Opinion Piece by Gaurav Sharma
2nd July 2025 – India’s military response to the heinous terror attack in Pahalgam on 22nd April 2025 was punitive and it achieved the target it had set with clinical precision. A significant amount of terrorist infrastructure inside the Pakistani territory and Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir was destroyed beyond redemption. India successfully completed the Operation Sindoor 1.01 without paying much heed to Pakistan’s hollow nuclear threats.
While India executed its military plans remarkably, Pakistan was successful in bluffing its own public and international media, at least temporarily.
Although there were no proofs ever given of Pakistan downing six India Air Force (IAF) fighter planes, the news story captured the Pakistani headlines for days. The news outlets in the West projected Pakistan as the victim or the protagonist and India as the perpetrator of crime. They downplayed the Pahalgam incident and focused on how India is instigating a war between two nuclear-powered nations.
The UN Secretary-General António Guterres expressed deep concern over Indian military operations across Line of Control (LOC) and the international border with Pakistan.2 U.S. President Donald Trump also re-hyphenated India and Pakistan and claimed that he helped settle the tensions between the two nations. He claimed that he had stopped the nuclear war.3
Over a dozen articles in major news outlets, journals and think tanks in the West carried the Pakistan’s narrative which surely has dampened the spirits on the Indian side. The Pakistan-China Institute published a 27-page report on 24th May 2025 that titled “16 Hours That Reshaped South Asia – How Modi’s Miscalculation Led to Pakistan’s Primacy”.4 Although, this report has received a strong rebuttal5, the Western media has not questioned back Pakistan’s claim of victory yet.6
Assuming that a lot of media and think tanks in the West are systemically biased against India, what can India do overcome this? The first thing the Indian government and its bureaucrats need to do is to come out of the state of denial and acknowledge the fact that international opinion on a lot of issues is not pro-India.7 India, by far, has failed to present itself as the victim of terrorism. It has failed to touch the hearts of the Western audience which cares a lot about liberal values of individual rights, equality, religious freedom, colonial history and the rule of law.
For India’s domestic audience, Pakistan’s false claims of victory have rightly been exposed. But, among the international audience, it still has not been able to make space for itself. India desperately needs to invest in an International Media platform which spreads the India story to the World. Several such examples exist for other nations; Russia Today (RT) for Russia, Al-Jazeera for Qatar and Turkey’s TRT World. The demand for such an international forum has been there for years now8 and the time has come for India to claim its narrative space in the world. After all, we are fighting the battles in Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW).
- https://swarajyamag.com/defence/one-month-of-operation-sindoor-this-pause-is-just-a-pause
- https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/05/1162986
- https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/trump-repeats-claim-that-he-stopped-india-pak-conflict-8761417
- https://pakistan-china.com/pdfs/16-hours.pdf
- https://www.vifindia.org/article/july/01/PCI-s-Paper-on-India-Pak-Operations-A-Disinformation-Case-Study
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7xqfPGKyEw
- https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/inside-modis-crackdown-foreign-press-india
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK5uo1jFgJI&list=PLCHsD-K66hczGyKp4hXcNQwGvGzEwvtv8&index=2
