Can Indian MP delegations blunt Pakistan’s global narrative edge?

In the wake of the four-day India-Pakistan conflict, New Delhi has launched a public relations-offensive to inform the world about the dangers of Pakistan-backed terror in Kashmir.

Seven delegations comprising MPs from both the ruling party and the Opposition as well as retired diplomats are currently travelling around the globe to present India’s point of view. They have met journalists, civil society members and policy makers in cities such as New York, Moscow, Doha and Seoul.

But while these visits are intended to project national unity, Jairam Ramesh of the Congress party saw them as a sign of the Modi government acting in “damage control” mode.

“The Vishwaguru narrative has collapsed and India-Pakistan have been coupled again,” the opposition party’s communications head told Scroll on May 17. “The world is talking about Kashmir, not terrorism.”

Ramesh is not the only person to raise this concern. Since the ceasefire was declared, security and defence experts from around the world have flagged the so-called re-hyphenation of India with Pakistan on the international stage – undermining the success of New Delhi’s effort in recent years in ensuring that it should not be considered only in tandem with Pakistan.

This, along with the renewed focus on the dispute between the two countries over Kashmir – brought up by the American President Donald Trump, no less – is being seen as evidence of Pakistan’s supposed success in shaping the global narrative about the conflict. India has long insisted that Kashmir is a bilateral matter and should not be internationalised.

A Scroll analysis of foreign media reporting and interviews with several experts show that Pakistan has indeed edged out India in the information war. Will the Modi government be successful in its effort to fix the global narrative about the conflict and put the focus back on Pakistan’s use of terrorism against India?

View from the West

As far as the foreign press was concerned, the so-called Kashmir dispute was at the heart of the conflict from its very start – a narrative that India has always sought to avoid.

Since the Pahalgam terror attack, The Washington Post has published 21 stories about the escalating tensions between India and Pakistan. Kashmir was in the headlines 10 times. Terrorism did not appear even once.

It may bring solace to India that the The New York Times carried a story about the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammed, the two terrorist groups that India claimed to have targeted during Operation Sindoor.

But even so, it is unlikely that New Delhi will be pleased with how America’s newspaper of record saw the result of the fighting: a draw, not an Indian victory. A report that was published in the paper after the ceasefire announcement carried the headline: “India and Pakistan talked big, but satellite imagery shows limited damage.”

The headline to the newspaper’s first story about Operation Sindoor was even more damaging. “India strikes Pakistan but is said to have lost aircraft,” it read, highlighting a Pakistani claim that New Delhi has yet to confirm.

The New York Times was not alone. Other international media outlets, such as CNN and Reuters, followed up on Pakistani claims of taking down as many as five Indian fighter jets, state-of-the art French Rafales among them.

India has so far refused to publicly accept or deny any loss of planes. The loud silence made foreign journalists wary of other Indian claims as well.

“I respect anyone who is open about losses and weaknesses,” said Shashank Joshi, defence editor of The Economist. “I then trust them more when they make claims about their successes and their strengths.”

Even as Pakistani claims of downing Indian jets got play in the international press, the Indian assertion of killing over 100 terrorists during Operation Sindoor received little to no attention.

This even when seemingly ludicrous Pakistani claims, such as those about killing “40 to 50 Indian troops” along the Line of Control, were published in CNN and The Washington Post with the caveat that the outlets were unable to verify them.

A dipstick survey by Scroll found that on the whole, Pakistan’s claims received more space and attention in the foreign media. This is how the two countries fared at pushing their claims on CNN’s live blog about the conflict across three days of the fighting:

The Pakistani strategy

The reason for this disparity: top Pakistani officials, including the ministers of defence and foreign affairs, were constantly speaking to foreign publications on-the-record from May 7. Their Indian counterparts did not do this.

The Pakistanis were also more “dynamic” than the Indians, said a journalist working for an American newspaper.

“The Pakistanis came out before dawn on May 10 to say India had attacked their airbases,” the journalist recollected, requesting anonymity. “What could I carry in that moment? At 3 am, I said, ‘Pakistan claims its air bases attacked.’ At 4 am, I said, ‘Pakistan is striking targets in India.’ However, till the 11 am briefing [by the Indian side], I had no idea what India was saying. I can only say what I know.”

The other reason why Islamabad was able to push forward its talking points is that it seemed to understand its audience much better. The issue of the jets, for example, got so much attention in the Western media because the Pakistanis played up the China angle to pique their interest, explained defence commentator Pravin Sawhney.

“The world focussed more on Pakistan because they have Chinese equipment,” he said. “International publications saw this as a contest between high-end Western and Chinese technology. This was the first time that Chinese equipment was being tested on the battlefield. This helped Pakistan get the spotlight.”

In contrast, India’s Ministry of External Affairs made little effort to reach out to foreign journalists. While it did conduct background briefings once the fighting was over, only local journalists and members of Delhi’s strategic community received invitations, foreign reporters covering the region told Scroll.

“I am glad I am not a journalist covering this because it is just very natural to gravitate towards the Pakistani accounts,” said C. Christine Fair, a professor at Georgetown University and author of several books on the Pakistan Army’s use of terrorist groups. “It is faux access, right? It's an arranged fiction, but it has the illusion of being fact.”

Indian officials need to be more hospitable and information-friendly in their dealings with the international press just like the Pakistanis, she suggested.

But other defence analysts disagree. They argue that the difference between the approaches of India and Pakistan is a function of how the two countries view their national security objectives.

Pakistan is quick to communicate with the international community because it seeks foreign involvement in its disputes with India, contended Kabir Taneja, deputy director of the strategic studies programme at the Observer Research Foundation.

“For the Pakistanis, grabbing headlines in the international press is very important,” he added. “It is a well-institutionalised machinery so they can activate it very quickly. It is muscle memory for them. But India has always been more closed off.”

Too little, too late

Given that Pakistan took the lead in shaping opinions in the West, analysts are sceptical about what the MP delegations from India will be able to achieve. Fair, the Georgetown professor, argued that these efforts to set the global narrative should have preceded military action.

“The Indians should have gone to the United Nations first,” she said. “They should have presented their evidence [about Pahalgam]. They should have gone around to global capitals first and then conducted the military operation.”

Sushant Singh, a lecturer in South Asian Studies at Yale University, said it is unclear who the MPs would meet on these visits. But the fact that the government is sending them out is, in itself, an indictment of India’s foreign policy establishment, he said.

“If you require MPs who are not part of the government to talk about cross-border terrorism, then it is clearly a failure of [external affairs minister S] Jaishankar and the whole diplomatic core that we have,” Singh said. “What is it that Shrikant Shinde is going to do that a professional diplomat with 35 years of experience can’t do?”

Shinde, a 38-year-old Shiv Sena MP, was picked by the Modi government to lead the contingent to the United Arab Emirates and three African countries.

The delegations will have to “walk a tightrope” to draw attention to terrorism without getting caught up in discussions about the Kashmir dispute, said a Delhi-based foreign policy expert.

But, irrespective of what the MPs succeed in conveying to the world, New Delhi will have to find a way to break its impasse with foreign journalists, he said. The Indian government, in his view, is currently playing “catch-up” in the narrative war because of its “unfriendly” relationship with the Western press.

“Our whole external publicity, for several years, was aimed at the domestic audience,” he said, 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.

Then there is the trolling that journalists and commentators are subjected to for finding faults with the Modi government. “I say a lot of critical things about governments, including my own, but the most vitriolic criticism has come from Indian hawks,” said Joshi of The Economist.

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.”