On Operation Sindoor, a case of oppositioniitis

Indian Express

28-05-2025

Nirupama Rao, whom I have held in regard for several decades, is seriously wrong on a couple of scores about why Pakistan succeeded in taking control of the narrative during Operation Sindoor. However, she does make some good points in her piece. It needs to be stated, with requisite — and imperative — eclaircissement, that, in its hallmark style, our neighbour was offering absurd falsehoods as fact; and that the better part of the world, predictably, was lapping it up.
Rao unfairly accuses the Indian media of 'hypernationalism' and levels a gamut of other allegations against it, while, in reality, large swathes of both print and broadcast media did a sterling job covering India's Operation Sindoor. Terms such as hypernationalism are deeply offensive, and it is intellectually lazy to simply throw them at the Indian media — and that is now a go-to strategy for a certain enclave — as they end up being patently uncharitable.
Rao is now saying that the Indian government 'must' develop a real-time crisis communication mechanism with strategic partners. That is what I have been requesting of our diplomatic corps for 30 years. Rao might easily have tackled the odious disinformation campaign against India when she was Foreign Secretary, between 2009 and 2011; or, if she had considered a weekly briefing of the hostile American press at her office, when she was India's Ambassador to the US between 2011 and 2013. Rao's suggestions come a few decades too late.
Pakistan said it won the 1971 war when, in reality, it had capitulated to India and General A A K Niazi handed over 93,000 prisoners of war to General Jagjit Singh Aurora. Ditto with Operation Sindoor. This is Pakistan's 'perennial volte face narrative', in which it commits — tragically — the most lethal error of all: That of consistently fooling itself. Polonius's advice would fall flat on a country that lacks a self, and whose raison d'être for 77 years has been obsessing with and perpetrating terrorist attacks on India. It is not quite enough that India gave Pakistan to Pakistan — that is, a million square kilometres of its own precious territory — but an edacious Pakistan wants more.
Kashmir has been an integral part of India for millenia: Think of Anandavardhana (820-890 AD), Bhallata (who wrote during the reign of King Shankaravarman in 883-902 AD), Kshemendra, Abhinavagupta, Utpaladeva and the glorious Kashmir Shaivism — India does not need to prove that Kashmir belongs to it.
J&K Chief Minister Omar Abdullah's word on the Indus Waters Treaty is the final word: 'We have always believed that the Indus Waters Treaty has been the most unfair document to the people of Jammu and Kashmir.'
Sitting onstage at prominent conferences with serial — and truculent — maligners of India, and, thereby, lending them credibility, is not what we expect of former diplomats of distinction. Why destroy India, our treasured homeland, on foreign shores or at home?
The best media briefings during Operation Sindoor were provided by India's armed forces, whose strategic knowledge, confidence, command, and extraordinary capability reduced nine of the enemy's terror bases to smithereens in 20 minutes. Eleven of Pakistan's air bases were also damaged, in short order. No volume of praise for India's armed forces is hyperbole. India is not in need of cute filler words used
as pilasters to try and shore up perfunctory arguments.
The resounding and almost aesthetic Indian victory — owing to its finesse, brevity, and perfection — of Operation Sindoor robs the West of its inordinately long exercise of hegemony. What is lost is 'the ideological rationale for reducing and reconstituting the (Indian) as someone to be ruled and managed'. That is the inconvenient truth. You might recall Immanuel Kant labelling Indians — and others — as being incapable of 'moral maturity'.
Operation Sindoor was a retaliatory act in response to Pakistan's cold-blooded and well-planned terrorist invasion of Pahalgam, which led to the massacre of 26 civilians. What was India supposed to do? Sit back and munch on nuts and sip Cinzano? Our neighbour has launched dozens of terrorist attacks on India, in which over 20,000 innocent civilians have been killed (a figure cited last Friday by Ambassador Parvathaneni Harish at the UN) and many more wounded. It helps to remember that India has about 200 million Muslims.
Rao says that India also failed in what she calls the 'financial domain.' Rao's official tenure in Washington, DC should have alerted her to the fact that the Americans simply don't listen to anyone once they have made up their minds.
I remember Senator Edward Kennedy — with admiration and gratitude — because he repeatedly accused Pakistan of genocide on the floor of the US Senate in 1971. He blamed the Nixon administration for the unfolding horror show: 'Nothing is more clear, or easily documented, than the systematic campaign of terror — and its genocidal consequences — launched by the Pakistan army on the night of March 25 (1971).'
Kennedy said that it was the Bengali Hindus who were being meticulously targeted, 'systematically slaughtered, and, in some places, painted with yellow patches marked 'H'.' Comparing one of the greatest humanitarian tragedies to the Holocaust, Kennedy said: 'America's heavy support of Islamabad is nothing short of complicity in the human and political tragedy of East Bengal.'
Then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken enriched Pakistan on 28 September 2022 with a staggering $450 million sustenance package for its F-16 fleet, right in the middle of 'dialogue' with India. How did Blinken justify this? Pakistan needed that package to 'fight' ISIS and al-Qaeda. That is ominously similar to the IMF dispatching $1 billion to Pakistan right after its heinous terrorist attack in Pahalgam. Never mind, then, that the butcher and the surgeon are the same entity.
President Donald Trump now repeatedly takes credit for having negotiated a 'ceasefire' between India and Pakistan, which India has refuted. More irksome is the constant equation of India to Pakistan: Bogus equivalences are vexatious. The much-maligned Prime Minister Narendra Modi has ascertained that India is no longer a blank slate on which anyone can scribble, and India is not indigent. Ultimately, it is India the Trump administration will be forced to turn to, to keep its arch-enemy, China, in check in the South China Sea.
Language comes to you as naturally as your breath; thus, notes of artifice generate unbearable dissonance (ativa dussaham). Russia unfailingly gets its messages across to the world. As John Mearsheimer recently said: 'The Russians are unequivocal on what has to be done to satisfy their demands.' India needs to get there too, without tarrying.
I am delighted that India has dispatched the peerless, eloquent, and intellectually rigorous Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament, to the US and a few other countries, to brief leaders on the incessant and barbaric terrorist attacks Pakistan launches on India. India needs to be left alone — a 5,000-year-old civilisation is finally reclaiming itself. Its economy has grown to now make it the fourth largest in the world; flagitious cross-border terrorism impedes the pace of its economic growth.
If there is a toss-up between winning a narrative war and the actual war — and not a 'moral' war, as Rao mentions — it is obviously the greater victory to win the real war, instead of a psyop narrative battle, based on decades of insane concoction and terrorism.
Many of us are chagrined to witness distinguished former members of India's diplomatic corps, and the bureaucracy, reposting material from 'X' by 'columnists' whose language blazes forth malapropisms, and who make a living out of India-bashing, and faux victimhood.
Opposition for the sake of opposition is juvenile: That's Oppositioniitis. When that emanates from India's former top-line government officials, it inflicts a deep and irreversible gash on the country. That feels like stabbing one of your parents — the attendant sense of betrayal is excruciatingly powerful.
(The writer was appointed distinguished fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in 1990. She is also a global adviser on public policy, communications, and international relations, and an award-winning Odissi and Bharatanatyam artiste and choreographer. Views are personal)