Debashish Mukerji
India’s outrage over the April 22 terrorist attack in Pahalgam, which killed 26 tourists, found collective catharsis in Operation Sindoor. The four-day blitz in May could bring Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party considerable domestic dividends, especially in the forthcoming Bihar assembly elections at the end of the year and in later elections.
But many have been surprised by how little global support Operation Sindoor garnered, despite Pakistan’s well-known 35-year-long record of instigating terrorism in Kashmir. Diplomatically, India’s reprisal has done it no good at all. While many countries expressed sympathy for the victims of the Pahalgam attack, none explicitly named or blamed a perpetrator, leaving India’s response without a single public endorsement. In contrast, countries such as Turkey and China have upheld Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, which they implied India’s Operation Sindoor had breached.
Its diplomatic isolation prompted India to send out seven delegations of MPs and a few diplomats to 33 countries across the globe to remind them of the grave provocation that prompted Operation Sindoor and reiterate India’s resolve to counter Pakistan-sponsored terror. There was much trumpeting of the fact that the delegations included representatives of all the important opposition parties to emphasise that, whatever domestic differences political parties in India had, on matters of national security, they were one.
Although these delegations received extensive coverage in the Indian media, indications suggest that their visits received little to no attention in the local media of the countries they toured. Precise information on this count is scant, but it does appear that, barring Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko, no other senior political leaders or government officials in any country were willing to meet them. They interacted mainly with mid-level officials and leaders of the Indian diaspora.
The reason is obvious – Operation Sindoor does not quite square with the image of a hapless, long-suffering victim of terrorism that India wants to project. A victim does not engage in war mongering of the kind most Indian television channels and BJP-supporting trolls on social media did during Operation Sindoor, exulting in the damage inflicted on Pakistani territory, frequently spewing fake news of imaginary successes to such an extent that the Press Information Bureau had to set up a fact checking unit to counter some of the more outrageous claims.
In an interconnected world, the hyper-nationalist shenanigans of Indian TV anchors and social media andh bhakts – especially those using English, which is understood everywhere – were embarrassingly visible to a world audience. Some foreign handles – of people with no direct stake in the conflict – even had clips on X.com mocking the ‘meltdown’ of a certain TV anchor, which garnered thousands of ‘likes’ and re-tweets. The image India projected was not that of a victim, but of South Asia’s neighbourhood tough, ready to pound to dust anyone who provoked it – and a boastful tough at that, revelling in exaggerating its triumphs and spreading misinformation.
No country – or individual, for that matter – can be perceived as ‘victim’ and ‘tough’ at the same time. If India wants to be seen as tough, as indeed the mood in the country appears today, it must reconcile to not having international sympathisers. Of course, other countries will continue to engage with us, but solely based on strategic and trade interests. But so too, the strategic interests of the US and the West in general dictate that Pakistan, despite its documented record of encouraging terrorism, will never be turned into an international pariah of the North Korea kind, much as India would like it to be.
A secondary reason for the indifference to India’s viewpoint is that the world has lost interest in Kashmir. It is no longer seen as a flashpoint; nor is any country, barring Pakistan and India, interested in its history or the claims and counterclaims around its possession. All the world wants is to avoid a war over Kashmir, no matter what the provocation, and that too only because both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers. Had they not been, the Kashmir conflict would have mattered as little to the world as, say, the tussle between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, which too has led to wars.
Yet another reason can be found in the extremely pertinent question that Shashi Tharoor’s son Ishan, a reporter with The Washington Post, asked his father at the Indian delegation’s US press conference (Tharoor was leading the delegation): what evidence did India have of Pakistan’s involvement in the Pahalgam attack? Tharoor gave the standard Indian reply, pointing to Pakistan’s previous record of encouraging terrorism in Kashmir. In fact, in no court of law is this even circumstantial evidence – an accused person’s criminal record is of no consequence when deciding his culpability in the fresh crime he is accused of.
The truth is that, seven weeks after the Pahalgam massacre, India’s law enforcement agencies have not been able to arrest even a single perpetrator, let alone establish his links with Pakistan. If they have made any headway at all in the investigations, it remains a closely guarded secret. Nothing was known about the mysterious ‘Resistance Front’ when it took responsibility, on social media, for the killings immediately after they occurred (it later rescinded that claim as well), and nothing is known even today. The world, quite rightly, wants to see concrete proof of Pakistan’s culpability in this particular instance – and India so far has been unable to provide it.
What then were the gains of Operation Sindoor? In the view of noted political scientist Christine Fair, who is extremely sympathetic to India, there were none. In several interviews, she has given her reasons: it will not deter Pakistan from further terror attacks; it has changed nothing on the ground. After the terror attack in September 2016 on an army brigade headquarters at Uri, India responded with a ‘surgical strike’. After the Pulwama attack in February 2019 on a CRPF convoy, it launched the Balakot air strike. After the Pahalgam killings, it went for Operation Sindoor. What happens if and when the next attack occurs? How much further can India up the ante?
(The writer is a senior journalist and author of “The Disruptor: How Vishwanath Pratap Singh Shook India”)
