India-Pakistan Conflict: Fake News, Nuclear Fear, and Media Hysteria

Residents of the Razarwani area of Uri leaving for safer places as the Pakistan Army intensified artillery fire across the LoC, on May 9, 2025.
| Photo Credit: IMRAN NISSAR

The problem with an India-Pakistan conflict is that it is both very predictable and highly risky. This time around we went into a short duration military conflict after a horrific terrorist attack at Pahalgam in Kashmir. The hostilities ended after US President Donald Trump claimed that his administration had brokered a ceasefire. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, however, said that Pakistan approached India for a ceasefire; he also stated that India would not succumb to nuclear blackmail. If the past and the present give clues to the future, the gauntlet will be picked up again since the foundational territorial dispute remains unresolved and deeper irritations that are existential to both countries persist.

Having spent a gut-wrenching day at the Hiroshima museum in Japan, I have no clue what Modi means when he says he will not succumb to nuclear blackmail. Does it imply that we will not be deterred by the fact that a cornered Pakistan could hit back with a nuclear weapon? Or by the possibility of a deadly accident if Indian missiles hit a nuclear storage site? (The latter was rumoured to be the real reason behind the ceasefire.)

But by far the most disturbing aspect of the latest conflict between India and Pakistan was that in both nations the war did not take place just in the skies or on the ground but was staged on TV screens in a frenzy of fake images, manipulated videos, and hysterical hashtags. We saw clips of aerial dogfights that never took place. From across the border came very real looking images of an Indian woman pilot parachuting down and surrendering. After two days of speculation over the identity of the pilot, a Reuters fact-check revealed the clip to be fake.

Manipulated by psy-ops

Clearly, people’s hearts and minds were being manipulated by psy-ops pushed through broadcast and social media. Television anchors who call themselves journalists showed images lifted from video games. They declared that Karachi port had been hit, that Islamabad was under attack, that Indian soldiers had entered Pakistan, and more. They may claim in hindsight to have been fooled themselves, but it is clear that they did not care enough to pause or fact-check. At any rate, it is possible they were mandated to whip up hysteria and boost their ratings—damn any pretence of credibility they never had in the first place.

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War at its core is a performance of toxic masculinity: armies and nations fight over territories or ideologies while soldiers die and ordinary people become collateral damage. But the reality of contemporary wars is also that they drag on and frequently have unintended consequences. Take the Israel war on Gaza. Has the US-backed Israel won the war? Not quite, although it has certainly bombed and killed and starved the people of Gaza and is being accused of genocide. It has also destroyed parts of the West Bank as well as Beirut in Lebanon. But Israel is far from achieving an outright victory. Its citizens live with bunkers, sirens, and a battered economy.

Likewise, Russia is a powerful nation, but the war in Ukraine continues although it began over three years ago. Certainly, Western support bolstered Ukraine and allowed the war to continue—until now, that is, with the Trump administration reportedly looking to extricate itself from picking up the tab for any conflict. In the India-Pakistan theatre too there are other big powers at play besides the two principal adversaries.

The US has never truly ’won’ a war

It is not clear what the endgame of war can be. Despite its formidable military might, the US has never truly “won” a war in the sense of achieving a clear, lasting political objective through force alone. India did, in 1971, when its war with Pakistan culminated in a formal military surrender. But the US failed in Korea, with the 1953 armistice leaving the peninsula divided; the US was in Vietnam for two decades and piled up 58,000 casualties. (Vietnamese government sources say that 3.1 million of their citizens died in that period.) But the US had to leave Vietnam after it lost credibility at home.

US engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan contributed to the destruction of those countries but no real victory for anyone and no negotiated exits for Americans. The US has pummelled nations and forced regime changes, but there has been no lasting victory. Wars are also fought for reasons that turn out to be fake. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the US deployed forces in Afghanistan allegedly to dismantle Al Qaeda, but by early 2003, it had shifted its focus to Iraq. Although there was no direct link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, the George W. Bush administration claimed that the Iraqi dictator was piling up weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). It has been speculated that this was done to justify the invasion of Baghdad to the people back home and reinforce the broader “war on terror” narrative.

The New York Times would later issue a public apology admitting that its coverage leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq was flawed, particularly regarding claims that there were WMDs. The paper would also say that its reporters relied on sources who were intent on regime change in Iraq. No WMDs were ever found, but Saddam was deposed. What the episode reveals is that there are always vested interests that might seek to instigate one country to go to war with another. And vested interests that will provide cover-ups for the media to report.

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Across the world, leaders have used external conflicts to rally domestic support and distract attention from internal troubles. In 1998, US President Bill Clinton was neck-deep in a scandal involving the White House intern Monica Lewinsky. On August 20, 1998, three days after Clinton testified before a grand jury, US cruise missiles landed on alleged Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and an alleged chemical weapons plant in Sudan. There has always been speculation that both attacks were a Clinton-enacted distraction. There is in fact a delightful film starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro named Wag the Dog about an American President fabricating a war to divert attention from a sex scandal.

Truth is always the first casualty during war. In contemporary times when every hand holds a digital screen, imagine how much faster the lies can be amplified. War is also an occasion to silence dissent and rally public sentiment around a common “enemy”. During the recent hostilities, hate crimes against Muslims inside India also escalated.

When war is presented as nationalistic theatre, an impression is created that it is possible to repeat it. With each “surgical strike”, consumed like an episode in a TV series, the appetite grows, but dissatisfaction also grows if the ending is tame or the status quo stays unchanged. But if war is indeed politics by other means, then we no longer have statesmen but performers on a high wire who balance fear, hate, politics, and strategy over a dangerous void. 

Saba Naqvi is a Delhi-based journalist and author of four books who writes on politics and identity issues.