“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
— Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion and rights activist, in a conversation with Columbia Journalism Review in 2017
Those unfortunate enough to be following Indian television ‘news’ channels on the night of May 7 — a day after India launched missiles on civilian targets in mainland Pakistan and Azad Jammu & Kashmir — could be forgiven for being thoroughly confused.
While the Indian media was in a state of frenzy over alleged Pakistani strikes in “15 locations”, including in Occupied Jammu and Kashmir and Indian Punjab, Pakistan was officially denying any such operation. In fact, the Director-General Inter-Services Public Relations (DG ISPR) Lt Gen Arshad Sharif claimed that the sound and fury coming from India signified nothing other than an attempt to create war hysteria among its own populace.
He referred to it as India’s “phantom defence” against imaginary attacks. Of course, very few in India would have heard him, since Pakistani channels and many Pakistani social media sites are officially blocked in that country.
To be fair, many Pakistanis were also completely nonplussed. It didn’t help that there was soon a sort of panic in Pakistan with the intrusion of Indian drones across multiple cities and their being engaged with anti-aircraft guns was already making it sound as if a full-fledged war had broken out, at least in Punjab. But with all the media hysteria coming out of India, they couldn’t understand why Pakistan was not taking credit for its expected retaliation.
If one were being charitable, one could say the Indian media was simply guilty of being taken in by the hysteria spun by its government sources — loud firing at non-existent missiles can still sound threatening and cause panic — and swallowing their line, hook line and sinker that all the alleged multiple attacks by Pakistan had been repulsed and neutralised, without any damage or casualty or a single shred of evidence presented in terms of the debris of any incoming missiles or drones.
The past few weeks have made it evident that India’s mainstream media has traded fact for fantasy, devolving into a propaganda machine that espouses delusional narratives, endangers regional peace and erodes public reason
But nothing could have prepared any viewer of Indian TV channels with what came a day later. And this was far more sinister.
FAKE NEWS GALORE
On the night of May 8, Indian television channels were glutted with news first of a Pakistani attack on the Sikh heartland of Amritsar, which nobody in Pakistan could make sense of. Why would Pakistan alienate the Sikh community in particular and to what purpose would Amritsar be attacked?
The Pak military spokesman himself looked shocked at the turn of events, saying that India had attacked its own areas. He would later show real-time digital maps tracking the projectiles fired, which seemed to indicate that the four missiles that apparently landed near Amritsar and which India claimed had been fired from Pakistan had been launched from an Indian air base in Adampur.
But soon, all this was left behind as Indian anchors on mainstream news channels went into overdrive and were doing their best to out-shout each other about one alleged Indian “victory” after another alleged advance.
“Karachi Port Destroyed” screamed one headline along with the channel’s anchors. One notorious ex-military Indian “analyst” exulted that India should subsequently destroy all of Karachi with Brahmos missiles from the INS Vikrant, the Indian aircraft carrier that was actually hundreds of miles away. Another channel had Indian ground forces in Lahore. A third announced the takeover of Quetta by the banned Balochistan Liberation Army and the secession of Balochistan. Then one broke the “news” that Pakistan army chief Gen Asim Munir had been arrested and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had been scuttled off to a secure location. Another shrieked that Islamabad had fallen and the Indian flag had been flown in the capital.
It was apparently a resounding victory for the Indian military and the end of Pakistan as a country.
Pakistanis, meanwhile, watching all this unfold on social media, sat eating their popcorn and laughing their heads off in disbelief. The so-called news coming out of Indian channels was so absurd that most did not know where to begin, though some intrepid souls did put videos out on social media of the prevailing calm and normality in Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad.
India’s entire adventure with its so-called Operation Sindoor was predicated on wrong assessments and hubris. It assumed Pakistan was on the point of fracturing, that the Pakistan military did not have the wherewithal to respond in kind, that it could bully Pakistan and establish a new norm, and that it needed to present no evidence of its alleged involvement in the tragic Pahalgam incident. Each one of those assessments, fed in part by Modi Media, turned out to be false.
As one sober Indian commentator put it, the Indian public woke up the next morning with a very bad hangover. Nothing of what they had been fed the night before had come to pass. Pakistan still existed. Life went on as normally in its cities as it can in the middle of such tensions. And soon a few ethical voices across the border began to criticise the madness that India’s media has become under Narendra Modi. One TV channel, out of the scores that had participated in the mass hysteria, attempted to apologise to its viewers with a mealy-mouthed statement about “inadvertent mistakes” in its reporting.
“All of this ‘reporting’ by major news channels was not just fake news but also inflammatory and provocative, and clearly intended to ensure the very escalation (from the Pakistani side) that the Indian government has cautioned against from the outset,” tweeted Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of The Wire, whose website was ironically blocked in India under Indian government orders around the same time.
‘GODI MEDIA’
This hangover would be broken by the news on Pakistani media on the night of May 9 that a few Pakistani airbases had indeed come under Indian missile attack, including the Nur Khan airbase in Chaklala, Rawalpindi. Soon after that came Pakistan’s actual “notch above” military retaliation, fully owned by Pakistan and partly beamed live on Pakistani television screens.
Interestingly, while Pakistanis only had the Pak military’s version of the number of targets hit in India, the Indian government corroborated that 26 purely military locations had been hit, though it disputed Pakistan’s version of how much damage had been incurred by those sites.
The military and diplomatic successes and failures have been debated continuously on both sides and will no doubt continue to be debated for a long time to come. But it is important to also consider what exactly has happened to the Indian media under Modi’s proto-fascist Hindutva regime.
Over the last decade or so, the Modi-led government has deliberately shrunk the space for India’s independent media. Some, like Prannoy Roy’s NDTV have been forced to sell. Others have had to toe the line. At the same time, there has been a rise of what is termed in India itself as ‘Godi Media’, a pun on Modi’s name and the Hindi/Urdu word for ‘lap’, implying its status as lapdogs of the Hindutva regime. A combination of financial inducements to media owners and direct attacks from armies of Hindutva trolls have made independent reporting in India a very risky venture.
This is not to say that parts of Indian media have not resisted — parts of the old print media continue to hold out. But even they are under pressure. An example of this can be seen with how The Hindu — long a bastion of old world journalism — was forced to remove a report from its website that raised questions about the Indian government claims that none of its fighter jets had been downed on the night of May 6 and 7.
The removal of the reporting from the ground, which indicated that people had seen the wreckage of at least two jets, may have been prompted by recent Indian government stipulations that only official statements regarding military matters could be carried by the media during the war. But the end result was the same: silencing of dissent and any narrative that goes against the official one.
Of course, one can argue that the lot of the Indian media, in matters related to hostilities with Pakistan, is not very different from Pakistan’s media. Pakistani media too cannot afford to counter the military line in such matters and many so-called journalists in the electronic media go out of their way to propagate whatever they are fed without question. However, India had always prided itself on having a freer media, protected by constitutional and democratic ideals, unlike its neighbour who they assume work under far greater constraints.
But whereas Pakistan’s media has indeed worked under greater constraints to its freedoms — resisting and often using ingenious methods to carve out space for itself — Pakistan’s political history has also led to the Pakistani populace having greater skepticism about the official narrative. And to be fair, it has never had the kind of no-holds-barred, jingoistic and inflammatory mainstream electronic media that India now seems to have.
Perhaps even more troubling is the general acceptance of such narratives in India. The psychological repercussions of a widespread acceptance of such bigotry and falsehood is something for sociologists to delve into in more detail.
DELUSIONAL BUBBLES
“The lowest form of popular culture — lack of information, misinformation, disinformation and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives — has overrun real journalism.” — Carl Bernstein, American journalist Perhaps the most revealing element of the psychological make-up of the new Modi Media is what the buffoonish former Major Gaurav Arya — who regularly calls for Pakistan to be annihilated on various Indian TV channels and recently caused a diplomatic ruckus by labelling the Iranian foreign minister a “pig” — himself admitted in a video.
Justifying his spreading of disinformation, he told his viewers, “This work was begun by Hitler in the Second World War. His minister for propaganda was a man named Joseph Goebbels. There is a famous saying by Joseph Goebbels that if you repeat a lie many times, people begin to believe it. There is truth to this. Whether you like it or not, it’s true.”
Using the example of genocidal maniacs Hitler and Goebbels to explain yourself must surely rank as a new low in Indian media and Arya did not delve into the fate that befell both. But it also showcases what the models of the Hindutva brigade are. Ironically, the same brigade is also the greatest cheerleader for Israel, which also regularly uses disinformation tactics as a matter of policy, although it would not like its Hasbara antecedents to be traced to Hitler and Goebbels.
Quite aside from the frightening aspect that a large swathe of India’s population now salivates over genocide, one must also consider the internally deleterious effect of living in delusional bubbles. When the mainstream media is feeding you completely manufactured stories and one-sided analyses, you are unlikely to take more rational, considered decisions. More likely, emotions are going to cloud your thinking and get the better of you.
In fact, India’s entire adventure with its so-called Operation Sindoor was predicated on wrong assessments and hubris. It assumed Pakistan was on the point of fracturing, that the Pakistan military did not have the wherewithal to respond in kind, that it could bully Pakistan and establish a new norm, and that it needed to present no evidence of Pakistan’s alleged involvement in the tragic Pahalgam incident. Each one of those assessments, fed in part by Modi Media, turned out to be false.
ENFORCING A CONSENSUS
Aside from uniting a politically polarised Pakistan, India was surprised by the ferocity of Pakistan’s military response, it inadvertently internationalised the Kashmir issue again and re-hyphenated India and Pakistan in global discourse, and it received no diplomatic backing — aside from Israel — from the international community.
It now also realises, irrespective of Modi’s faltering bluster, that it faces a far more implacable regional adversary in the synergy between a rising China and Pakistan combined. The new norm it wished to establish has in fact happened, but not in the way it had envisaged.
It is not that there are no intelligent, thinking individuals in India who have a nuanced worldview. In fact, there are probably many more in sheer numbers in India than in Pakistan. But it is that they are increasingly sidelined or marginalised from positions of decision-making or influence. Two examples immediately come to mind.
Pravin Sawhney, a well-known defence analyst and former Indian army major, presented perhaps the most calculated initial assessment of the air battle on May 6/7, which flew in the face of the official Indian narrative. He explained through clear evidence and logic that it was quite likely that at least four Indian jets had been downed. For his troubles, his YouTube channel was banned in India and his interview by Karan Thapar for The Wire was probably also the prompt for the latter to be censored.
Another, surprisingly, was a former secretary of the Indian Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW), Rana Banerji, again recently interviewed by Karan Thapar for The Wire. His analysis of the Pakistan Army and Pak army chief Gen Asim Munir was perhaps the most knowledgeable and nuanced you could find in India, but it was also the exact opposite of the consensus that the Indian media has built around itself. Sadly, there is no place for such voices in the Modi’s Media.
The Modi regime has been on a banning and blocking spree recently. Over 8,000 websites and social media Pakistani, Indian and international accounts have apparently been proscribed in India, some simply for disagreeing with the official Indian government narrative or for presenting alternative viewpoints. Among them are the Chinese Global Times and Xinhua News and the Turkiye-based TRT World.
Meanwhile, despite voices of criticism from within India, the mainstream electronic media continues unashamedly spreading fake news and hysteria. And Hindutva trolls continue to attack any voices on social media that don’t toe the Modi line — Indian or not — with abuse, filthy language and sometimes even physical threats.
One of its ‘star reporters’ recently claimed the downing of a Pakistani F-16 and the capture of its pilot by India, again without evidence. Social media warriors also started spreading the ‘news’ that a Pakistani nuclear weapons storage site was hit — even a denial by the Indian Air Force Director General Military Operations was presented as tongue-in-cheek. Later, more ‘news’ was circulated that there had been a nuclear radiation leak in Islamabad that was making scores of people ill.
If this is the sort of information Indian analysts base their decisions on, is it any surprise about the kind of decisions made?
In this, there is a lesson for Pakistan too. Delusional bubbles and enforced consensus are a recipe for disaster, not only because they vitiate the atmosphere of the free exchange of ideas, but because they inevitably lead to bad decision-making.
When hubris is the only coin you deal in and you can’t bear to listen to disagreement, the long-term results can never be good. Hitler and Goebbels taught us that.
The writer is Dawn’s Editor Magazines.
X: @hyzaidi
Published in Dawn, EOS, May 18th, 2025
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