HOW MUCH SPACE is there in India for citizens to question and dissent from the actions of their government in a time of war or near-war? Today the answer is not very much, or maybe none at all.
In the wake of the terrorist attack on 22 April in Pahalgam, in India-administered Kashmir, with India blaming Pakistan and hostilities erupting between the two states, Indian television news channels have further lowered even their already dismal standards, with anchors and guest panellists alike baying for blood and calling for vengeance. Not content with simply reporting the facts – a task that is admittedly not simple in the fog of war – they have vied with one another to up the ante.
As India launched “Operation Sindoor” on 6 May, with aerial attacks on Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, television studios reverberated with febrile and histrionic storylines churned out to soundtracks worthy of an action movie: Islamabad had been captured, Karachi port had been bombed, the former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan had been killed and Asim Munir, the country’s army chief, arrested. It was left to saner international media outlets to report as best they could the conflicting, and often unverified, claims made by both sides. Pakistan said that Indian strikes killed 31 civilians, including women and children, and injured dozens more. India insisted that it had targeted “terrorist infrastructure” – a term that, in the new world disorder exemplified most spectacularly by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, renders quaint the classical distinction between civilian and military targets in the rules of war. Lost in the battle of narratives was the tragic possibility that both sets of claims might be true.
India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), ever ready with belligerent rhetoric against Pakistan, set the tone and led the way. Nowhere was this clearer than in the “Bharat mata ki jai!” issued by the defence minister, Rajnath Singh, after India’s first strikes, deploying a Hindu nationalist slogan instead of the more customary and less communal “Jai Hind”. But hopes for saner counsel or calls for restraint even from the political opposition were disappointed. Almost without exception, India’s parties closed ranks to express support for the Narendra Modi government’s strikes against Pakistan in response to the Pahalgam attacks.