Operation Sindoor: Unpacking the 'military success, narrative failure' discourse

If Balakot and Ladakh represented tactical setbacks with little political cost, Operation Sindoor appears to be demonstrating the opposite.

If there is one thing that the last few years have taught us about India, it is that the relationship between military conflict, ground reality and popular politics is simply not straightforward.

Does military weakness impose a political cost in a democracy? One would assume so, yet the situation in Ladakh – where it was clear to most analysts that China had altered the status quo in 2020 and was preventing Indian troops from patrolling territory that they previously had access to – suggested otherwise.

In the immediate aftermath of the Ladakh clash in 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi insisted that no one had intruded on Indian territory, while in the years that followed Union Home Minister Amit Shah claimed that China couldn’t “encroach on an inch of India’s land”. This flew in the face of the lived experience in Ladakh and the government’s own attempts to negotiate deescalation and disengagement with Beijing (i.e. what was there to negotiate if nobody had intruded or encroached on Indian land?). That discrepancy was even raised by Opposition leaders. Yet the chasm between the official government line and the situation on the ground seemed to have little impact on Modi’s popularity.

The Pulwama-Balakot incidents of 2019 offer a similar example. The much advertised ‘surgical strikes’ of 2016 were intended to deter Pakistan from abetting further terrorist action. Yet, in 2019, a bomb attack killed 40 CRPF personnel in Pulwama. In retaliation, India carried out its first airstrike on Pakistani territory since 1971. But the attack appeared to do little damage to the terror camps, and the conflict that followed saw one Indian fighter jet taken down in Pakistani territory and an Indian pilot captured by Pakistan, only to later be released back to India. Indian air defences also accidentally hit an Indian Air Force helicopter, killing all six personnel on board as well as a civilian on the ground.

As Sushant Singh drew out in an essay earlier this year, “for all intents and purposes, the Balakot episode was a military failure for India.”¹ Yet, a few months following the clashes, Modi notched up a massive victory in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, winning a bigger majority than he had garnered in 2014.

If Balakot and Ladakh represented tactical setbacks with little political cost, Operation Sindoor appears to be demonstrating the opposite: A successful military effort that has nevertheless been perceived as a disappointment. Many analysts believe that India broadly succeeded in its military goals, yet even pro-government voices cannot hide a sense that the overall effort was insufficient or even a failure. Why is that?

First, on the military front, while much more still remains to be understood about what exactly took place over those four days, at least some of the details can now be discerned. A number of observers seem to believe that India achieved its objectives, even if the big question of having lost fighter jets – obliquely acknowledged by the Chief of Defence Staff without a straight answer – still appears to be a raw wound.

A few insightful pieces:

• Christopher Clary has a very useful paper putting together all the publicly available information about the four-day conflict, including this assessment: “Having perhaps struggled with the counterair environment on May 7, India’s achievement on May 9-10 is impressive by any measure.”

• Joshua T. White breaks down four dynamics from the conflict, concluding that “the combination of new norms on attribution, the precedents set by provocative targeting, the chaotic information warfare environment, and new drone technologies could make for a crisis that escalates even more quickly and opaquely than this one, with a wider configuration of fronts and greater destructive capabilities.”

• Walter Ladwig on the misguided analysis focusing narrowly on which military platform did what:

  “Undue prominence was given to the performance of specific platforms, with little regard for the broader operational context or the rules of engagement that shaped the encounter. As a result, Chinese arms manufacturers enjoyed a perceived PR win – one arguably disproportionate to the tactical or strategic context of the engagement… That misleading narrative obscures a more consequential truth: despite Pakistani tactical successes, India appears to have largely achieved its stated objectives… While losses were incurred, these must be evaluated against the scale and complexity of the mission – not simply tallied in isolation. The mere fact that the Indian Air Force could strike targets under defended conditions and undertake follow-on attacks demonstrates its capacity for coercive precision operations.”

• Arzan Tarapore on India’s new strategy and the many challenges it brings:

  “India no longer expects that threatening a major punitive response can dissuade the Pakistani establishment from its campaign of terrorism. Instead, it accepts that Pakistani intent is practically immovable, and seeks to materially degrade the adversary, keep it on the defensive, and thereby thwart its offensive power against India… In this alternative concept of coercion that India seems now to be embracing, the retaliation, rather than its threat, is the instrument of coercion — levying tangible costs that force the adversary’s future attacks to be smaller or rarer. This form of coercion, sometimes called “cumulative deterrence,” is especially suited to enduring rivalries, where the two sides expect a continuous cycle of violence.

See also: Sanjeet Kashyap on India’s deterrence doctrine, Justin Bronk on the key questions about what military hardware was used, Sushant Singh on the delusion of deterrence, Sarabjeet S Parmar on the Navy’s presence and future potential role, Rishap Vats on the new normal, Ali Ahmed on Sindoor’s lessons, Hartosh Singh Bal on many more questions.

While not everyone agrees that India necessarily ‘won’ at the strategic level (Will any of this actually deter Pakistan? Have India’s attacks seriously degraded terrorist infrastructure? Will the conflict actually bolster Pakistan’s military, which had previously faced its most serious legitimacy crisis?), there is some consensus that New Delhi’s successfully achieved its immediate objectives (retaliate conventionally despite the nuclear overhang; display resolve and ability to hit Pakistani military air defences and other targets; rely on Indian air defences to safeguard against Pakistani retaliation) particularly after day one of the conflict.

Given these conclusions about India largely achieving its aims, with some Rafale-sized caveats, why is the feeling around the conflict one of disappointment in India?²

Part of the answer may have to do with India’s truly unhinged pro-government media networks. During the conflict and after, each of these outlets were attempting to outdo the other in spreading breathless, jingoistic misinformation about how India was about to destroy a Pakistani state that was also imploding at the same time.

Karishma Mehrotra reports:

“Shortly after midnight on May 9, an Indian journalist received a WhatsApp message from Prasar Bharati, the state-owned public broadcaster. Pakistan’s army chief had been arrested, the message read, and a coup was underway.

Within minutes, the journalist posted the information on X and others followed suit. Soon enough, it was splashed across major Indian news networks and went viral on social media.

The “breaking news” was entirely false. There had been no coup in Pakistan. Gen. Asim Munir, far from being behind bars, would soon be elevated to the rank of field marshal…

Times Now Navbharat reported that Indian forces had entered Pakistan; TV9 Bharatvarsh told viewers that Pakistan’s prime minister had surrendered; Bharat Samachar said he was hiding in a bunker. All of them, along with some of the country’s largest channels — including Zee News, ABP News and NDTV — repeatedly proclaimed that major Pakistani cities had been destroyed….

Just before midnight on May 8, in a WhatsApp message exchange seen by The Post, a journalist with a major Hindi-language network messaged colleagues: “Indian navy can carry out an attack imminently,” citing unnamed sources. Another staffer responded simply, “Karachi,” but gave no details on sourcing. Within minutes, the channel was falsely reporting that the Indian navy had struck the port in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city.”

For a taste of the madness, watch this TV Newsance episode.

(See also: Prem Panicker on how the “Indian media will tell the armed forces how to conduct a war, how to behave in the aftermath, who to talk to and what can be said and cannot be said.”)

While some of this coverage may have just been demand-driven, with each newsroom competing to grab eyeballs through nonsensical militaristic claims, these channels were only likely to have done so having received the go-ahead from players in the government. Notice how they have rarely used similar bombast on the Chinese front, for example.

As Mehrotra points out in her report,

“One senior Indian national security official said the misinformation played to India’s advantage. If lower-level government sources deliberately spread false claims, it was to “take advantage of the information space” and create “as much confusion as possible because they know the enemy is watching,” the official said.

“Sometimes the collateral is your own audience, but that is how it is,” the official added. “That is how war has evolved.”

Put aside the discomfiting notion of the government thinking of its own citizenry as unavoidable yet acceptable collateral in information warfare, an idea that the Modi government has brought up in the past in other domains.

Could all this bombast have been responsible for the subsequent disappointment from even pro-government voices? It is true that, if you were expecting Pakistan to have collapsed with a few more attacks, the ceasefire would have come as a surprise. But outlandish TV coverage, including of military conflicts, is hardly new. In the past –as with Ladakh and Balakot above – this ability to shape the narrative has had a strangely positive implication: It has allowed both sides to claim victory regardless of what actually took place, with the governments certain that they can control domestic narratives, given all the work done to deligitimise serious journalism on both sides of the LoC over the years.

With the same conditions in place, why the narrative violation this time?

We discussed an initial version of the answer a few weeks ago:

Much has been made of the re-hyphenation of India and Pakistan in the aftermath of the crisis, with other nations seemingly treating the two nuclear-armed neighbours as equally responsible for the crisis – rather than accepting New Delhi’s perspective that Islamabad is the aggressive, destabilising force because of its support for terror. This is a diplomatic setback, and one that the Indian government has attempted to correct through the all-party delegations it dispatched around the world, though how useful that effort has been is an open question.

(See evaluations by Scroll.in, Quint and Newslaundry, all of which find engagement with relevant players in respective countries – including US Vice President JD Vance – but very little in the way of local media coverage, and barely any direct acknowledgment of Pakistan’s role in statements by foreign counterparts).

Despite External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s ‘laser eye’ reputation, moreover, India’s faulty communication strategy around Operation Sindoor – even though it was initiated at a time of New Delhi’s choosing – has also received justified criticism, including from friendly voices.

See, for example, Ashok Malik:

“Strategic communications is a critical element of digital-age diplomacy and conflict management. India pays insufficient attention to it. It is notable that the recently-announced National Security Advisory Board has put together talent from the armed forces, diplomacy, internal security and intelligence - but completely ignored strategic comms and, for that matter, supply chains. There is a crying need for modernisation in approach.

Amid Operation Sindoor as well, there was a glaring dissonance in terms of an overarching communications strategy. Rather than leave media and public emotions to their own devices - and, in some cases, fevered imagination - there should have been a convergence between the messaging to diplomatic interlocutors and to domestic constituencies.

International partners were being told that India did not want to escalate. Destroying terrorist camps - in addition to coercive economic diplomacy in the form of Indus Waters Treaty measures - had achieved objectives. The domestic mood was given no such salve, no 'mission accomplished' prophylactic. The result was a media-social media ecosystem that went berserk.”

As well as an analysis from Anurag Bisen at the Vivekananda International Foundation:

“The failure, however, lies not just in Pakistan’s information warfare acumen but in India’s systemic neglect of narrative-building as an extension of strategic policy… India’s restraint in narrative building stands in stark contrast to Pakistan’s hyperactive media outreach. While Indian missiles hit their targets, Pakistan’s narrative missiles struck international opinion. Indian official briefings responded reactively, often too late and too cryptically. Key Indian military achievements—crippling Pakistani air defences, neutralising terrorist camps, demonstrating standoff strike precision—remained underreported in global outlets.”

Some elements of these critiques – India’s lack of a comms strategy as well as its inability to prevent re-hyphenation at the international level – strike me as at odds with the actual situation.

From the outside, the problem appears to not have been the absence of a communications strategy, but the existence of one – albeit the same one that the BJP has put in place over the years with the assistance of pliant Noida newsrooms: Push outrageous lies out at the public through the news media, knowing that the narrative can easily be reframed whenever needed, given that tough questions directed at the government are a thing of the past.

Have the Indian authorities become so used to a fully managed domestic media environment that they have forgotten how to handle a truly dynamic news ecosystem? See, for example, this report by Anant Gupta:

“Our whole external publicity, for several years, was aimed at the domestic audience,” said a [Delhi-based foreign policy expert], requesting anonymity. “We did not seem to be bothered about what the international media was saying. We have alienated a big community that forges international public opinion and we are realising that now. That is why all these delegations.”

Part of the problem is that Indian officials have come to expect docility from the media and detest questions that make them uncomfortable, the journalist quoted earlier added…

Another reporter with an international publication, who also requested anonymity fearing government retribution, said that the ruling dispensation needs to move past the idea that the foreign press is prejudiced against India. It would help if officials tried to understand the specific needs of international media instead of persisting with a one-size-fits-all approach, they said.

The reporter remembered how, on May 8, a government source tried to feed them stories about India apparently attacking Karachi and taking a Pakistani pilot into custody. But the unverified, off-the-record claims simply did not pass the muster for their outlet.

“They can’t manipulate the international press in the same way that they manipulate the domestic press,” this person said. “You can’t just tell me lies and expect me to publish them.”

And while hyphenation is an issue at a rhetorical level, it isn’t per se a major problem. At the nuclear and security level, global players have historically treated India and Pakistan with at least some equivalence, and New Delhi has even relied on this approach for its own ends in the past (as with agreeing to participate in secret talks with Pakistan in Dubai in 2021). Despite this, India’s growing economic heft means that there are no real fears about the two countries being treated similarly by the global community, as Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif rather incredibly acknowledged a few days ago:

“Given the economic progress India claims to have made, war would be a complete disaster for them. The destruction would be India’s to bear; we’re already in a struggling phase, so we’re prepared for any scenario.”

Why then the discomfort over ‘hyphenation’? The answer has more to do with who was adding the hyphen: US President Donald Trump not only took credit for the ceasefire, he also suggested that it was achieved through threats over trade, and that he would be happy to jump in and help solve the Kashmir dispute. New Delhi, fearful of annoying the American president, has done little to rebut his claims (which even the Russians are now parroting).

Trump is the other element that upsets the Indian government’s belief that it can always control the narrative at the domestic level. The Biden administration, while not always on message, appeared somewhat sensitive to Modi’s needs at a domestic level, endorsing New Delhi’s G20 efforts, eventually dialing down the early criticism over Russia ties and choosing a relatively quiet approach to the extrajudicial killing allegations. The Trump administration appears to be uninterested in such sensitivities, or in any coordination on public messaging.

Given that years have been spent selling the idea that Modi and Trump are close friends alongside the claim that India is the global ‘vishwaguru’, it is hard for the pro-government media to now go out and simply dismiss anything that the US president says (although they are trying to course correct).

And so, outside of the challenges created by Trump’s policies on the foreign policy front, he also represents a very real domestic danger, through his ability to puncture a hole in the reality distortion field that pro-government Indian media have assiduously built. And given that Jaishankar can’t simply throw out angry rhetoric directed at DC, there seems to be no way to respond to the ‘Trump narrative vulnerability’ other than throwing dry bureaucrats at the problem – and hoping the American president will just move on.

That, then, may also be why so many pro-government voices appear to be disappointed by the outcome of Operation Sindoor, even if the military acquitted itself well: The communications failures during the conflict have revealed the limits of the Modi administration’s reliance on a pliant domestic media, and Trump’s rhetoric has made it clear that New Delhi’s narrative building has a massive, unpredictable White House-sized hole that will not be easily plugged.

1. It’s worth noting that not everyone agrees that Balakot was a military failure, with some arguing that India managed to ‘change the script’, by showing resolve and willingness to use conventional weapons against a nuclear-armed adversary, in the confidence that it would then be able to de-escalate. Those analyses assumed that the actions would deter Pakistan, even as others argued that Islamabad emerged from it “largely undeterred”. But even if you put aside the more technical questions of deterrence and doctrine, at the layman’s level, one would have expected that the sight of an Indian pilot in Pakistani custody and the accidental killing of Indian military personnel might have played badly for the leadership in New Delhi – this did not end up being the case.

2. The deaths of Indian civilians in Pakistani shelling along the LoC, and the fact that the terrorists who perpetrated the heinous attack in Pahalgam are still at large do not appear to be factors in this disappointment, despite the seriousness of both of those developments.