Two curiously different narratives have been offered in parallel to the Indian public with respect to the recent strikes on Pakistan.

The first, as reflected in the name of the operation, “Sindoor”, is designed to both reiterate the religious nature of the Pahalgam killings and draw on distinctly gendered Hindu imagery in the response.

The second — a carefully crafted more secular nationalist narrative — was reflected in the [Indian] Ministry of External Affairs’ (MEA) briefing. It was led by two female officers — one Hindu and one Muslim — and included a statement by the foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, reiterating that, while the aim of the Pahalgam attack had been to divide the nation on communal lines, the Indian government and its people had risen to the challenge and refused to be divided.

Dual narratives have been a steady feature of Indian foreign policy in recent years.

One narrative — typically the more religiously polarising one — is enthusiastically run for supporters of the ruling party, led by online influencers and the Indian television media, and usually takes its cues directly from the rhetoric of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The dissonance between the cultural symbolism entrenched in the name of this operation and the more calculated nationalist narrative put forth by the Indian state suggests that the BJP does not believe that religious nationalism alone will be enough to manufacture consent for armed conflict

The second, usually a more sober sounding narrative, is run by the MEA through their official diplomatic channels. For example, in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, Prime Minister Modi, in a strongly worded post on X, called the attacks terrorism and offered solidarity with Israel. This was the position that Indian newsrooms and influencers ran with, together with graphic anti-Palestinian imagery. The MEA, meanwhile, barely deviated from their historical, more neutral position, including by remaining noncommittal on Israeli demands to recognise Hamas as a terrorist organisation in India and urging both sides to resume diplomacy.

But while, typically, the more polarising narrative is the only one offered for domestic consumption, the inclusion of a more secular nationalist narrative in the public domestic discourse in the aftermath of the strikes suggests that the BJP does not believe that religious nationalism alone will be enough to manufacture consent for armed conflict.

THE FEMINISATION OF TERRITORY

The female body plays a critical role in the imagination of any modern nation state. It is the female body that transforms the cold cartographic form of territory into the living, breathing nation that people are inspired to protect or even die for. For example, a country is termed a “motherland” or its language a “mother-tongue”, implying that its citizens are born into brotherhood and fraternity. Without this imagery being internalised, we remain just inhabitants of a territory.

Internalising this imagery isn’t difficult — most of us are born surrounded by it and rarely question it or its implications. Each such feminised territorial representation almost unconsciously leads people to specific conclusions about the nature of the nation state in question. As pointed out by [cultural historian] Sumathy Ramaswamy, the image of Bharat Mata [Mother India], usually represented in the form of a Hindu goddess, when superimposed on the cartographical map of India, is used to subtly suggest that India is a land essentially and eternally Hindu.

This feminisation of territory also turns any threat to territorial integrity into a physical attack on a female body. Secession, for example, is portrayed as an amputation of the mother figure. Accordingly, how the mother figure is positioned on the cartographical representation of the land is also designed to lead to specific conclusions. The head of Bharat Mata, for example, in pictorial representations created in independent India, is more often than not, located at Jammu and Kashmir.

As a corollary, when territory is turned into a female form to protect, female bodies are turned into sites of nationalist contestation and conquest. The most gruesome example of this remains the abduction of women on both sides of the border during the partition of the Subcontinent that accompanied independence from British rule.

Conservative estimates suggest at least 75,000 Hindu, Muslim and Sikh women were abducted and raped by men from religions different from their own. Many of these women were either married by their abductors or passed through different hands and eventually married men whose control they wound up in. Some of these marriages were forced, while others regarded the men who eventually rescued them as saviours, but it is impossible to speak of the creation of India and Pakistan without speaking of this widespread use of abduction, rape and forced marriage as tools of religious and nationalist assertion.

In the context of India and Pakistan, therefore, any association of military actions or actions involving armed force with references or rituals associated with marriage are inherently problematic.

It is perhaps for this reason that the Indian Army has traditionally steered away from both gendered and overtly religious framings in conflicts with Pakistan. In 1965, the Indian response was termed Operation Riddle. In 1971, the operation was named Trident. In 1999, it was Vijay, meaning victory. In 2016, and 2019, Indian strikes inside Pakistani-controlled territory, were, as in the case of Waterloo, simply referred to by locations — Uri and Balakot.

Operation Sindoor marks a decided shift in this pattern. The name frames a military operation, which India says it conducted in self-defence against an imminent attack, as an act of patriarchal justice delivered to the widows of Pahalgam. The fact that this was done at a time when a few of the female survivors of the attack — who refused to be voiceless victims on behalf of whom others can act — have themselves been subjected to brutal online trolling and harassment only reiterates the troubling nature of this framing.

LIBERAL POLITICS AND SECULAR NATIONALISM

If the name of the operation was designed to appeal to religious nationalists, the MEA briefing was designed to spark pride in liberal-minded Indians. The imagery of two successful Indian women, one Muslim and one Hindu, together holding forth in a traditionally male-dominated field clearly found its target audience.

Many, mesmerised by the optics of a secular nation, with equal opportunity for women and minorities, that has long been promised but which has rarely materialised, have ceased to ask whether this was the right strategy at all. The retaliatory attacks on Indian Muslims and Kashmiris within India in the aftermath of Pahalgam have also been forgotten. Nationalist warmongering has always been perfectly acceptable in Indian liberal circles, as long as it was at least avowedly secular.

This imagery isn’t troubling to BJP supporters either, contrary to what one might imagine. The idea of a Muslim woman liberated from what they see as the conservative trappings of Islam is frankly central to their ideology, and is reflected in many policies, including the criminalisation of divorce by triple talaq and the hijab ban.

While the foreign secretary’s statement on religious unity in the nation is certainly welcome, coming as it does after multiple calls by local politicians to boycott or shut Muslim shops in retaliation for Pahalgam, we need to reflect on what these optics are aimed at.

In the last 24 hours alone [May 7-8], over 10 Kashmiri civilians have been killed on the Indian side of the Line of Control (LoC) in Pakistani shelling. Civilian homes have been damaged and dozens of Kashmiri families are now displaced. The Pakistani military speaking to the BBC has said that 26 people were killed in the Indian strikes. For the people at the heart of this conflict, any escalation would be catastrophic. The LoC spans about 750 kilometres. The broader international border between the countries spans about 3,300 kilometres. Even a conventional full-scale war would cause devastating suffering to civilians on the border. To add to this, both India and Pakistan have nuclear capabilities.

At times like this, it is critical for responsible citizens to resist the lure of narratives and focus on the uncomfortable truth: a hot war is a terrible reality for anyone to live through. Any escalation at this point would bring one of the most populous regions in the world into full-blown armed conflict. Whether we are distracted from this uncomfortable truth by the religious masculinity of the “Sindoor” nomenclature or the softer, more progressive imagery of India offered by the MEA, is secondary.

Sarayu Pani is a lawyer by training. X: @sarayupani

By arrangement with The Wire

Published in Dawn, EOS, May 25th, 2025