There is a growing perception both in India and abroad that India won the recent military encounter with Pakistan but lost the battle of narratives.
This perception has been validated by India’s decision to send seven diplomatic delegations to 32 countries to share with the world not only India’s version of what happened in Pahalgam, during Operation Sindoor, and what led to the ceasefire, but also to persuade the world that Pakistan is a state sponsor of terrorism. The need for this diplomatic mission is a recognition and admission that during the brief but intense war between the South Asian neighbors, India’s messaging did not land.
India’s Message and Messengers
India wanted the world to know that Pakistan was behind the horrendous terrorist attack on tourists in Pahalgam on April 22. India has long suffered cross-border terrorism emanating from Pakistan and carried out by terrorist groups like Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba, and it wanted the world to accept that the Pahalgam attacks were just a continuation of past cross-border terrorism. New Delhi offered no evidence, however; it wanted the world to take its word for it.
India also wanted to convey that its military response, Operation Sindoor, was calculated and restrained and designed only to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and not a war against the state of Pakistan or its people. This was new India, which would no longer suffer terrorism but would respond decisively and forcefully, but also responsibly.
The world did not buy this narrative. No leader and no country held Pakistan directly responsible for the Pahalgam attack. No one condemned Pakistan. There was no appreciation for India’s carefully calibrated military response; on the contrary, the world was preoccupied with how many of the Indian Air Force’s Rafale jets were shot down by Pakistan, and how Chinese jet fighters and air-to-air missiles were besting Western-made weapons deployed by India. U.S. President Donald Trump’s social media posts about his decisive role in bringing about the ceasefire, a claim that Pakistan confirms and Indian denies vehemently, then sucked away the oxygen from India’s narrative.
Two questions thus came to capture the headlines and the policy debates worldwide: how many Rafale jets were downed by Chinese weapons? And why did India cave to pressure from Trump and accept a ceasefire when it appeared that it was gaining the upper hand in the military exchange?
Recognizing that India’s message to the world was getting lost in the post-ceasefire fog of the war of narratives, Modi’s government decided to send an all-party delegation – including non-BJP stalwarts like Shashi Tharoor of the Indian National Congress, Asaduddin Owaisi, the parliamentarian from Hyderabad, former Minister of State Salman Khursheed also of the Indian National Congress, former Ambassador Syed Akbaruddin, and the former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir Ghulam Nabi Azad – to reboot India’s image and buttress its narrative.
The insecurity about what is being discerned about Operation Sindoor is not limited to the world outside. The Modi government has also launched a massive campaign of domestic messaging called the “Tiranga Yatra,” the tricolor journey to reshape the memories of what really happened during Operation Sindoor. The nationwide exercise in rebranding that is also a thinly disguised election campaign for the coming statewide elections in the critical state of Bihar.
The Failures, Unfortunately, Are Not Limited to Narrative Alone
While the idea of the diplomatic mission sounds good, I am not persuaded that it is going to be a success. Diplomacy is not just about narratives and spin doctoring; it is essentially about reducing the gap between the interests of different nations and building allies. One thing that screamed out loud for everyone to hear during Operation Sindoor was India’s profound lack of friends and allies in the world.
No country repeated India’s claims, no nation condemned Pakistan by name, and none of the many “strategic partners” that India has accumulated in the past few years appeared to be on India’s side. Ask anyone who observes the region’s politics, even casually, who stood with Pakistan and the answer will be the same — China and Turkiye substantively, Azerbaijan and the OIC diplomatically. When the same question is asked about India, the answer will be that almost everybody, including China, condemned terrorism and sympathized with India for the loss of civilian lives in the Pahalgam attack, but no one turned up as India’s ally and partner during Operation Sindoor.
Where Did India’s Allies Go?
For the past several years, the U.S. and India have been courting each other, describing their mutual relationship as the “most consequential” of this century. Indian media and leadership, including External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar, have played up the personal chemistry between Modi and Trump and highlighted how firmly the partnership was based on shared interests (read facing the rise of China) and shared values (democracy). In fact, the presence of a few Indian Americans in the Trump administration was interpreted as the United States’ profound tilt toward India in Trump 2.0.
But the U.S. did not take India’s side during the actual conflict, even as rival China was actively supporting Pakistan with alleged early transfer of missiles and reorientation of satellites to provide it with real-time intelligence. The U.S. first maintained a balanced position, with Trump arguing that he was “close” to both India and Pakistan. And then the issue of the ceasefire has created some diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and India, as Trump insists on taking credit and India insists on denying it.
After the ceasefire, Trump has indulged in what is being described as “hyphenation,” placing both India and Pakistan on the same level, much to the chagrin of the former and delight of the latter. But the biggest diplomatic blow that Trump has dealt to India was internationalizing the dispute over Kashmir. India has jealously worked to keep the Kashmir issue limited to the Indo-Pak bilateral domain and remove it from the international agenda.
What must rankle most is Trump’s equating Shehbaz Sharif with Narendra Modi. Modi’s government has invested years and billions in cultivating Modi’s international image and now, with a few social media strokes, Trump has brought him down to the level of the prime minister of Pakistan, who does not enjoy any real power or respect in his own country.
The U.S. is not the only close partner that did not stand up with India. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, consisting of India, the U.S., Australia, and Japan had nothing substantive to offer to India. Not a single South Asian nation stood with India. India did, however, receive some verbal support from the radical Islamic group, the Taliban, whose regime in Afghanistan even India does not recognize. For a few years now, Modi has been claiming that India is the leader and voice of the Global South. The Global South too did not stand with India. In fact, a big section of the Global South includes the members of the OIC, and their statement was more in alignment with Pakistan than India.
Modi’s Diplomacy Failed When India Needed It
For over a decade, India has effectively had two much-celebrated foreign ministers: Modi and Jaishankar. Every visit, statement, tweet, and gesture made by them has been celebrated in India as master strokes. The country has spent billions hosting summits and international conventions to promote the “India story.” The narrative that India has been propagating is that India is rising in the world and it is solely because of Narendra Modi.
But in its moment of crisis, when India was mercilessly attacked by terrorists and was seeking justice and defending itself, the world did not stand with India. Modi has travelled to over 70 countries, making multiple trips to some key nations like the U.S. and Japan. Jaishankar, too, is at every major event from the Munich conference to the Shangri-La Dialogue. What did they achieve? What did all these diplomatic efforts yield in India’s first major crisis since the Pulwama incident in 2019?
India has used diplomacy as a campaign tool to build up the image of Modi at home and win elections. But in the process, Modi’s foreign policy failed India. Has India’s much-touted multialignment policy resulted in zero alignments? These are serious questions that need to be addressed, but the government, unfortunately, is devoted more to winning the domestic narrative about the crisis and rebuilding the image of Modi.