Bharat must not let Op Sindoor lose the narrative war – Firstpost

“Yasya pramāṇam na bhavet pramāṇam kastasya kuryād vacanam pramāṇam”

(What’s the use of citing the lawbook to a person who doesn’t follow the law?)

-Subhasita Ratna Bhandagara

(quoted in Kshatra: The Tradition of Valour in India, by Shatavadhani R Ganesh)

Unlike the physical battlefield, the narrative Kurukshetra is harder to assess. Based on who you ask, what they have just seen or read (which is itself a function of what networks they happen to be in on their phones and what their algorithms are showing them in their feeds), and their particular engagement with their own memory, desires, and critical faculties at that moment, they can tell you very different things about something seemingly very obvious.

The Pahalgam terrorist attack and India’s military response against Pakistan under the evocative title of Operation Sindoor are among the most important events in our time from the perspective of military and political will, as well as the sheer depth and breadth of emotional-moral response to an outrageous provocation. The focused anger among friends and family in India at the horrifying religious targeting of 26 people by ruthless terrorists was far more earnestly felt than perhaps any other terrorist attack in the past two decades. Given that we, as the general public, receive news about the world from so many different sources and in varying shades of presentation and credibility, it was a moment of breakthrough as far as truth was concerned – a very, very horrifying and sad truth indeed, but it shattered the clutter and seized our attention as it ought to. We were, as the phrase goes, utterly, clearly, and unflinchingly united.

And like a sign of affirmation from the Mother of the Universe herself, as if Mother Parameshwari was holding our minds and hands, we received a name, a symbol, whose appropriateness and urgent fury could not have been surpassed by another. Operation Sindoor; as if a thousand recitations of the Devi Khadgamala had been concentrated into one name, one form, one shared force of desire by a nation for justice now.

By all accounts, that pursuit of justice, as understood within the framework of the military strategists, has been successfully executed. Some experts will debate, of course, whether deterrence against future terrorism has been achieved and also the question of delivering their karmic fate to the actual killers and planners of the massacre itself. We hope for this too to happen. But in terms of the events of the physical battlefield, the strikes on terrorist infrastructure sites and then military airbases inside Pakistan, accompanied by an appreciably successful defence of Indian lives from Pakistani attacks thanks to soldiers, leaders, technology, and of course, protection of deities and ancestors, we can say, with more than a hint of sadness for the families whose loss started it all, but with pride nonetheless, we won this one.

Winning the War, Losing the Narrative

However, as the title of a recent interview with Sky News journalist Yalda Hakim puts it, the sobering truth that media (and warfare) experts should consider now is the fact that India may have won the war but lost the narrative. Coming from a journalist with good standards of professionalism and integrity, as evidenced in her informed and persistent questioning of government officials on her programme, Hakim’s observations should be treated with respect and attention.

There will be a tendency among Indians in the days to come, understandably, to either rest on laurels in the form of assertions about our military and technological superiority or to subject misleading reports from Western news media that denied or downplayed Indian victory in Operation Sindoor to a well-deserved dusting down and brushing off.

However, the fact remains that India and one billion-plus Indians, despite occasional temporary attention gains by way of hashtag noise and force on social media, are virtually non-players in the global narrative battlefield. We feel the effects of this absence in a dozen ways every day, and yet, we, or our leaders, fail to diagnose the causes of this situation.

Inequality Trope: The West’s False Narratives which Shield Terrorists

Take, for instance, the mood in Silicon Valley at an important event held just hours before the Pahalgam attack took place. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman was speaking in a beautiful auditorium at Stanford University about her government’s plans for a “Viksit”, or “developed”, India, by 2047. Topics like digital fluency, AI, women’s empowerment, and so on, came up in the conversation. But what is relevant to the current situation, though, is a comment the minister made by way of a retort to her interlocutor’s persistent (some might say tediously persistent) questions about women’s upliftment in India.

There’s a problem, she said, with the West’s “mind picture” of India. Today’s India, she insisted, was not full of snake charmers and poverty. As she spoke, images like Hyderabad or Bengaluru or Gurugram’s gleaming hi-tech cityscapes naturally came to mind. Indians and foreigners who visit these cities might be impressed and see the contradictions with the old poverty stereotypes.

But then, the issue as far as the propaganda wars around India’s image go today is not the presence of poverty in India; it is the opposite. From the time of the movie Slumdog Millionaire (which slyly made a “rich-poor” tale also a “Hindu-Muslim” issue), bolstered by dozens of high-profile books and international news columns, what dominates the “mind picture” in the world about Indians in general and Hindus in particular is not poverty but India’s new wealth. The argument has been drilled, very effectively, by academicians and pop culture creators alike that the wealth that India has generated in recent decades is somehow deeply ill-gotten, religiously tainted, and Brahminically dominated – so any act of violence against Hindus or Indians, be it 26/11 or the Pahalgam massacre, must be seen as an act of resistance.

The “mind-picture” of India today is not there out of inertia. It is the product of a massive and massively coordinated investment. It comes from the binding force of organised communication, from the command centres of world propaganda, from the persistence of certain ways of looking, gazing, silencing, objectifying, and dehumanising others in these institutions and in the habitus of those who work in them, generation after generation. To put it simply, the West has managed to conduct itself with absolute, unabashed racism against Indians in general and Hindus in particular, even while elevating anti-racism to the level of the supreme morality and religion (and business venture) of its time. It takes enormous will and investment to sustain a lie that goes so brazenly against the zeitgeist year after year. But if you connect the dots, you will see it. It is not a conspiracy.

Information Asymmetry: What Indians See, What Americans Don’t See

In the days that followed the Pahalgam attack, the picture that formed in the minds of observers in the West was patchy at best. Even though Indian students in some colleges held vigils and some bold protests were conducted at Pakistani embassies in some cities, the bottom line was the information asymmetry that prevents an honest or effective understanding of events in India in the West.

In college classrooms, the percentage of students who said they had seen news of the attack was probably just about one in five. And even among them, the understanding of what happened in Pahalgam was extremely vague. Big-reach platforms like the Associated Press and Washington Post had obfuscated the events enormously with phrases like “indiscriminate firing” instead of highlighting just how brazenly the terrorists had religiously profiled their targets for execution. Naturally, for anyone who is not deeply invested in the issue and also following multiple independent sources from India, the “mind picture” is exactly what the Western shield-bearers of Jihadism want: there is no religious genocide going on at all, just one more flare-up in a disputed, “occupied” territory that India and Pakistan regularly bicker over.

Worse, even though people in India may be more aware of the realities domestically, for most Americans, including many non-resident Indians and persons of Indian origin, the vague image they have of events in India since 2014 is unfortunately profoundly skewed by the headlines they skim through regularly (and also the synergised fictional depictions they consume on channels like Netflix). Even if people here are forced by better-informed Indian friends to confront the reality that the Pahalgam killers targeted Hindus and Christians (and even checked to see if they were circumcised), that reality will not sink in given the way their minds have already been conditioned over many years. What exactly is this conditioning? It consists of the hundreds of times their eyes would have noticed the phrase “Hindu Nationalist” in headlines even about jihadist attacks. It consists of memories of the photos they have seen of angry men with saffron scarves and trishuls. It consists of memorable villains from movies like Monkey Man or shows like Leila and Sacred Games.

What has been normalised in the public here is the certainty that even if Islamists did something really bad in Pahalgam this time, the “Hindutvas” have been doing equally bad things for the last ten years, so it all equals out. This is, of course, a delusion, a perversion of the “all religions are the same” myth, which functions as an “all fundamentalisms are the same” cop-out. But this too is the reality of the “narrative battlefield”. Millions of minds have been moulded and shaped by the vast, centralised, intrusive, and, of course, professionally and morally compromised Western military-industrial media apparatus.

Don’t Give Complaint, Get Compliance: “How Qatar Bought America”

That Western news media coverage of terrorism against India remains biased can be demonstrated using objective methods of media research such as content analyses. From the 1993 Mumbai blasts to the present, the fact remains that consumers of the propaganda product called “foreign news” have rarely managed to see through the lies and half-truths. They have come to accept the “brand prestige” and professional packaging of platforms like NPR and BBC as guarantors of objectivity.

To anyone trained in the basics of critical media studies, the truth that news media are anything but objective, fair and professional (or even ethical) should be obvious. Some of us have done extensive studies, reports, letters, and petitions and even managed to hand them in to responsible (and personally affable) captains of American news media. But nothing has changed, nor should Indians expect anything to change in the way terrorism against Indians is presented in the world press. The days when the press felt professionally or morally obliged to respond to public criticism or pressure are gone. They are purveyors of expensively bought words and images shielded from such pressures by a gilded cage.

Coincidentally enough, even as observers in India are debating how fairly or unfairly Western media covered the recent conflict, a fantastic piece of journalistic research shedding light on how narrative battles actually unfold was
just published in The Free Press. The story talks about how Qatar’s ruling family needed to establish that it was an invaluable ally to America, even as it continued to host hostile fundamentalist and anti-Western forces and used its formidable wealth and smarts to take control over, well, nothing less than the American mind, in a manner of speaking. What did they do, and how did they do this? It is worth studying the article in detail, but a brief summary may be useful here. While hundreds of billions of dollars in business and defence deals may have won for the country a measure of influence, what countries like India, which seem to mistake engagement in these two areas alone for actual clout, need to learn more about is what else the Qatar government has done.

Using data from an extensive study done by Rutgers’ University’s National Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), the authors argue that Qatar has invested billions of dollars in American higher education and also invited prestigious US universities to set up shop in their country.

The article also documents many other forms of narrative-influence building, such as spending on advertising in US news media, as well as investments even in conservative news platforms. Most importantly, of course, Qatar also has the globally influential Al Jazeera English platform (and the more narratively appealing AJ+), which made a huge mark on young, idealistic US college students in the aftermath of the George Bush presidency and the Iraq War fiasco.

Teaching about media and war in the United States at that time was a memorable experience, with young people and many professors rejecting American platforms like Fox News and even CNN for AJE. Little wonder that by the time of the tragic October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, about 50 per cent of American voters under the age of 35 were saying in polls that the attacks were “justified”.

Unlike Indian leaders of business and government, who seem satisfied with photo ops and trade deals, other countries, even small ones, like Qatar, and seemingly economically distressed ones, like Pakistan, get a lot out of their interactions with the West simply because of their unabashed faith in their civilisational vision and mission. It was therefore strange to see Indians on social media (and even some important op-ed writers) mock Pakistani General Munir a few weeks ago for his grand declarations of their ideological and cultural “supremacy”.

Now, the Indian military may have the upper hand, and all praise for the courage and sacrifices of its men and women. But what neither India’s soldiers nor citizens nor diasporic outposts have is anything close to the narrative shield that has been built for Pakistan and its friends in the global mind through their careful cultivation of real influence in the United States. India’s and the Indian diaspora’s disorganised, voluntary, on-and-off efforts to appeal to US politicians and media are absolutely no substitute for masterful, professional, well-funded communication and information policies and organisations and operations.

Imagine if India did not have a standing military and the missiles and shields it had but relied on word of mouth to get some docile people sleeping under a tree to run out with twigs and stones to defend the nation every now and then. This is the situation that India is in as far as the narrative battlefield is concerned.

Every serious country has a global broadcasting platform and a serious investment in American influence. Indian government officials should get over the old excuse that we should not “pay to play” or that American media propaganda and dehumanisation is just their “internal matter”, or worse, that it’s a sign they are frustrated by our gloriously climbing GDP!

No. Just like one may buy weapons, energy, or other things in the US, a serious country would also invest in buying cultural and narrative influence here. But the difference, of course, is that countries like China, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and now Qatar are quite aware of what they need to get out of it. Most elite Indians, unfortunately, are not and do things like give $25 million to Harvard, which hosts a Pakistan conference a couple of days after a terrorist massacre!

Money Matters, Yes, But Words Matter Even More!

The most important lesson that anyone who goes on to read the Free Press article on Qatar’s incredible success story should take, though, is not about the billions it has invested in American PR, media, colleges, and political lobbying. It is a quote from a former student of Georgetown University (which, according to the NCRI report cited here, received $73.5 million in just 2024 alone from the country): “They know exactly which buttons to push and how to phrase an argument, how to engage in conversations with students who are especially progressive.”

Contrast this efficient marriage of ideology, investment, professionalism, and even “soft skills” with the state of the Indian “narrative about narrative”. We complain on social media, we scream on television panels, and we go on with life and death as it is doled out to us by terrorists and their masters. Once in a while, we sing the praises of our armed forces and leaders. But if we are to prevent future Pahalgams, then it is imperative that our future strategy should take into account the fact that “narrative” is not just a loose word to be tossed around. It is today’s gold or oil and something very precious and valuable in today’s global, networked, unceasingly active attention economy. Without control of the narrative, the terrorists will always win, even when they lose.

The harsh truth at the present time is that Indians who complain about Western news media’s biased coverage come across to people in these institutions not quite differently from the way many Indian social media influencers harshly characterise Pakistan and Pakistanis: as “beggars”. Not as equals, not as formidable opponents in the global struggle for attention, perception, and opinion formation, but just as petulant bystanders prone to complaints that rarely get feet beyond hot air on social media, and equally prone to distraction by well-timed flattery. We boast about how rich we are and how many CEOs we have. But then, we never seem to have realised that we have no leverage over them or over anybody.

This is not to say that we lack talent or truth-sayers. The readiness and courage with which Shashi Tharoor, for example, spoke for his country and for decency were commendable. Indian diplomats and armed forces spokespersons also stood up amidst what must have been extremely difficult circumstances. But all of these are still like popping mustard seeds in the feast of truth and power that must come for Bharat to truly win in the narrative battlefield.

Imagine if India set up a global “media education campus” somewhere and invited the world’s best educators and institutions to lend their expertise and name to it (which is what Qatar seems to have done with Northwestern’s prestigious journalism school, among other things). Imagine if the curriculum was designed from scratch, integrating modern India’s needs and global ambitions with the growing interest in “Indian Knowledge Systems”.

Imagine teaching young “content creators” from around the world about what a truly Indian vision of the universe would sound like and feel like and then getting the world to “convert” to our ancient, timeless, unifying, diversity-maintaining wisdom. We have to learn, to quote the Georgetown student’s half-compliment to the Qatari education patrons, how to “push the buttons”. The British have left. We don’t have to stand up like good children and plead that we deserve more GDP and jobs and investment and re-education in human rights from them. We must be sure of who we are and who they are and push the buttons that will make everything good for us and them in that order.

Vamsee Juluri is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco. He has authored several books, including ‘Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Indian Intelligence’ (Westland, 2015). C Raghothama Rao is a writer, podcaster and YouTuber. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.