Head-on | Operation Sindoor: Winning the perception war globally

India decisively won the four-day conflict against Pakistan. But in the international media and within sections of the global intelligence community, Operation Sindoor is regarded as only a qualified success.

From May 7-10, India degraded Pakistan’s terror infrastructure and severely damaged its military bases. After a week of denials, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif finally admitted during a public address that India had successfully hit several Pakistani military airbases, including Nur Khan, with ballistic missiles.

Most neutral experts have called Operation Sindoor a notable success in the fight against global terror. As David Vance, a British commentator pointed out, India is helping the West fight the global war on terrorism whose hub lies in Pakistan.

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So why is the West discomfited by India’s unprecedented attack, with precision-guided munitions, on a nuclear-armed country? Why has US President Donald Trump tried to downplay India’s successful military response to the brutal attack on 26 tourists in Kashmir by Pakistani terrorists?

There are two key reasons. First, the Western establishment sees India, now the world’s fourth largest economy, in the same light it perceived China 15 years ago: a rising power that could pose a future threat to 300 years of Western global hegemony. Any event that moderates India’s rise is in the West’s interest.

This, however, presents the West with a conundrum. It regards China as a far bigger geopolitical problem than a rising India. China has already risen. Its economy, at nearly $20 trillion, is two-thirds America’s $30 trillion economy. India’s GDP at $4.19 trillion is still small but its annual growth rate is treble America’s and double China’s. The gap between the three will close sooner rather than later.

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The second reason for the global reaction is commercial. The US sells a significant amount of military hardware to Pakistan, including F-16 fighter jets. These performed poorly against India’s new 4.5 generation stealth Rafale fighters whose lethal Scalp missiles have a 400-km standoff range. The outcome was not a good advertisement globally for US defence companies like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Raytheon which supply military hardware around the world.

US media immediately took the cue and downplayed India’s military success in Operation Sindoor. Several US media organisations have Pakistan-origin editors. They gave the conflict a spin that called it a draw when facts pointed to a clear Pakistan defeat.

China stays out

To Pakistan’s disappointment, China did not make an attempt to open up a second front on the LAC. The poor performance of Chinese military equipment and fighter jets in the conflict was blamed by Chinese military strategists on the relative incompetence of Pakistani Air Force (PAF) fighter pilots, not the quality of Chinese hardware.

India’s Operation Sindoor has crossed a Lakshman Rekha in two ways. One, it has demonstrated to Pakistan that nuclear blackmail is no longer a restraining impediment. Prime Minister Narendra Modi made it ominously clear when he said: “A future terror attack will be regarded as an act of war.”

This closes the option Pakistan has exercised for decades: launching terror attacks behind a nuclear shield. That shield has been breached.

Two, the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) serves as a new deterrent. India has swifty begun to use water it was always entitled to legally under the IWT which came into force in 1960. Out of a misplaced sense of goodwill, India had not used its full legal quota of water for over six decades.

Jammu & Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah said candidly last week: “As far as J&K is concerned, we have never supported the Indus Waters Treaty. We have always believed that it is the most unjust document for the people of Jammu & Kashmir. Opposing a blatantly unfair treaty (IWT) is in no way, shape, size or form warmongering. It’s about correcting a historic injustice that denied the people of J&K the right to use our water for ourselves.”

Abdullah said that with the IWT suspended, hydro-electric power plants could transform the Union territory’s economy. For example, he pointed out, “The Wular lake is in North Kashmir. Civil works on the Tulbul Navigation Barrage were started in the early 1980s but had to be abandoned under pressure from Pakistan citing the Indus Waters Treaty. Now that the IWT has been suspended, we may be able to resume the project.”

Multi-party global outreach

What India must now do falls into three buckets. First, ensure that the decision to send multi-party teams to various countries later this week does not appear as a defensive tactic. India does not owe anybody an explanation for Operation Sindoor. The various teams must focus on demonstrating with evidence the scourge of Pakistan’s decades-long use of terrorism against India.

Second, the teams must present graphic proof of the success of Operation Sindoor and why it has only been paused, not completed.

Third, they must expose, with published examples, the deliberate bias in Western media coverage of the conflict and how the bias diminishes their editorial credibility.

Pakistan has spent millions of dollars in the US on lobbying firms. These firms have strong ties with Congressional leaders in both the Senate and the House of Representatives as well as with legacy media organisations. These relationships are used to airbrush evidence of Islamabad’s links with UN-designated terror groups.

India has the ability – and the goodwill – to hire the best US lobbying firms to state its case with evidence and seize control of the narrative.

Above all, the key task for the multi-party teams preparing to set off to different geographies this week is to de-hyphenate India from Pakistan.

Pakistan’s GDP at $360 billion is smaller than the GDP of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR). Just as US wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan did not hyphenate the US with those countries, the multi-party teams must make it clear that India is dealing with what Defence Minister Rajnath Singh last week called a rogue nation.

The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.