Written by Shreya Bakhshi
April 22, 2025, began like any other spring day in Kashmir – pleasant, breezy, serene – until four men targeted and killed 26 Indian tourists in Baisaran Valley, Pahalgam. This attack was not the first, and as history suggests, will likely not be the last in the Indian-administered Kashmir valley. What set this attack apart was the explicit targeting of Hindu tourists (Hashim, 2025). Among the dead were a Lieutenant from the Indian Armed Forces on a honeymoon with his wife, an Indian Air Force officer, and a Kashmiri Muslim pony operator. The attackers spared the women, and when one of them pleaded with a terrorist to kill her too, he said, “I won’t kill you. Go tell this to Modi” (India Today News Desk, 2025; ET Online, 2025).
Two weeks later, on May 7, a four-day long conflict erupted betweenIndia and Pakistan, leaving behind a trail of deaths and worsened political relations (Hashim, 2025). While those living close to the borders experienced days of blackouts and the terrifying sounds of drones and shelling, the rest of the nation demanded revenge.
While wars between India and Pakistan are not new, the aftermath of this attack revealed a stark departure from the past. What once would have prompted cautious diplomacy now unleashed a wave of public fury and nationalist rhetoric. The Pahalgam attack was simply a catalyst that revealed the hideous face of far-right religious nationalism that has been growing at an alarming rate in India since the Modi government came into power in 2014 (Singh, 2024; Vaishnav, 2019). The public discourse lacked coherence; it was instead a salad bar of narratives where people could pick and choose the flavours of the day and customise their ideologies to the need of the hour (Kidwai, 2024).
A Hindu majority India, as opposed to the secular state entrenched in the constitution after independence, was not an idea one could have envisioned prior to 2014. But the May 7 – May 10 conflict rooted this idea deeper into the Indian psyche. The Indian media was rife with outlandish claims asserting India had not only targeted nine terror hideouts in Pakistan, but also advanced into major cities like Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad (Allsop, 2025; Columbia Journalism Review, 2025). Simultaneously, the political discourse was galvanising public sentiment (Al Jazeera, 2025). It was sensationalism at its best.
The most striking display came with India’s first official press conference led by two female officers, one of whom was a Muslim, along with the Indian foreign secretary of Kashmiri origin announcing India’s strategic and targeted attack on Pakistan, evocatively named ‘Operation Sindoor’ (Al Jazeera, 2025). It was an optimal display of India’s secularism, nationalism, and modernity neatly wrapped into an official press conference. Naming a military operation Sindoor – a vermillion-coloured powder worn by married Hindu women – was almost poetic. The country’s brave soldiers were seeking strategic revenge for the widows who could no longer wear Sindoor.
Communication during a time of crisis matters, as does the way messages are constructed and how a narrative is shaped (GCU, 2020). It is particularly critical when a government and the nation’s image are at stake. The Modi government, in particular, has worked over its two terms to conflate these things. They have also worked on censoring information and voices that question their actions. This time was no different. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting blocked an independent newspaper called thewire.in for publishing an article about an Indian jet allegedly being shot down by Pakistan. The ministry, however, instead cited a technical issue for blocking the site (The News Minute, 2025).
The rhetoric did not change until the threat of war was real. Quite swiftly, the nationalistic needle moved from “we want war” to “we still want war, but we’re also quite scared” (Al Jazeera, 2025). The flavour of the day had moved from blind revenge to a sense of uncertainty about what was to come. After all, these are two armed nuclear nations with the ability to obliterate each other.
The same Indians who wanted revenge were now requesting the government stop the bloodshed. No one asked for revenge at the cost of innocent human lives, after all. Did that mean the warmongering had ended? Absolutely not. A new narrative had sprung up – “the loss of human lives in Pakistan is simply collateral damage. We don’t support it, but they deserve to be taught a lesson for killing 26 Hindu civilians.”
The facts and timeline of this event are straightforward: a brutal terrorist attack in which 26 tourists lost their lives. 24 of them were Hindu men, but there was also a Christian, and a Kashmiri Muslim. A Kashmiri separatist group called The Resistance Front, an affiliate of a group called Lashkar – e – Taiba,1 took responsibility but later retracted their claim. The perpetrators have not been identified and are still at large. The Indian government immediately placed blame on Pakistan for the attack, however no investigation has been conducted by either side, and no proof presented. India claims to have targeted terrorist hideouts strategically yet has not presented reports of how many terrorists have been killed or any other tangible results achieved. The Indian attacks only managed to kill the chief and ten family members of the head of a terrorist organisation based in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Beside this, all forms of Pakistani media, and social media accounts were banned in India right after the attack and the long-standing Indus Water treaty now stands in abeyance (Al Jazeera Staff, 2025; Hashim, 2025; Yadav, 2025).
What this four-day conflict did was create nothing more than an echo chamber in which the proponents of a hardline response could only hear the sounds of their own voices. Each day, the narrative menu offered something new; some days nationalism was served on its own, but on others it came with a dash of secularism and a sprinkle of religious fundamentalism. Even after both parties agreed to a ceasefire, some still could not get enough. The Foreign Secretary and his family received death threats, and so did the widow of the Air Force officer, whose Sindoor was avenged (Yadav, 2025; Firstpost, 2025). The demand for this narrative salad is high, and the hunger insatiable. But even after a cross-border conflict, and multiple innocent lives lost, all that remains is two nations fighting an age-old diplomatic tug of war.
Footnote
1 Lashkar – e – Taiba (LeT) is a Pakistan-based Islamist militant group, designated as a terrorist organization by the United Nations and several countries, that is particularly active in the Kashmir region and is known for orchestrating major attacks in India, including the 2008 Mumbai attacks, with the stated aim of bringing Indian-administered Kashmir under Pakistani control and ultimately establishing Islamic rule across India (EBSCO, 2023; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2024).
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