One year after Operation Sindoor: India had the jets, the digital army, and a decade of nationalist momentum. Pakistan had self-deprecatory jokes and diplomatic trolling. Guess who won.
“In information warfare, perception is the battlefield. If the news damages the other side—true or false—amplify it. Post it. Share it. Make it viral. Let panic spread across the border. If the news harms us — even if true — bury it. Suppress it. Disarm it before it spreads. This is not journalism. This is war. Every post is a bullet. Never fire one at your own country.”
— Anonymous X user, Indo-Pak conflict, May 2025
“Jung karni ho to 9 baje se pehle kerlena — 9:15 per gas chali jati hai humari.” (If you want to finish a war, do it before 9 PM — our gas goes off at 9:15.)
— Pakistani X user, also during the conflict, May 2025
When Indian missiles struck multiple targets inside Pakistan on May 7, 2025, two wars began simultaneously. One war involved aircraft, coordinates, and competing casualty figures that neither side would ever fully agree on. The other war was fought on X, Instagram and WhatsApp, in Urdu, Hindi, English and meme formats that require no language at all.
The first war ended in four days of contested claims and a ceasefire both sides described as a victory. The second war had a clearer and a far more unexpected result. Our netizens turned the odds in their favour. They not only fought but actually won the narrative battle. It is the question of how it did this that illuminates the direction of information warfare, and who, unexpectedly, is leading it there.
A murder of crows
It shouldn’t have been this outcome. India entered the information war with every structural advantage. Multi-decade disinformation influence operations documented by international watchdogs produced one of the most organised online nationalist ecosystems on the planet. India was coordinated, enormous, and primed for exactly this kind of conflict.
While we might take pride in our fifth-gen warriors or 5Gs, Pakistan entered the infowars with a year-long ban on the platform where most of the battle would be fought, in a country where blackouts (electricity, internet, press freedom) are a condition of daily life rather than a wartime imposition. And yet, we prevailed.
We saw a preview in Balakot, circa 2019, in a brazen act of diplomatic trolling. India’s Mirage jets crossed into Pakistan and, by India’s telling, killed hundreds of militants in a precision counter-terrorism strike. According to Pakistan’s version and that of Reuters reporters who visited the site, India actually killed four trees and some crows. India held a press conference. Pakistan filed an FIR against unnamed IAF pilots for environmental destruction, submitted a formal dossier to the United Nations demanding India be declared an “eco-terrorist,” and moved to strip Modi of the “Champion of the Earth” award the UN had given him. A song was composed in memory of the fallen trees. An annual holiday (Fantastic Tea Day) was established to honour Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, who had been served chai in Pakistani captivity and had called it “fantastic”.
Pakistan did not contest India’s narrative. It replaced it with one so specific, so absurd, and so verifiably grounded that India’s victory claims curdled on contact. This is Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath at work. The giant loses not because David is stronger, but because David refuses to play the giant’s game. India wanted a narrative war conducted on the terms of the powerful—solemn, institutional, credential-heavy. Pakistan showed up with an eco-terrorism complaint and a tea holiday. The giant never recovered its footing.
Beaten to the punchline
Coming back to 2025, India’s information manual against Pakistan was, and usually has been, straightforward (some might even say boring): you are poor, you beg from the IMF, your infrastructure is a humanitarian emergency, you commit rights violations, you’re a terrorist state, your country doesn’t have resources, etc. These are real vulnerabilities which are documented, painful, and definitely not invented. As weapons of narrative warfare, they should have been devastating.
And yet, they were not. Because Pakistan fired them first. At itself. And laughed. When a Pakistani user posted “Jung karni ho to 9 baje se pehle kerlena—9:15 per gas chali jati hai humari,” they weren’t being self-pitying. (If you want to go to war, do it before 9pm, our gas load shedding starts at 9:15pm). They were challenging the Indians to do their worst…what can they do that we haven’t done to ourselves already?
Owning a weakness so completely, so publicly, so cheerfully, neutralised any attempts at damage. You cannot humiliate a country that is already laughing harder than you are. And you certainly cannot humiliate one that has beaten you to the punchline. What is more, we didn’t need a coordinated effort to achieve this, just a shared sense of deprecation. Linguist Steven Pinker, in When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, calls this common knowledge. It is the public, visible consensus that coordinates collective posture without issuing orders. We don’t need to explain it because everyone gets it. And everyone’s in on it. Every Valima-in-a-heatwave tweet, every transformer-mistaken-for-a-nuclear-strike thread was building a global audience, aligned and laughing in synch.
Pakistan has been rehearsing for this moment for decades. We practised on Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s couplets aimed at military dictators, truck-art commentary running up GT Road and with barely hidden references to Vigo kee sawari and Mehkma-e-Zaraat. In Weapons of the Weak, political scientist James C. Scott called it the “hidden transcript” or the subordinate group’s resistance conducted not through rebellion but through jokes, coded language, and the quiet appropriation of the Master’s narrative. The peasant who cannot challenge the landlord directly learns to challenge him indirectly through foot-dragging, feigned ignorance, and the precise deployment of the apparently innocent remark.
Know your audience
The information war was also lost to myopia. India was talking to Indians. Pakistan was talking to everyone.
India’s digital ecosystem of viral news anchors, coordinated hashtag campaigns and studio generals declaring cities captured was calibrated for a domestic audience already marinated in a decade of Hindutva-inflected media. The claims didn’t need to be accurate, just emotionally satisfying to people watching from Mumbai and Delhi. The international press, the foreign policy community, the undecided global gallery: none of these were the target. They were the collateral audience, and collateral audiences notice when you’re lying.
Pakistan’s memes, by contrast, were legible everywhere and spoke to a global audience. The Vince McMahon escalation meme required no knowledge of South Asian geopolitics. The shrimp karahi tweet from the allegedly bombed waterfront required only the ability to recognise absurdity. The Lowy Institute noted that Pakistan’s memes made it appear “cool-headed and composed, while India appeared reactionary and militaristic”. This was a verdict delivered not by Pakistani state media but by an Australian foreign policy think tank reading the international room. The Columbia Journalism Review called India’s coverage the smog of war (man-made, and known to be so by those making it).
The specifics are worth cataloguing. Zee News announced India had captured Islamabad and Pakistan surrendered. Times Now Navbharat declared Indian forces had entered Pakistan. Aaj Tak aired footage from the January 2025 Philadelphia plane crash as an Indian airstrike on Karachi. Major (retd) Gaurav Arya “reported” that the Indian Navy had bombed Karachi’s port—a claim met, in real time, by a Pakistani journalist filing from a restaurant beside the allegedly destroyed waterfront, eating shrimp karahi. An AI deepfake of DG ISPR Lt Gen Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry was circulated as authentic footage of him admitting Pakistani jet losses. India’s military later acknowledged that 15 per cent of operational time had been spent debunking fake news, and most of it was homegrown. The trolls were not operating in a parallel ecosystem but were on primetime television.
India’s information war defeat was largely self-inflicted. The enemy’s most effective psychological operation was India’s own media. According to BOOM Live, India’s leading fact-checking organisation, 68pc of all fact-checks conducted in May 2025 were related to Operation Sindoor. Not 68pc of the defence-and-security fact-checks, 68pc of everything. In a country of 1.4 billion people, with a media ecosystem covering every subject imaginable, two-thirds of all verifiable falsehoods circulating in that month were about one four-day military operation. India’s information war was not undermined by Pakistan. It was undermined by India’s own media infrastructure, operating at full speed, in the wrong direction.
Counting the wins
Pakistan’s most disciplined information operation was also its simplest: 6-0. Six IAF aircraft downed, deployed in press conferences and memes simultaneously, with the consistency of a brand campaign.
The Rafale was the centrepiece. India’s most prestigious military asset, the jet Modi had staked significant political capital on acquiring, was now the subject of a Washington Post report confirming three crash sites in Indian territory. French intelligence acknowledged at least one loss. It was the first Rafale combat loss in the aircraft’s history. Pakistan had shot down India’s most expensive jet with a PL-15, and before the debris had cooled, had put it in a metaphorical tandoor, named the hashtag Operation Tandoor, and was serving it with naan and half a million impressions.
The Defence Minister joined the bandwagon personally and retweeted an AI-generated image of Modi cycling the Rafale wreckage to the Bilal Ganj scrap market. 533,000 impressions. The state and the meme had become a single, grinning entity. Even the Chinese chimed in with their own videos.
Ritual humiliation
India named its operation Sindoor, or the vermilion marker worn by married Hindu women, invoking the widows of Pahalgam, framing its military strikes as masculine national grief made kinetic. Feminist scholars were not impressed, noting that branding a military campaign after a symbol of female marital subservience was a peculiar flex. Pakistan did not miss the opening, albeit with a rather regretful display of misogyny wrapped in jingoism.
Operation Suhag Raat trended within hours, reducing the widow-avenging solemnity to bedroom comedy. AI images of Modi as a Hindu widow (Operation Widhwa) circulated with the confidence of a finishing move. A Pakistan Army soldier applying sindoor to a woman in the Indian tricolour sari, beneath the banner “New Chapter Begins,” completed the inversion: in the ritual, the one who applies the sindoor is dominant.
India had named its operation after what husbands give wives. Pakistan replied by demonstrating who, in this version, was the husband. More work for the feminist scholars here.
The Trump card
Perhaps the coup-de-grace was the ceasefire announcement. US President Donald Trump announced he had brokered the deal, saving (by his own escalating estimate) somewhere between five million and fifty million lives, a figure he has revisited more than eighty times. India firmly rejected any US role, insecure of resolving any issue with Pakistan multilaterally (case in point: Kashmir).
Pakistan not only accepted it, but embraced it, nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Twice. PM Shehbaz Sharif, flanking the US president in Egypt, offered a salute and called him “the man this world needs most at this point in time”. The flattery was extravagant to the point of parody. It was also, as a piece of diplomatic manoeuvring, near-perfect—each nomination costing nothing, purchasing significant goodwill from a man who responds to recognition the way a plant responds to water. And we are all in on it. Common knowledge.
The result? For the first time in a generation, Islamabad is warmer with Washington than New Delhi is. The underdog played the room. The giant, too proud to flatter, paid full price.
The (Pr)oxymoron
The lessons of 2025 can be summarised in a paradox we may not dwell on too much. As much as we may want to give credit to the 5Gs and our communications statecraft, the voice that won this information war—irreverent, uncontrollable, brilliantly indirect—is precisely the voice the State has spent years trying to silence, citing electoral disinformation and digital terrorism.
Whenever the bans came, we didn’t stop, thanks to the VPNs. War was, ironically, a welcome relief. Seeing the trends, the ban was lifted overnight, arguably because the same forces who saw this behaviour as a threat, suddenly found its irreverence an asset. The weapon it had spent years confiscating turned out to be the one that critically turned the tide in our favour.
The lesson of 2025 is not that Pakistani trolls were more creative than Indian ones, even though they were. It is that a government which treats free expression as a threat to be managed will find, at the worst possible moment, that it has disarmed its own most effective weapon. We would do well to value the humour and resilience of this expression.
This country’s humour is not decoration. It is load-bearing. It carried us through Balakot, through the IMF, through every blackout of every kind—and when the missiles came, it was the first thing the world heard and the last thing India could answer. The condition is simple: let the people speak. Not when it’s convenient. Always.
