On April 22, the picturesque and sleepy hamlet of Pahalgam became the site of the deadliest assault on civilians in years in the restive region of Kashmir, which is claimed by both India and Pakistan. India was quick to blame Pakistan for the attack, in which gunmen killed 28 civilians, mostly Indian tourists and one Kashmiri tour guide. Pakistan denied the charge, and tensions mounted, culminating in a spate of airstrikes and gunfire along the Line of Control, the de facto international border that separates India from Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.
Though a fragile ceasefire took effect on May 10 and brought this cycle of violence to a close, the Pahalgam attack will continue to leave its mark. That is because the narrative that Kashmir has become a “normal” and peaceful region under Indian rule has been a core element of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s propaganda for years. Overnight, the attack shattered the version of reality that the Indian government and mainstream media had painstakingly constructed.
Pahalgam, whose name means “village of the shepherds,” is no ordinary tourist destination. In a region long famed for its beauty, the town’s grassy meadows surrounded by firs and pines have been immortalized in dozens of Bollywood films. Every summer, it also serves as the base camp for a major Hindu pilgrimage that brings more than 500,000 devotees to Kashmir annually. Pahalgam is heavily militarized, with several checkpoints, a paramilitary camp, and a designated security detail that protects Hindu pilgrims.
In an emotional interview, one of the survivors of the attack, Aishanya Dwivedi, told the BBC’s Hindi service: “The government told us Kashmir is safe. But it’s because of the government’s failure that the [attackers] entered our country. In fact, our government left us orphaned there.” In a rare admission of culpability, on April 24, Indian security officials seemed to concede this, acknowledging the massacre resulted from a security “lapse.” But further investigation seems to have taken a back seat as the conflict with Pakistan escalated in the subsequent weeks.
“This narrative was the central placeholder in a propaganda campaign.”
The Pahalgam massacre was particularly shocking for an Indian public which, for a decade now, has been sold a false narrative of “normalcy” in Kashmir. This narrative was the central placeholder in a propaganda campaign conducted by the Indian government. What the attack and its immediate aftermath have revealed is just how hollow these promises of “normalcy” were. Tensions between the two nuclear-powered nations are increasingly powered by a dangerous game of facts and counter-facts powered by AI-generated videos that produce two diametrically opposed realities. Decades of information and psychological warfare from both sides undergird and enable periodic flare ups between the two nuclear-powered nations, leaving Kashmiris to bear the brunt of the violence.
The last time India and Pakistan went to war was 26 years ago. Located at a key juncture on the Line of Control, the Kargil War played out in a mountainous desert frontier, in harsh, high-altitude conditions, with temperatures regularly dipping below -20 degrees Celsius. Indian military forces first received news of infiltration by Pakistani troops on May 6, 1999, but it took another eight days for the Indian military to determine the extent of the incursion. In later assessments of the war, military historian Arunkumar Bhatt said that the biggest psychological warfare mistake India made was “letting the other side know not only that they were surprised but also how much.” As fighting escalated, India banned Pakistan Television and the website of Dawn, a major Pakistani English-language newspaper, but these strategies backfired. Pakistan spun India’s censorship as driven by fear of the truth.
India also tried deploying pro-Indian military information to border communities in Pakistan, but these efforts failed because of a lack of local language broadcasters. India’s weak propaganda capabilities were revealed. Military experts argued that India should model itself on the United States, which used local language experts and announcers culled from years of “area studies” in Afghanistan and Iraq. By the end of the Kargil War, the Indian government had learned its lesson about the importance of information warfare. For the first time in Indian history, the military broadcasted the somber death ceremonies of soldiers on national television. These images helped the Army’s welfare fund raise record donations in a matter of days.
“India and Pakistan have waged relentless psychological and information warfare.”
Although the Kargil war ended in two months, it inaugurated a new era in which India and Pakistan have waged relentless psychological and information warfare against each other. In 2019, when a similar sequence of events as the Pahalgam attacks occurred, India and Pakistan both engaged in tit-for-tat air strikes. While the Indian military insisted that it had hit its target—a purported Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist camp in Balakot, Pakistan—and had “killed a large number of terrorists,” publicly-circulated satellite images the following day showed that the camps were not damaged or destroyed. Indian media also blacked out information about a downed Indian MIG-21 pilot in Pakistan. Both countries claimed victory to their own publics, allowing the situation to defuse, according to one military analyst.
Kargil and Balakot were key moments in the Indian political establishment’s long-term counteroffensive against what it calls Pakistan’s global “disinformation” campaign. Indian officials have long dismissed all anti-Indian agitation from within Indian-controlled Kashmir as a Pakistani psychological operation. In response, the Indian government has pursued policies that criminalize and censor any “separatist” attitudes, cracked down on “pan-Islamic” ideas and religious organizations, and accused human rights defenders of “demoralizing security forces” by “getting them bogged down in wild allegations of atrocities.” Efforts to “malign Indian security forces as an occupation army” in Kashmir, it argues, are not only an illegitimate political position but also a fundamental misapprehension of reality.
India has put great effort into constructing its own version of reality in Kashmir. Politicians and TV anchors whip the Indian public into a fevered nationalism that often manifests as anti-Muslim animus. In 2019, soon after the BJP soared to its second national electoral victory after the Balakot strikes, the government unilaterally revoked the autonomous status Jammu and Kashmir had enjoyed since shortly after India’s independence, removed its statehood, and redrew its electoral map. To prevent any protest, Kashmir was plunged into a seven-month total communication blackout—the longest by any democracy in history. With Kashmiris collectively muzzled and under an indefinite blockade, and more than 700,000 Indian troops permanently stationed in the region, the government insisted that “normalcy” had returned and terrorism had been defeated.
This argument hinged on convincing non-Kashmiris to feel confident enough in their safety to visit the region for tourism and religious pilgrimage. In September 2021, two years after the revocation of Kashmiri autonomy, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs released a 38-page report celebrating its accomplishments. The report, titled, “The Dream of One Nation, One law, One Symbol Fulfilled,” pictured an idyllic scene at one of Kashmir’s most famous tourist attractions, Dal Lake. In the photo, an Indian tourist water skis on the shimmering lake while, in the background, Kashmir’s famous wooden houseboats stand neatly in a row. (The houseboats were immortalized by British colonial officials in the 19th century who sought them out as refuge from the heat of the north Indian plains, and then in the 1960s, when George Harrison rented one to take sitar lessons from Ravi Shankar.)
“Tourism has replaced terrorism,” became the BJP government’s slogan, as it began an all-out public-relations campaign to encourage Indian tourists to visit. It also pushed forward several new laws, notably one that allows non-residents to buy land in Kashmir for the first time since the region acceded to India in 1947. In 2024 alone, more than 3 million Indian tourists visited the region, many on their honeymoon, and many traveling on an airplane for the first time. Periodic eruptions of violence targeting outsiders—notably last October, when six migrant workers and a doctor were shot dead near the site of a new, much-lauded tunnel construction project—were brushed aside. Statements by militant groups that all non-Kashmiris who visited the region were potential targets also went ignored. Independent media channels that dared to challenge the narrative of “normalcy” were shut down under new information and broadcasting rules. Kashmiri journalists were interrogated and imprisoned by the dozens under terrorism charges. Anonymous articles appeared in the Kashmiri press about the need to weed out “narrative terrorists” and “white-collar terrorists”—referring to academics, journalists, lawyers, and civil society actors, that is, anyone who told a story that conflicted with the official narrative.
Across social media, a legion of accounts claiming to be Kashmiri Muslims posted messages praising the Indian Army’s military successes in Kashmir and offered scathing takedowns of critics of the Modi government. IPs of these suspicious accounts, which were found to be fake, were traced back to the XV Corps headquarters. In January 2022, Meta suspended the official accounts of the Indian Army’s XV Corps (Chinar Corps) for “coordinated, inauthentic behavior.”
P.K. Mallick, a former major general in the Indian Army, has noted that the stakes of information and psychological warfare are not “merely propaganda, fake news, or manipulation of perception,” but “a battle over what people believe is reality.” It seems the Indian authorities had been taken in by their own version of reality. What was revealed on April 22 was that people in Kashmir had been living “amid a strange calm enforced by an intensified security crackdown.” Ignoring warning signs, military and government officials continued to insist that incidents of terror had significantly declined and an atmosphere of peace and security had prevailed.
“The government and media sidelined questions around a possible security lapse.”
In the days following the Pahalgam attack, the government and media sidelined questions around a possible security lapse as well as efforts to locate the attackers (who remain at large) in favor of unanimous and vociferous calls for revenge. Kashmiris were the first casualties. More than 2,000 people, including journalists, were detained, and the homes of nine suspected militants’ families were demolished without any due process. Across India, Kashmiri Muslims were targeted in mob violence.
India’s mainstream television channels, highly dependent on government advertising revenue, ran headlines proclaiming that “India-Pakistan’s fifth war” had already begun. The lead anchor of the right-wing news outlet Republic TV called for a “final solution” in Kashmir. The battle for reality went into overdrive when India launched its “counter-attack,” Operation Sindoor, on May 6, firing several missiles into Pakistan. Indian officials claimed to have killed 100 terrorists while Pakistani officials stated that 31 civilians had been killed. Pakistan responded, attacking Indian military targets, which India claimed to have “neutralized.” On May 8, India fired Israeli-made Harop and Heron Mark2 drones into Pakistan, wounding four soldiers. India also said Pakistan hit several of its cities with drones and missiles, a claim that Pakistan denies. The two also disagreed on whether a Sikh temple in Indian-controlled Kashmir was hit, and by whom. In recent days, both sides have exchanged heavy gunfire along the border. As the tenuous ceasefire now takes hold, psychological and information war continue unabated.
In On War, Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously highlighted the centrality of “fog, friction, and chance” to war. But the war of narratives, of facts and counter-facts mean that what we are dealing with is no ordinary “fog”—it is the deliberate and systematic manipulation of reality.
On May 7, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif commended the Pakistan Air Force for shooting down five Indian jets. The debris from three of the planes fell on villages in Indian-controlled territory, according to reports by local journalists and police officials. Mainstream Indian news outlets either entirely ignored the story or were barred from running it. In a press conference, India’s Air Marshall Bharti admitted to the losses, but refrained from commenting further. “If I comment it will only be advantageous to the adversary,” he said. Meanwhile, a video posted by Indian military commentator Pravin Sawhney, corroborating local news reports about multiple downed Indian jets, was removed from the internet. As Sawhney said in a recent interview, “there is a massive information war going on in India today.”
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it,” said the master propagandist Joseph Goebbels, “people will eventually come to believe it.” But he also warned: “the lie can only be maintained for such a time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and military consequences of the lie.” While the psychological and information warfare of the past was mostly directed at enemy populations, domestic populations are increasingly its primary targets. On May 9, the Indian government directed the social media platform X to restrict access to over 8,000 personal accounts, and the accounts of at least four news organizations—Maktoob Media, Kashmiriyat, BBC Urdu, and Free Press Kashmir—were suspended.
People in Indian-controlled Kashmir, who have been living in one of the most densely militarized places in the world and in the crucible of a decades-long conflict, have long questioned government claims to normalcy. “Nothing is normal in Kashmir,” is a refrain heard frequently on the streets. They also know that the greatest danger that they face is not in the form of kinetic warfare, but in the mass gaslighting they have experienced for decades.
The recent violence reveals the catastrophic stakes when a “big lie”—a massive psychological operation produced through the collusion of the government and media—ruptures. As Sawhney put it: “Let us behave like a democracy. At the moment, we are not at war; we are at a crisis stage. At this stage, if you don’t want sensible voices to speak, something is wrong.”