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India fights alone: Narrative wars, Western gaslighting, and a missed opportunity

What we saw this time was that the Pakistanis were taken by surprise, and India had a massive advantage. But now that the cat is out of the bag, Pakistanis and Chinese will regroup and figure out corrective tactics read more From May 1 until the 20th, I was travelling in the US and thus had to depend on Western media (mostly Twitter/X) for news about Operation Sindoor and the aftermath. It was self-evident that there was no point in reading things like the NYTimes, Wapo, The Economist, etc, because one look at their headlines confirmed that they were 'manufacturing consent'. Soft Power Given the difference in X posts that I read in the US and those in India, I think the algorithms were deprecating posts for me in ways that are hard to detect. In other words, there is a narrative war where India has no say but lots at stake. India's soft power is seriously wanting. Joseph Nye, the academic who popularised that phrase, passed away this week; following his theories, it behooves India to make a concerted attempt to improve its storytelling. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD It faces an uphill battle because Western, especially American, media have shown an ability to gaslight at scale in three major stories in the recent past: the COVID panic, the 'Trump-is-a-Russian-stooge' meme, and the 'Biden is mentally sharp as a tack' story. They are good at it and have no love lost for India, and so India needs a long-term plan to get its own propaganda story out, for instance, developing an Al Jazeera-style global footprint or an X-style social medium. The entire Western narrative, for self-serving purposes, continues to be against India, for good reason: they do not wish to see India grow into a peer-level competitor at the G3 level. In this, both China and the West are of one mind, and it shows. Besides, the West has every incentive to try to block India from becoming a major arms exporter: they would prefer India to continue to be one of the biggest importers, preferably from them. Narrative warfare is a Western speciality, as I said in Information Warfare, Narrative-Building: That Kind of Warfare. In addition to kinetic warfare, India needs to up its game here too. Narratives have real-life consequences. The Pakistanis have been quite successful in their own narratives, riding on Western media: here is an example from the Nikkei (which owns the Financial Times) from a Pakistani journalist. This is typical of the stories created by Pakistanis and amplified by western media: basically, that India took a major hit, with five or six high-end aircraft downed by Pakistani/Chinese weaponry. The story was repeated so many times that it essentially became the Truth. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD A Step Change in Aerial Warfare My personal belief is that India won a victory on the ground and in the air, humiliating Pakistan, attacking it at will and exposing its Chinese armaments as below-par. Some thoughtful neutral experts support this view: See . India also demonstrated surprising competence in the new age of electronics-based warfare. It may no longer be expensive fighter jets (and by extension, aircraft carriers) that tilt the balance, but missiles, drones and integrated air defence. This must be emphasised. There are periodic step functions in warfare that render earlier, victorious technologies/processes less valuable: this is similar to disruptive innovation, where the 'insurgent' firm nullifies the apparent advantages of the 'incumbent' firm. Often that means a point of inflection. An example is the arrival of the longbow in mediaeval times that made hitherto unstoppable heavy cavalry stumble. Another is the arrival of air power itself. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Today there may be another point of inflection. Experts have suggested that warfare going forward will be software-driven, including drone swarms that can autonomously reshape their formations (reminiscent of the murmurations of flocks of starlings). Presumably, there will be plenty of predictive AI built in as well. Given India's poor track record in software products, it was generally assumed that India would not do so well in such a new environment. In reality, there appears to have been a clever integration of indigenous and imported technology to create an 'iron dome' of sorts against Pakistan's Chinese missiles, of which an advanced variant, PL-15, was apparently shot down intact. More interestingly, it appears that Lakshya and Banshee drones were programmed to masquerade as Rafales, Sukhois, etc, by emitting their radar signals, thus attracting enemy fire towards themselves. This might explain the claims of five or six Indian aircraft shot down by Pakistan, whereas in reality they may have simply shot down the phantom, mimic drones. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD The implications are large: in effect, India was able to attack Pakistan at will; video evidence shows significant damage to terrorist sites in the first round and to military sites in the second round, including to key Pakistani air bases, as well as, it is said, the entrance tunnel to the nuclear storage facilities in the Kirana Hills. Indian air dominance appears to have forced the Pakistanis to beg for US support to suggest a cessation of hostilities. This skirmish was proof in the heat of battle for India's indigenous weapons, especially the BrahMos (although, of course, that is a joint venture with Russia). It may result in a number of serious queries from prospective customers, especially in Southeast Asia, who will be interested in battlefield performance against Chinese missiles and aircraft. This would be a win for India's arms industry. Conversely, there is a singular sore spot: fighter jets. For a variety of reasons, most especially the fact that the Kaveri engine has not been allowed to complete its testing and development phase, India is still dependent on others for advanced fighters. And this is just fine as far as they are concerned, because the Americans want to sell F-35s, the French want to sell more Rafales, and the Russians want to sell Su-57s. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Here's an X comment by a military historian who suggests that India's fighter jets are inadequate. He deleted his further comment that indigenisation is fine as an industrial policy, but it doesn't work for advanced weaponry. This is a typically sniffy attitude towards India, which is grist to the mill for the Chandigarh Lobby's successful efforts to trash local weapons and gain lucrative middleman deals for foreign weapons. Strategic Dilemma: To Push On or Not There is also a strategic dilemma. India has an unfortunate habit of wasting its soldiers' hard-won victories at the negotiating table due to bad political calculations. The epitome of this is, of course, Indira Gandhi's 1971 giveaway of 93,000 Pakistani PoWs in exchange for essentially… nothing. There is some reason to wonder if something similar happened in 2025 as well. A tactical victory was possibly converted into a stalemate, and the old era of hyphenation and the nuclear bogey has returned. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD What we saw in 2025 was that the Pakistanis were taken by surprise, and India had a massive advantage. But now that the cat is out of the bag, Pakistanis and Chinese will regroup and figure out corrective tactics. Thus India has, to use an American expression, 'shot its wad', and the element of surprise is gone forever. The endgame for India is the dissolution of Pakistan into four or five statelets, which, one hopes, will then concentrate on Pakistani Punjab as the root of all their troubles. In that case, they will keep each other occupied, and India can live in peace without regular terrorist attacks. Of course, that may be a pipe dream, given the Ghazwa-e-Hind formula many entertain, but the collapse of the Pakistani state is anyway desirable for India. Should India have continued its offensive? Forget the murky issue of the nuclear assets in Sargodha. Should India have moved the Line of Control (LoC) forward into some areas, perhaps into Gilgit-Baltistan (with Sharda Peeth and the Kishenganga) and up to the Jhelum River in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir? The problem though, is that once you start moving past the border posts, you have hostile civilians to contend with, and your supply lines start getting stretched. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Even though it is tragic to let go of an opportunity to thrash an enemy that's on the back foot, and Pakistan will inevitably use the truce to rearm itself and come back ever stronger (the Treaty of Hudaybiyah is not a meme in the Islamic world for nothing), it is not clear to me what India could have done to militarily make the LoC irrelevant and make Pakistan implode, especially in the context of American pushback. The Role of the US Why was there pressure from President Trump? One of the things I observed during my US stay is the total absence of DOGE and Elon Musk from the headlines after Trump's 100 days, very contrary to their ubiquity early on. Similarly, the security implications of Trump's recent embrace of Syria's President Al-Sharaa contradict Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's views on Syria, as evidenced by her tweets. Further, there are U-turns on tariffs. This means Trump is being mercurial as ever. Furthermore, there might be something to the idea that his family's embrace of crypto may have endeared Pakistan – which is making noises about supporting crypto at scale – to him. All this is red-pilling many about Trump. Indeed, he may be allowing short-term, commercial considerations to drive policy, which may return to haunt the US: that is exactly what Clinton, Bush, Obama, et al did with respect to China. On the other hand, there are longer-term considerations, too. Pakistan is essentially a Potemkin nation, which has no particular reason to exist, other than it is being propped up. Initially, it was a British project for the Russian Great Game; then it was taken over by the US Deep State in order to fend off the Soviet Union. Pakistan was a 'major non-NATO ally' (MNNA) according to Obama, if I remember right, and earlier it was a member of CENTO and SEATO. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan to Pakistan, approved in the middle of the hostilities, is not surprising, either: this has happened before. In a way, it is a complicated money-laundering activity. Funds from somewhere (possibly Qatar) are chanelled to Pakistan, which then buys American arms. Thus, the Deep State Military Industrial Complex is the winner. With the end of the Afghanistan wars, Pakistan offers no obvious geographic and strategic value to the US. Unless, of course, the target is no longer Russia but India. Perhaps in anticipation of its being a check on India, the US had helped Pakistan nuclearise, according to this archived article from the NYTimes: US and China Helped Pakistan Build Its Bomb, from a time when it was possibly more truthful. I am indebted to Brahma Chellaney for this link. This may suggest that Pakistan's nuclear 'assets' are not theirs but are managed by an American crew. On the other hand, though, the greater possibility is that such assets are loaned by China. Pakistan is a fantastic force multiplier for China. Abhimanyu Syndrome The bottom line, then, is that India is on its own: sort of an Abhimanyu Syndrome, with nobody to help. The most obvious 'friend' is Japan (because of the China threat), but it is severely constrained by American red lines: see how there was not a murmur from the Quad after Pahalgam. India's very possible rise is in fact encouraging other powers to put it down: grow so much, but no farther. There really is no alternative for India but to industrialise, make everything possible for its large internal market, and increase the level of strategic autonomy in everything it makes: no more dependence on third parties, who may feel free to use kill switches or deny spares or components at will. In this round, India did surprisingly well with indigenous technology, and it has articulated a strategy of escalating deterrence. To put teeth into this, innovation at home must continue. The writer has been a conservative columnist for over 25 years. His academic interest is innovation. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost's views.