Opinion: A Pakistani Life for an Indian Life – India’s Attempt at Manufacturing Consent for War

“Mahjoor, why came you so early?

You could have delayed your arrival, 

So that people could flock to buy you, 

Like they buy saffron flowers.” 

Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor – Shaiyar-e-Kashmir (the Poet of Kashmir) 

Metragam, Pulawama, Jammu and Kashmir. 

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“The Indian military occupation of Kashmir makes monsters of us all. It allows Hindu chauvinists to target and victimize Muslims in India by holding them hostage to the freedom struggle being waged by Muslims in Kashmir. India needs azadi from Kashmir just as much as – if not more than – Kashmir needs azadi from India.” Arundhati Roy, 2008.

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“What is state terrorism? It is similar to non-state terrorism in that it involves politically or ideologically or religiously inspired acts of violence against individuals or groups outside of an armed conflict. The key difference is that agents of the state are carrying out the violence”. Steve Hewitt, in Terrorism by the State is still Terrorism.

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Who doesn’t appreciate an underdog taking centre stage during a fight? There are rules to a fair game, a fair fight. Proxy wars – whether we agree with this norm or not – are designed to prevent conventional warfare and, for the most part, are fought in the shadows. There are spoken and unspoken rules of the fight, the most obvious one being that if both parties possess nuclear weapons, they don’t go to war. This rule, the one that matters the most, was broken late at night by India on May 7th, 2025 as it launched missile strikes into the heart of Pakistan, murdering civilians in their sleep as a ‘response’ to the jolting terrorist attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir on April 22nd, 2025, which Pakistanis condemned univocally. If these were “precision” strikes, as the Israelis also infamously say about their genocide in Palestine, then the killing of Pakistani civilians proves the intention behind them to be just that: this was precisely the target in Operation Sindoor.  

Universally, one’s geographical reference may bring out one’s beating heart for one’s homeland, but it is sleeping children that often become the jugular vein of political consciousness, especially after the Israeli genocide in Palestine. Likewise, the Indian state, with masses rallying behind it in unison, has done the unthinkable and killed Muslim Pakistani children in their sleep, either labelling them terrorists, collateral damage or civilian casualties, which means all the same: that India has murdered Pakistani children in their sleep. And the world acting as a witness has seen the usage of dehumanizing language to justify dehumanizing acts.  

There are many ways of capturing criminals but India chose to strike Pakistan’s jugular vein, signifying the taking of a Pakistani life for an Indian life; India’s portrayal of justice for Pahalgam. The deafening silence against the infamous Gujarat Pogrom of 2002 has, 23 years later, grown into a disturbingly loud social consensus for war in all echelons of Indian society while the Indian establishment has been providing patronage to violent militancies in Pakistan all this time.

India plays the ‘good terrorist’, ‘bad terrorist’ game. It shows in the pirouetted, painfully delayed trial of the 2008 Malegaon Bombings, including one that targeted a masjid and its Muslim attendees, in which Indian Muslims were initially publicly accused of attacking Indian Muslims (mimicking colonialism, the social experiment seems to be divide and rule from within), while the Indian civil-military establishment privately replaced five presiding judges and overlooked blueprints from clandestine meet-ups to plan the blasts along with “the formation of a central Hindu government (Aryawart)”. Meanwhile, one of the convicts Pragya Singh Thakur, a textbook case study of childhood religious radicalisation, was voted in as a Member of the Indian Parliament (MP). Launching judicial wars within, the said establishment protects the convicted (who trace their affiliation to Abhinav Bharat), while BJP apologists who turn away from other parties cite financial corruption as the reason. The BJP government accumulates political capital in the docks of its courts that reek of both financial and spiritual/religious corruption, which as a combination are almost guaranteed to win elections in societies that understate the dangerous liaison of financial and religious/spiritual capital in the context of what it means for marginalised communities. 

Similarly, Bhavesh Patel, another Hindu extremist from Gujarat, was given a “hero’s welcome” by members of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), VHP (Vishva Hindu Parishad) and RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) after being released from a life imprisonment sentence for his conviction in the Ajmer Sharif Dargah (Shrine) Bomb Blast. His admirers and former fellows from the RSS and VHP, citing his pious, spiritual transformation in jail, said that “When he went to jail he was like any another common man” and it was “only after he came here that we learnt that he has already become a monk of an akhada, and has changed his name to Swami [religious ascetic] Muktanand”. Religious capital can be exchanged with social and cultural capital in corrupt theocracies but not genuine democracies; in India, it is directly bartered for extra-judicial overreach. This raises and answers the question of which of the two India is.  

The pattern replicates itself in the Mecca Masjid Bombing with the acquittal of Swami Aseemanand from the RSS, whose trial links with the Samjhauta (friendship) Express Bomb Blast as well as the two events mentioned above. The Samjhauta Express Bombing of a biweekly train connecting Delhi and Lahore, two cities that are said to closely mirror one another. Up until 2007/08 when the said terrorist activities happened, the blame was instantaneously shifted towards either Pakistan or practising Indian Muslims, but it is after the series of these terror attacks that the non-violent legacy of Indian democracy and post-conviction piety was put on trial too.  

In the black and white of ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ terrorists, though, where do violent Tamil militancies stand? 

Suicide attacks by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – including “elite suicide wings” that promote “martyrdom” amongst young female recruits like the 22-year old female suicide bomber who assassinated Rajiv Gandhi – are attributed to the Tamil guerrilla warfare that has “institutionalize[d] the tactic” in India and Sri Lanka. As of 2009, the LTTE “had carried out most of the suicide attacks recorded around the world up until that point”. Tamil Nadu and Kashmir both have insurgencies that utilise at times similar methods of warfare. Still, there is a unique factor that prevents India and Sri Lanka from going to war even after witnessing a surge in suicide attacks: islamophobia. This has infiltrated the Indian military and intelligence forces – whose high-ranking officers founded and continue to run Abhinav Bharat – with an ambition to gain patronage from India’s “corporate houses”, and thus signalling the blurring of boundaries between the civil-military domains as well as corporate clientelism and “crony capitalism”.

Despite this, news in the Western world has remained painstakingly partial, polarising and psycho-politically manipulative because it covertly pushes forth the West’s geopolitical strategy of neocolonialism, human rights violations under a liberal guise, white supremacy and the dehumanisation of its ‘other’ – case in point being islamophobia after 9/11. Predictably so, American academics seemingly are offering an analytical cushion to soften India’s operation and equate it with Pakistan in the last few days, creating the impression that both want to go to war and both are irresponsible with nuclear weapons. It is part of the usual ‘both sides’ false equivalency that liberal interventionism, neocolonialism, Zionism and Hindutva supremacism propagate. This is organised disinformation, not only because Pakistan did not want to go to war but also because an important realisation has been made by the world: that Pakistan and India’s political stratagem and moral consciousness are not the same. Pakistan in its social and mass communication realms has claimed victory not only in the skies but also on the global stage by refusing to engage with misogyny, feminist tokenism, imperialist expansionism, memes over dead (Pakistani) children and nuclear rhetoric in the same language as India.  

Neither Rome, nor moral consciousness are raised (not “razed”) in a day. Some influencer figures in Pakistan, the IMF-dependent Rome – seen by some as a “failed state” – asked their fellow citizens to remain respectful towards the people of India and to not equate Indian citizens with their state apparatus. It asked Pakistanis to humanise Indians. In this, Kashmiri news was silenced by the deafening Indian news alerts. Seeing the two-edged sword of Hindutva that provokes uncalled aggression into an internationally recognised border since 1947 in the name of justice and socially emasculates direct calls for negotiation through false bravado, it is curious to think how many years of the ‘you lose no matter which side you pick’ treatment the Kashmiri people have been subjected to. 

There was no evidence provided behind Pakistan’s alleged involvement in Pahalgam, just like there is no evidence of the Kashmiris’ hearts beating for a Hindu Rashtra. In either situation, does it matter?  

For any nuclear state refusing to be jingoistic and hypernationalist is not a sign of the underdog’s weakness, including economic struggles that its neighbour keeps bringing up, but its upholding of dignity and respect for its Indian counterpart. This has gone unappreciated in the nuclear-possessing Western countries, but at the brink of war, this is truly what set Pakistani society apart and prevented much else from escalating on the ground and social media. Some of the peace projects initiated by Pakistan for India, which has involved inviting VIP guests from India for Pakistani literary festivals, Pakistani and Indian universities collaboratively teaching courses on South Asia, a large viewership for Indian cinema in Pakistan, renowned voices in Pakistani intelligentsia and mass media continuing to ask for regional peace, the Aman ki Asha Economic Conference, Pakistani officials repeated requests to India for a bilateral approach to terrorism and climate change, and so on. Such joint efforts have ended in a dejected place, especially for the skeptics of the British-drawn partition in the Indian subcontinent who argued that we are all the same people who hold the same love for one another.  

Pakistan has demonstrated emotional intelligence and military restraint while the Indian media and state spokespersons publicly decried the ceasefire and made widespread claims of destroying Sialkot and Lahore’s landlocked and thus non-existent ports. Conversations about the Indus Waters Treaty – water being the only biological lifeline for the human species and South Asia already facing water starvation due to climate change – were left out of mainstream discourse or presented as retaliation when it has been a hegemonic power play all along. India is not a superpower but it has demonstrated in this war the regional issues that would easily become a strategic challenge for countries well beyond Pakistan if it were to become one.  

To justify the ‘safety’ of an average Indian, the Indian army has systemically enforced disappearances, initiated demographic restructuring (a type of settler colonialism also seen in Israel) and set up “a torture trail” in Kashmir, including but not limited to Papa II, Cargo and Harinawas. To prevent the Indus from going green, India has turned Jhelum red. The Indus Valley Civilisation must be weeping in the stars of the galaxies looking over contemporary South Asia.  

India today stands in psycho-socio-religio dissonance with the respective Indian Prime Ministers Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh’s vision for regional diplomacy. It is an India on the verge of an explosive internal identity crisis and one that has ‘otherised’ Pakistan and Muslims to unite the nation against a common enemy – a tried and tested mechanism of state control and self-sanitisation for public relations that is bound to fail as it did in Pakistan during General Zia’s dictatorship. Quoting Jibran Nasir, “when hate becomes the national currency, it demands targets.”  

How then, does one logically equate the actions of insurgents with those of a nuclear state? How does one fairly assess this crisis in which millions have been left traumatised and more than 8000 accounts blocked overnight on X, Pakistani journalists’ accounts banned on Indian mass media and the rest of Pakistani social media is put under a shadow ban?  

Pakistan and the world have woken up to Hindutva’s religious and political extremism and the ungodly backing of it by Zionism, and this is not limited to BJP supporters anymore. In this war, the Indian right-wing ideology and practice were no longer limited to the RSS or BJP; India’s hatred towards Pakistan was their mainstream, their new normal. Even so, such widespread and deep-rooted hatred is seldom the result of mass communication propaganda, a terror attack or a country’s decision to go to war.  

This publicly displayed genocidal and annihilative hatred against Pakistanis, Kashmiris and Muslims has been in the making for many years and has almost expansively included many of India’s supposed liberals. A social dynamic encapsulated by Arundhati Roy:   

“For many goodhearted liberals, Muslims are welcome guests, but guests nevertheless—burdened with the expectation of good behavior, which is a terrible thing to thrust onto fellow citizens. It’s like giving women rights as long as they promise to be good—good mothers, sisters, wives and daughters. Even the most well-intentioned, progressive people often counter anti-Muslim slander by talking up Muslim patriotism.” 

Somewhere, India’s rage is symptomatic of a deeply damaged national self-esteem and the search for a scapegoat. It is a self-esteem that has found a common vindictive enemy in the dehumanising imaginary and false belief of the average Pakistani holding pro-terrorism sympathies simply through association (to Pakistan). And when Pakistanis did not live up to the imagined description of being a terror-supporting people, but rather turned out to be victims of terrorism and offered condolences to the victims of Pahalgam, they were digitally cut off from the Indian people in India’s attempt to manufacture consent for war.  

The normalising of national imaginations of such vast destruction and carnage, even at a time of war, is something to be cautious of. This speaks to something bigger and more sinister: India’s genocidal fantasies of regional hegemony and Akhand Bharat (Greater India, like Greater Israel) – something that Indian-occupied Kashmir is a direct victim of. For those who defend it (I do not), this is the way of proxy wars; many countries in the world do it. But what is alarming here is India’s denial of Pakistanis as legitimate victims of the War on Terror and declaring it not only a terrorist state but also a terrorist society and thereby extending collective punishment to the average Pakistani civilian. 

This psycho-emotional state of warfare led many Indians to openly exude apathy towards dead Pakistani people and children, whom their state directly targeted because it was portrayed as justice and the only option left.

Hindutva’s ambitions for Akhand Bharat, which include conquering most of South Asia, have found a friend in Greater Israel and beyond that with Western imperialist allies in a world order that does not exist anymore. This is the world order of the Kargil War 1999, in which India saw the Pakistani establishment more willing to go to war than it is today. It is also the same liberal world order in which states and their peoples conveniently ignored the Palestinian genocide in their bids for American attention on diplomatic forums. This is the world order of the United States of America in the aftermath of 9/11, which was used to justify multitudes of wars, drone attacks against Muslim civilians and invasions in the Middle East and South Asia.  

This world order also denied the legitimacy of victimhood of more than 60 Muslim lives lost in the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001. The Muslim prayer room on the 17th floor of the South Twin Tower in New York remains invisible in post-9/11 American trauma and Indian podcasters-turned-analysts’ recalling of Muslim history.  

The bloc that openly supported Pakistan included China, Turkey and Azerbaijan, amongst other countries. Although militarily successful with the downing of India’s most treasured Rafales, this bloc – following Pakistan’s strategy – was able to do many things at the same time. It was one that helped counter Indian hegemony and imperialist expansionism in the region along with the extrinsic reaction to an internal tragedy and the intrinsic attempts at dominating a regional (or rather, globally recognised) issue – Pahalgam and Kashmir respectively. Beyond that, Pakistan and its allies helped contain the Zionist-like dangerous attempt at setting a norm in international relations of employing Nazriya-e-Zaroorat (Doctrine of Necessity, also known as Doctrine of Exception) to use collective punishment in the pretext of self-defence and not be held accountable to international or humanitarian law because this situation is seemingly so exceptional that it need not adhere to the law as in the case of the Indian 1984 massacre of the Sikh community after Mrs Gandhi’s assassination.  

The liberal world order that has inspired India is one that was built on the marginalisation of Indian people themselves too, ironically, and has resulted in the embodiment of racial self-hatred in the likes of Rishi Sunak. The performative theatric of any kind of discrimination being analysed by the wrong party is that the problems are often selectively picked, appropriated and uncritically criticised, rather sanitised, by those who benefit from the structures that produce them and hence are left to carry on in micro-aggressive, subtler ways. Why is it that Indian society can only go so far as to reform caste or declare it a social practice of the past (which it is not), but cannot get rid of it?  

Ambedkar’s India is a myth and Babu Bajrangi’s India rules supreme. Tabrez Ansari, Ehsan Jafry and Bilkis Bano’s India, a mob lynching country, is a reality. Muslims are left to face the aftermath alone, citing Indian Air Marshal Bharti, who said, “Our job is to hit the target, not count the body bags”.

But who counts for the Kashmiris? 

Indian media supposedly braved the checkpoints of the most militarised place in the world to show Hindustan how the Ponywallahs and tour guides of Kashmir are good Muslims, good Indians who wanted to serve and give their life for mainland India. The journalists asked Kashmiris to speak against Pakistan ignoring their discomfort and agency. That is a word deeply admired by white and Indian feminists who were amiss of their own tone-deafness performing “loyalty tests” in the most militarised region in the world. A Hindu supremacist Rashtra not only demands land and water from its subjects; it entitles itself to their servitude and sacrifice of life itself.  

‘Jai Hind’ (meaning ‘Hail India’) it seems has to be felt naturally by the people of Kashmir the way it is being felt by influential Indian Muslims, such as Aamir Khan in his efforts to Indianise himself as a good Indian Muslim by starring as Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman – a pilot whose plane crashed in Pakistan in 2019, was captured and returned to India in a friendly diplomatic gesture by Pakistan, in his new movie. This is Khan’s latest venture in a jingoistic film industry misrepresenting Abhinandan’s failed mission as success despite Khan previously having boycotted Bollywood award ceremonies, calling them superficial and biased towards the country’s talent and truth. This is performative deference to Hindutva, stemming from fear and appeasement, the threats of which have not even spared the rich, famous and powerful Khan known to a global audience in India and beyond, Shah Rukh Khan himself.  

Amongst those misrepresented in Bollywood’s myth-making of history is the whitewashing of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the founder of Abhinav Bharat, whose legacy sought to go as far as to biologically racialise Islam. The puritan organisation that seeks the Bharat Ratna – India’s highest civilian award from the Modi government – traces Savarkar’s inspiration in Nazi ideology and pushes for the forced conversion of Muslim women to solve the “Muslim problem” for the “Hindu race”. This juncture of history, as it continues to be made by the cruelties of global far-right fascism, is witnessing India’s turn to a civilisational lens.

The romanticisation of bloodshed cannot be entirely blamed on propaganda alone, as many projected what they wanted to believe deep down in their hearts, but didn’t express aloud – until now. The condemnations for Operation Sindhoor’s victims mean very little coming from those who supported it all along and presented it to be the only option left. Targeted misinformation has brought out, amongst displays of supremacist ambitions of regional conquest as a supposedly corrective remedy for India’s flailingly low national self-esteem, a round of rumours on Indian television and social media about nuclear targets being hit and nuclear radiation spreading in Pakistan’s Kirana Hills.  

Paying tribute to and seeking forgiveness from the inevitable destiny and tragedy of nuclear leaks, God forbid them, ties the geography and survival of a people living in the closest proximity in South Asia, something that should not be used so casually in warmongering rumours.

As India’s digital footprint traces a vengeful national memory stuck in the Mughal past whilst the rest of the world wakes up to a multipolar world where Dassault Aviation, colonial lines and delusions of self-grandeur don’t reign supreme, this article wholeheartedly agrees to the demand of an independent investigation in Pahalgam and implores the neutral parties to also investigate the mass graves of Kashmir and the Gujarat Pogrom while they are at it. In its fight against ‘terrorism’, Hindustan, treading closely behind Israel and America, has committed crimes against humanity and has become a terrorist state itself. 

The IMF loan-ridden state and its wretched have every right to ask for peace, but today the ask is for a little more.  

Free Kashmir. Free Palestine. 

Image: The Babri Masjid mosque, Faizabad, India; Ayodhya, India, Samuel Bourne, 1863-1887//Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal