of suffering from terrorism with any seriousness. In fact, as many analysts have pointed out, the turning point for American understanding of the seriousness of terror attacks faced by India came only after the twin towers came crashing down in 9/11.
The collapse of the Pakistani state and economy and the need to cultivate India, one of the fastest growing economies in the world, gave some relief to this story as the West, especially America, deepened its engagement with India but the cultivation of Pakistan continued as it became a “frontline state in the war against terror” supporting American interventions in Afghanistan. In a recent interview, Pakistani Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif admitted that Pakistan “had been doing the dirty work of the US and the UK”, meaning cultivating and training jihadi terrorists for decades, and that the West looked away because it worked for them to use Pakistan as a base for such activity.
But the ground has become infinitely more complicated. Today Pakistan extracts material assistance both from the US (as seen in recent funding for maintaining its F-16 fighter jets) and from China, which in turn, uses Pakistan as its own frontline state for strategic initiatives against India.
Pakistan is also assisted by the narrative of global Islamophobia where it now peddles the story of persecution from “Hindu India” and has found allies in the pro-Palestine movement (especially from Hamas and overt or covert factions of the Muslim Brotherhood) to push the narrative that after Israel, India is the main “coloniser” in today’s world, and Indian Kashmir is “under occupation”. This narrative has for years tried to create a boycott and desist movement against Indian goods and services. India’s sheer size and economic heft have prevented this from happening at a mass scale but efforts to achieve this continue.
As ties between India and Israel deepen (and even though India has continued to maintain its old stance of support for the two-state solution), this narrative has hardened—especially after the conflict in Gaza where Israel received a lot of support especially from the Indian public square and the government when terrorists went on a rampage inside Israel on 7 October 2023. This narrative that India should be targeted for right wing policies has spread across university campuses and left-leaning media and therefore even attacks on India are now suspect in this community.
This propaganda machine received a bit of jolt with the coming of the Donald Trump administration and its outspoken policies against left-leaning radicalism, but it is far from diminished. Some of the worst sources of this propaganda today are the United Kingdom and Canada where a lot of the public debate has been captured by Islamist extremism, which operates a kind of veto over many topics and pushes talking points derived from Muslim Brotherhood and other similar sources. The revival of the Khalistan movement in Canada with overt or covert support from local politicians have made matters worse. A quick check on this can be done by analysing how many Western leaders clearly called out the Islamist terror attack in Pahalgam even though terrorists literally checked if tourists were Muslims (in which case they were spared) and the non-Muslims butchered. The only Muslim murdered was one who tried to prevent the terrorists. In several cases, male tourists were forced to undress to check if they were circumcised before being shot dead with assault rifles.
Yet, the Islamist word has often gone missing from the condemnation.
Pakistan is making a very serious effort in spreading the word that this was a false flag attack—even though its own army chief, only a few days ago, openly threatened to wreak havoc in Kashmir. No doubt in days and weeks ahead, this line will be picked up by many Western commentators and organisations. There is already news that this is being spread in many university groups by ideologically-driven faculty members.
India has often worried about fighting a two-front war, meaning fighting Pakistan and China, all at once. But a new kind of two-front war has dawned which cannot be fought with arms and ammunition alone. To lose in this two-front war is to become a pariah and face a situation where one’s citizens are constantly harassed in various parts of the world—as Israelis often are. There is an even more insidious aspect of this psyop—new generations of students studying in various parts of the world, both Indians and others, are being fed this propaganda. This will impact their decisions at every step as they move into the world of work after their education. Tomorrow, the choices they make to hire or fire, to work at or refuse employment, to strike business deals or not, to target maliciously or cooperate—all of this will depend on the kind of propaganda they have been fed. And that’s just the mildest impact. Remember that new generations of highly educated extremists are going to emerge not from the Middle East but from colleges and towns in the Western world—anyway with any analytical rigour one can see what’s coming, for instance, in countries like the UK, Canada, Belgium and Germany among others. Many of these highly educated and socially prosperous extremists are today directed against Israel but slowly and surely, they will be (and indeed are) turning against India. What is now merely a trickle could well become a flood and with the kind of mobility that India sees, it would be hard to tackle the inflow of such extremists looking to damage the country after entering it on any pretext. An even deeper worry is that it could be Indian students who study outside the country in very large numbers who could be radicalised against their own nation.
India lacks both the understanding and the wherewithal at this point in time to fight this war effectively and therefore its narrative, while effective at a governmental level, is shaky at best in the global public sphere.
It cannot be denied that India is seen as a relatively soft target in this kind of warfare. The Indian public square itself is full of many people who mindlessly repeat talking points that adversely impact the country’s interests. There is very little understanding of how the pedagogical and social routes through which this propaganda spreads.
The immediate impact of this is that in the case of any Indian retaliation following a major terror attack, the validity of the Indian position is diminished through this propaganda and this has grave strategic consequences for India’s deterrence capabilities.
Even though many Indian strategists tend to underplay this, this decade (or until India reaches about $10 trillion in size) will be the most critical period in the country’s history in defending its sovereignty. This is because this is seen as the last chance by its detractors to break and weaken India. At $10 trillion or more in GDP size, India would care infinitely less than it does today about Pakistan (which is already economically insignificant for India). But Pakistan today, more than ever, does China’s bidding. While it was once used as a tool by the West, it is now being used as a tool by China, and of course it is in China’s interest to do everything it can to contain and diminish India. India-US ties have got a renewed boost after the coming of the Trump administration but it is still unclear what might happen after four years of Trump.
It is important to note a World Bank analysis that came only a day after the Pahalgam massacre. It noted that, “Over the past decade, India has significantly reduced poverty. Extreme poverty (living on less than $2.15 per day) fell from 16.2 percent in 2011-12 to 2.3 percent in 2022-23, lifting 171 million people above this line. Rural extreme poverty dropped from 18.4 percent to 2.8 percent, and urban from 10.7 percent to 1.1 percent, narrowing the rural-urban gap from 7.7 to 1.7 percentage points—a 16 percent annual decline. India also transitioned into the lower-middle-income category. Using the $3.65 per day LMIC poverty line, poverty fell from 61.8 percent to 28.1 percent, lifting 378 million people out of poverty. Rural poverty dropped from 69 percent to 32.5 percent, and urban poverty from 43.5 percent to 17.2 percent, reducing the rural-urban gap from 25 to 15 percentage points with a 7 percent annual decline.”
This is measure of India’s success, this is the most useful India’s response in the narrative war, and it cannot afford to let anything derail this path. It is important to note that as India gets more and more wealthy, it will comprehensively surpass bankrupt Pakistan’s defences on all spheres and comprehensively. All that will be left would be nuclear parity but how long Pakistan—with a crumbling state—safeguard its nuclear weapons is a question mark. Till then, it must be remembered that not only does the two-front war exist on the ground with China and Pakistan, there is a two-front war in which propaganda is a critical front. And India must learn to fight this war.
* Hindol Sengupta is a historian and professor of international relations at the O. P. Jindal Global University