After Pahalgam: India, Pakistan, and the Smog of War
I’ve been working on a series called Himalayan Dispatches — quiet stories from the eastern Himalayas. After writing the first two (here and here), I had planned to release the third this week. But it felt dishonest, almost indulgent, to write about stillness while a storm was unfolding in another part of the same range.
Because the Himalayas are not merely a mountain system. They are a spiritual, civilisational, and geopolitical faultline where tectonic plates of belief, history, and memory grind against one another with uneasy force.
The most recent tremor began on April 22.
That afternoon, militants opened fire on a group of Hindu tourists near Pahalgam, in the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir. Twenty-six civilians were killed. The men were pulled aside, asked for their religion. Some were told to recite the Islamic kalima. Those who could not were shot point-blank. Among the dead was a local Muslim pony ride operator — a man who tried to intervene, and paid for his courage with his life.
The horror lay not only in the brutality, but in its choreography — deliberate, symbolic, designed to provoke rupture. And in that sense, it succeeded. What followed was a wave of grief, fury, and response.
India attributed the attack to terrorist groups operating with shelter inside Pakistan — and on the night of May 6, launched Operation Sindoor, a series of missile strikes on nine alleged terrorist sites deep within Pakistani territory. The response was deliberately calibrated: a limited strike, backed by intelligence that was swiftly made public. Names of operatives were released. And when Pakistan claimed the casualties were civilians, India’s High Commissioner to the UK appeared on British television, holding up a photograph of one of the men being given a state-level funeral in Pakistan.
But then things escalated. For several days, India and Pakistan engaged in their most intense cross-border confrontation in half a century. The nuclear-armed neighbours struck deep into each other’s territory, launching drones and ballistic missiles that reached densely populated cities, triggering blackouts, panic, and a wave of digital misinformation. Escalation appeared rapid — and, for a time, unstoppable.
Then, on May 10, as I was walking by the Thames, a ceasefire was announced.
It was one of those golden London afternoons when even the water seems to stretch its limbs. Somewhere between Blackfriars and Waterloo, I saw the notification: “Donald Trump says India and Pakistan have agreed to a full and immediate ceasefire.”
No statement yet from India, no acknowledgement. Just a swirl of WhatsApp forwards and news alerts, speculation blooming ahead of confirmation. Eventually, both countries said something, but neither wanted to seem like they had stepped back.1
And that, in a way, was the point.
Because in modern politics, perception often matters more than position. And strength, increasingly, must be seen to be believed.
I support action against terror networks — against the camps and handlers, the recruiters and ideologues, the hydra of asymmetric violence that has, for decades now, bled the region of lives and trust. Accountability matters. And after what happened in Pahalgam, no one could reasonably expect India to stay silent.
Indian diplomats — and even the Prime Minister — have drawn the comparison: the United States responded after 9/11. The UK acted after 7/7. Why, then, shouldn’t India? When civilians are executed on religious lines, when newlyweds are gunned down on their honeymoon, a response is not only understandable, it becomes a State responsibility.
And to the government’s credit, the response was measured. The initial strikes were limited and the rationale was communicated, both to domestic audiences and external ones. But it’s possible, and necessary, to give a government credit for a job well done, while also critiquing the ecosystem that can swell around it. The precision of a strike shouldn’t excuse the chaos that follows — the trolling, the scapegoating, the triumphalism and bloodlust masquerading as patriotism.
During the height of the crisis, one media commentator openly called for a “final solution,” while Instagram’s algorithm kept serving up nuclear survival guides from faceless handles on both sides of the border, each calling for the other's annihilation. And then, after the ceasefire, I watched, dismayed, as some of my own people turned against India’s Foreign Secretary, trolling and abusing Vikram Misri and his family online simply because he was the messenger.
India’s operation was named Sindoor — a word that carries symbolic weight, referring to the red vermillion powder worn by married Hindu women in the parting of their hair. A painful, poetic name, no doubt chosen to honour the fact that so many of the victims were young Hindu husbands, killed alongside the women they had just promised their futures to.
But the tragedy didn’t end in Pahalgam. In the days that followed, Kashmiris and Muslims across India reported harassment — and even the victims’ families weren’t spared. Himanshi Narwal, the young widow of Vinay Narwal, a 26-year-old naval officer killed while the couple were on their honeymoon, had become a symbol of national grief. A photo of her beside her husband’s coffin went viral, until she publicly urged restraint and asked people not to target Muslims or Kashmiris. Then came the abuse. Trolls accused her of dishonouring her husband’s memory, dredged up her past, and even used the fact that they had only been married a week to question her right to speak. The same voices that once mourned with her now turned on her for she chose to speak up against prejudice.
This is the second cost of terror: the way it hardens suspicion within, curdles grief into hyper-nationalism, and turns mourning into a loyalty test.
And yet, something shifted after Sindoor. Political opposition fell into alignment and religious differences were set aside. Even figures like Asaduddin Owaisi — often at odds with the ruling BJP — voiced support for the government’s action. For all of India’s attempts over the years to de-hyphenate itself from Pakistan, there is still something about standing up to its western neighbour that unites the nation in a way few other things do.
Meanwhile, across the border, Pakistan’s military elite returned to their oldest script: India as existential threat. This narrative is not just strategic, it is structural. It justifies defence budgets, suppresses dissent, and centralises power. Escalation, even when limited, reinforces their raison d’être. And so, both sides played the choreography they know best — just enough tension, just enough restraint, just enough spectacle.
But this wasn’t only a war of strategy, it was also a war of stories.
This may have been the first India–Pakistan flashpoint fully shaped by the logics of the Instagram age. There were countless memes and reels, Twitter threads, grainy footage, influencers turned war correspondents, and an avalanche of disinformation.
I was sent forwards claiming that India had destroyed Pakistan’s main port in Karachi. That Pakistan had bombed Delhi, and that Islamabad had fallen. That Pakistani General Asim Munir had been arrested. Videos supposedly “on the ground” turned out to be clips from Gaza, Yemen, or Syria. The most absurd, perhaps, was a combat simulation from the video game Arma 3, shared by both Indian and Pakistani accounts, each claiming it showed their side shooting down enemy jets.
This wasn’t just fog of war, but the smog of social media — a thick, choking haze in which truth struggles to breathe.
And in a story war, both sides can claim victory. For India, it was calibrated strength. For Pakistan, the very fact that the US intervened was spun as a diplomatic win — the crisis had been internationalised.
In such a landscape, narrative control often matters more than operational control. And whoever posts first, not whoever is right, ends up framing the debate.
And yet, even beyond the spectacle, this moment has marked several turning points for geopolitical observers.
India, for one, appears to be moving away from its long-held doctrine of No First Use on nuclear weapons — a posture that, while not formally abandoned, seems more flexible in the face of Modi’s statement that India will not be held hostage to “nuclear blackmail.”
Equally significant, this was the first air combat theatre where advanced Chinese and Western fighter jets — Pakistan’s JF-17s and J-10s on one side, India’s French Rafales on the other — were deployed against each other. In effect, a regional conflict became a live-fire demonstration of competing defence ecosystems.2
And in another break from precedent, India publicly declared that any future terrorist attack would be treated as an act of war — echoing post-9/11 US language around preemption and deterrence. One might read this as India’s own ‘red line’ moment, not unlike America’s after the Twin Towers fell.
For international relations observers long trained to view South Asia as an ‘outlier’, these developments should be a wake-up call. The frameworks of the Cold War, the Treaty of Westphalia, or NATO-era escalation no longer apply neatly here. The crisis revealed how religious nationalism, postcolonial grievance, and technological asymmetry now animate a strategic theatre that remains dangerously underexamined in Euro-American discourse.
And living in London, I’ve felt that distance acutely. Here, you start to notice what registers (and what doesn’t). The Pahalgam attack on April 22 barely made the news, and even when it did, no one really talked about it. Many who pride themselves on being globally informed didn’t seem to care. The ceasefire? Not even a conversation starter. And don’t get me started on how few knew, or wanted to know, about the history of the Kashmir dilemma, or the actors responsible for it.
Some of this is, of course, war fatigue — Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Sudan … you name it. The bandwidth of outrage is limited. But part of it is also structural: violence in South Asia, when it doesn’t spill beyond its borders, rarely registers. It’s filed away as “complex.” Too far, too familiar, too fraught. Only crises within Europe seem to come with ready-made narratives — with clear perpetrators, victims, and moral clarity.
As India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar quipped at the Munich Security Conference in 2023, “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.” The silence that greeted Pahalgam is case in point.
In the days since the ceasefire, more evidence began to emerge of just how damaging India’s strikes were. Indian missiles struck multiple Pakistani air bases, including Nur Khan in Rawalpindi — a critical military site just over a mile from Pakistan’s nuclear planning body — a detail that, according to several diplomatic analysts, was what triggered urgent U.S. intervention. Some Indian officials claimed that an operations command centre was hit. Pakistani officials later confirmed that a refueling hangar was damaged and that their National Command Authority, responsible for nuclear decisions, was briefly convened. In most strategic circles, a strike so precise, calibrated, and effective enough to rattle both Islamabad and Washington would be considered a clear tactical win.
And yet, for some, even that wasn’t enough. “We could have used our full capacity to show our strength,” one commentator told the press after the ceasefire. “Yeh dil maange more,” he added. The heart wants more.
There is broad agreement among security thinkers that credible deterrence is essential, that India must invest more in counter-intelligence, and that covert operations are often more effective than loud, reactive ones. Strategic flexibility increases when actions are shielded from public theatre.
But in the current political climate, that kind of restraint is difficult to sustain. When electoral logic demands visibility, when symbolic victories carry more weight than structural ones, and when leaders are cheered not for patience but for projection, even wise decision-makers can get boxed in by expectation.
And that’s precisely what those who sponsor asymmetric warfare want — for India to be baited into overreaction. For it to bleed, not only from the outside, but from within.
Before I go any further, I should say this: I did think twice about writing all of this.
I know emotions are high and the grief is still fresh and very real. And the last thing I want is to sound like I’m preaching from the sidelines. I worried I’d be lumped in with those couch warriors who only call for peace — who ignore the decades of provocation, the asymmetry of the threat, the fact that sometimes, a line must be drawn. So again I say: I think a response was needed.
But at the same time, I can’t ignore the rhetoric that followed. The media spectacle, the loose talk of ‘final solutions’ and the baying for annihilation sits uneasily with me.
I’m not trying to be righteous here. These aren’t perfect answers. They’re just thoughts I’m trying to work through myself, because at my core I think we need space for the uncertainties too — especially in a democracy.
When I was speaking to my father about some of these thoughts, he said: “You don’t always have to try so hard to be unbiased. You don’t have to fight your emotions. Sometimes, some things are just personal.”
And I think he’s right. At least sort of.
I’ll always know where my loyalties lie. For all I say about South Asian unity, I know what I felt when the Pahalgam attacks happened — my blood boiled. And when I first heard of Operation Sindoor, I beamed with pride. There’s no doubt about that.
But I also know that I’ll always try to navigate that uncomfortable middle ground — to explain why India’s military response was justified, especially when one side shelters terrorist infrastructure (something Pakistan’s own defence minister publicly acknowledged last week), and at the same time, why unchecked jingoism hurts us all.
If there’s any image from these weeks that might still give people pause, it may not be a grieving widow or an injured child — though there were many. It may be that of a buffalo, burned and blistered from a Pakistani drone attack, standing dazed in a brick shed in Ferozepur’s Khai Pheme Ki village.
Scroll.in ran a video story on it, and Amitava Kumar wrote a poignant poem in the voice of that injured animal; a creature stunned by the blast, unable to distinguish between flags or borders or causes.
and what difference does it make to me if the bomb
was dropped by India or Pakistan? Or if the drone was
marketed by Turkey or Israel? Or America or China?
I have a suspicion that the woman who takes care of me,
who I saw being taken to the hospital in the neighbor’s car,
would say the same if asked this question by a reporter.
This is stating the obvious: the bomb wasn’t designed
by any creature that looked like me, I know that.
These are the real experiences that show us that, in the end, what matters most may not be the stories we tell about war, but how we fight the war of stories.
And so I say:
It should be possible to condemn terror without glorifying annihilation.
To demand justice without dehumanising an entire population.
To hold your own government to a higher standard without forfeiting your love for the country.
To believe in the possibility of a politics that doesn’t mistake noise for courage.
It should be possible, even now, to write with nuance — not because it’s popular (because it certainly isn’t), but because it’s necessary.
That belief may not win elections, but it still feels like work worth doing.
Interestingly, China was reportedly displeased with Pakistan for engaging Washington first, viewing it as a diplomatic slight and issuing its own statements later to reassert influence.
For more on the military hardware dimension of this conflict — including how it became a live-fire test of Chinese and Western defence ecosystems — this FT piece is well worth a read. The article also covers the intelligence value of this engagement for global defence actors, including radar tracking data, missile performance, and aerial defence weaknesses on both sides.
Excellent piece! Love your brilliant style!