Decisive Truth Under War: How Propaganda Shapes Public Opinion

Revolutions may or may not be televised but wars will always be. In the absence of real footage, clips from video games, videos generated by artificial intelligence and old, unrelated visuals can keep viewers engaged. When facts from official sources are coming late, are scarce or not exciting enough, unverified content on social media platforms can fill in the gap. But the coverage must go on. Every moment belongs to the race for Television Rating Point (TRP)—revenue. Facts are just collateral damage.

On the night of May 6, India launched targeted aerial attacks at some locations in Pakistan and Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) after the Indian military identified these sites as terror training centres. The objective was to avenge the April 22 terror attack in Pahalgam that claimed 26 lives. Soon after the news of ‘Operation Sindoor’ broke, social media platforms like X, Facebook and Instagram got flooded with videos claiming that Pakistan had shot down five Indian aircraft. 

When the US broadcaster CNN asked Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Asif for proof of the claim of shooting down five Indian jets, he said: “It라이브 바카라 all over social media. Not our social media, the Indian social media.”

A top government functionary citing social media videos as proof of a country라이브 바카라 military success is a new high, or low, in the information war where the boundary between fact and fiction is too blurred to matter. By the time Asif made these remarks, Indian fact-checkers had already identified all those so-called jet-downing videos as old and unrelated. Fact-checkers also identified a series of X handles pretending to belong to Indian army veterans but actually being operated from Pakistan.

But the media in Pakistan continued to celebrate the ‘success story,’ using the same videos. Anchors at ARY News claimed with great excitement that Pakistan downed multiple Indian fighter jets. Geo TV claimed Pakistan intercepted hundreds of Indian drones. They all shouted in unison that the Pahalgam terror attack was India라이브 바카라 own doing to malign Pakistan, a narrative that the Pakistan government and army have launched. India is the eternal aggressor, who now must be taught a lesson, anchors and analysts cried.

ARY aired reports titled ‘Watch: JF-17 Thunder Taking Off to Destroy India라이브 바카라 S-400 Defence System,’ ‘India라이브 바카라 Cowardly Attack, Pakistan라이브 바카라 Decisive Response—A Global Turning Point’ and ‘The S-400 Fell, Rafales Tumbled: A First-Hand Account of India라이브 바카라 Strategic Defeat,’ and so on.

A war is a scary thing. It turns people into lifeless numbers, destroys properties, infrastructure and livelihood. Financial stress, mass anxiety over uncertainties and diversion of welfare funds for defence purposes strain public life. Panic-driven hoardings cause inflation. But for the media, especially TV news channels, a war turns into a spectacle that people can watch with as intense interest as a highly competitive sports tournament, sitting in the comfort of drawing rooms and bedrooms, sipping hot or cold drinks, munching snacks. As Bertrand Russel notes in his 1915 essay The Ethics of War: “Of all evils of war, the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth….”

In Indian states bordering Pakistan, May 8 was a night of horror. Pakistan launched a series of drone attacks and heavy artillery firing targeting India라이브 바카라 civilian population and infrastructure. Sirens, blackouts, sounds of blasts and roars of flying aircraft left people scared and anxious. In India라이브 바카라 TV news channel studios, it was a night of fabulous fantasies and fiction.

Anchors shouted jingoistic hyperboles at the top of their voices, with computer-generated images and animations mimicking fighter jets flying on the screen, sirens and hooters serving as background scores. With uncontrollable excitement, they broke the news that sent the viewers into a frenzy: Pakistan was on the brink of collapse.

The Indian Army had captured Islamabad, the Pakistan capital, triumphantly announced the Zee TV anchor. Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was hiding in a bunker, reported Zee as well as Guwahati-based NKTV and Pratidin Time. Pakistan Army chief Asim Munir had been removed in a rebellion and taken into custody, reported Kolkata-based ABP Ananda. Republic and ABP Ananda said INS Vikrant, the Indian Navy라이브 바카라 aircraft carrier, had destroyed Pakistan라이브 바카라 Karachi port. Assamese news channel News Live reported that 12 cities in Pakistan had been destroyed in Indian attacks. ABP Ananda said Balochistan was on its way to liberation from Pakistan and that the Baloch rebels had destroyed the Pakistan army라이브 바카라 camp at Quetta. India TV and ET Now said that India had downed an F-16 Pakistani jet and captured its pilot.

The power of the coverage was so strong that even Union Minister Kiren Rijiju ended up tweeting about India라이브 바카라 attack on Karachi. He later deleted it, though.

The media anchors’ hallucinating dreams must have ended by the next day. By morning, fact-checkers had debunked them all. In the evening, the Indian government gave a quite thorough briefing of what transpired on the intervening night of May 8 and 9.

The government said Pakistan military ‘carried out multiple violations of Indian airspace’ along the entire western border with an intent to target military infrastructure and resorted to firing of heavy-caliber weapons along the Line of Control. “Indian Armed Forces brought down a number of these drones using kinetic and non-kinetic means,” the army said. An armed UAV of Pakistan attempted to target Bathinda military station, which was detected and neutralised, they added.

The government said that drone intrusions were attempted from Leh to Sir Creek at 36 locations with approximately 300 to 400 drones, likely to test India라이브 바카라 air defense systems and gather intelligence. “In response to the Pakistani attack, armed drones were launched at four air defence sites in Pakistan. One of the drones was able to destroy an AD radar,” the government said, adding: “The Indian Armed Forces responded proportionately, adequately, and responsibly.”

The media라이브 바카라 bubble burst. All their sources of information and video clips came from social media platforms.

Misinformation, usually being sensational in nature, spreads faster than facts. In tense situations like a war or an armed conflict, misinformation can travel like missiles—fast and destructive. In the era of live coverage, social media and artificial intelligence, rumours can beat the speed of light and distort reality completely, even if temporarily.

Marketing Messages

An information war is not only about spreading misinformation but also shaping narratives with carefully curated propaganda. As British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said during the Tehran Conference on November 30, 1943: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” Every side in a war carefully guards information considered sensitive. But it goes far beyond protecting sensitive military or strategic information. 

The Pahalgam terror attack had a dark message. The assai­lants selectively killed 25 Hindu men and a Muslim man who refused to allow Hindus to be killed. They let all women and children go and told the women to tell Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi what had been done to them. 

In response, India, which right away blamed Pakistan-based and backed terrorists for the attack, named its operation on terror bases in Pakistan as Operation Sindoor, referring to the vermillion that many Hindu women apply on their forehead as a mark of marriage. In the government briefing on the following day, foreign secretary Vikram Misri was accompanied by two women, a Muslim and Hindu—Colonel Sofia Qureshi and wing commander Vyomika Singh.

If these gave a strong message of women empowerment and secularism to bolster national unity, Pakistan moulded its narrative around the ‘death of civilians’, including children, in India라이브 바카라 May 6 attack, to give their offensives on India the following day the colour of a ‘just war’. They highlighted former Jammu & Kashmir governor Satyapal Malik라이브 바카라 past comments questioning the Indian government라이브 바카라 role during the Pulwama terror attack (2019), for which India blamed Pakistan.

Citing how Indians themselves questioned government narratives, Pakistani officials said all terror attacks on Indian soil—from Pulwama to Pahalgam—are India라이브 바카라 own handiwork to unfairly implicate Pakistan. They even claimed that the May 7 missile attack on a Sikh Gurdwara in India라이브 바카라 Poonch was India라이브 바카라 own work.

Misri, the Indian foreign secretary, called Pakistan라이브 바카라 charges ‘deranged fantasies.’ He highlighted that India, being a democracy, allows its citizens space to criticise the government and ask uncomfortable questions—a space that라이브 바카라 missing in Pakistan.

While Misri rightly identified India as a land where the government faces uncomfortable questions, this reckoning also came at a time when the Opposition, civil society members and the independent media had been crying foul over India라이브 바카라 shrinking democratic space in recent years.

Besides, criticising the government in times of an armed conflict carries an element of risk. Senior journalist Vaishna Roy, who criticised the naming of the operation after Sindoor—which she finds patriarchal—faced brutal trolling on social media for questioning the armed forces in times requiring national unity. At a time when the government of India is highlighting India라이브 바카라 internal communal unity as its strength, many Hindu Right-wing social media users threatened secular and liberal voices with action should they try to question the government or the army in any way.

A ‘Gentle reminder: Anyone against Operation Sindoor should not be your friend anymore,’ said a Facebook page called Indian Army Fans. Many other users echoed the message. Many hyper-nationalist users shared on social media platforms the government emails where to report ‘anti-national’ posts. To many of them, anything that questions the government in any way is ‘anti-national.’

On May 9, The Jaipur Dialogues, a Right-wing propaganda handle with over 4.5 lakh ‘followers’ on X, set the rules of the game rather precisely. “In information warfare, perception is the battlefield. If the news damages Pakistan—true or false—amplify it. Post it. Share it. Make it viral. Let panic spread across the border. If the news harms India—even if true—bury it. Suppress it. Disarm it before it spreads.” They clarified that this is not journalism, but war, in which psychological warfare matters. “Every post is a bullet. Never fire one at your own country.”

While the government of India kept repeatedly warning the media and the masses against falling for misinformation and to trust only the government라이브 바카라 briefings, Abhijit Iyer-Mitra, a far-Right Hindutva propagandist, strongly defended their right to spread misinformation.

On May 8, he offered a “tweet of appreciation for all of you who tweeted POSITIVE AUXILIARY ASSISTANCE” in spreading misinformation about the coup in Pakistan, planes running from Pakistan, pilot captured, F-16/J-17 shot down and Karachi/Lahore being attacked. 

“You have no idea how useful you were today. You turned into an electronic warfare arm of the motherland,” he said, adding, “Anyone who labels you “fake news” or “misinformation” is a paid Pakistani 5th column.” In another tweet, he argued that such misinformation is necessary to confuse the enemy.

The Indian government, while trying to block social media handles and news platforms channelling Pakistani narratives, propaganda and misinformation, also blocked the handles of several Indian users and media platforms, triggering protests by a section of the press and civil society. In Pakistan, in contrast, voices critical of the government or the army are indeed too low to be heard.

In his 1938 memoir, Homage to Catalonia, British novelist George Orwell wrote that one of the most horrible features of war is that all the war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. “It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a frontline trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours,” he wrote.

This was a year before World War II began. Two years after the war ended, American psychologist and Nazi trial observer Gustave M. Gilbert wrote in his 1947 book Nuremberg Diary that Hermann Göring, a leading Nazi official, said during a 1946 interview in jail that while the common people don’t want war, it is always a simple matter for political leaders to drag the people along in their war efforts. “All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peacema­kers for lack of patriotism,” Göring was quoted as saying.

Decades after these remarks, we are left to seek truth—the many layers of many truths—for ourselves, navigating webs of fiction and fabrications.

Snigdhendu Bhattacharya is a journalist, author and researcher