Global Media And Operation Sindoor: Why Narrative Warfare Matters

As India launched Operation Sindoor—its most precise and daring retaliatory military operation since Balakot—TV anchors in London and New York were already drafting a different story.

It wasn’t about justice for the 26 unarmed Hindu tourists butchered in the Pahalgam massacre. Nor was it about the sophisticated coordination between India’s air and cyber command that rendered Pakistani radar systems temporarily blind. It was about "escalation." It was about "restraint." And increasingly, it was about India being the aggressor—a narrative that ran directly counter to both fact and law.

In today’s world, narrative is artillery. As the dust settled, one question loomed larger than any drone footage or radar map: Why does India still struggle to tell its story convincingly, even when it has the truth on its side?

The April-May 2025 Indo-Pak conflict was brief but significant. Triggered by a brutal terrorist attack on Hindu tourists in Jammu & Kashmir—an attack linked to Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives—India’s military response was swift, proportionate, and legal under Article 51 of the UN Charter. Operation Sindoor, executed over 72 hours, targeted terror infrastructure in Rahim Yar Khan, Bahawalpur, and select military installations in Pakistan supporting cross-border militancy. The operation showcased the evolution of Indian war doctrine: precise, time-bound, and deeply integrated across air, land, sea, and electronic theatres.

Militarily, it was a resounding success. The Indian Armed Force demonstrated dominance with minimal collateral damage. A new generation of domestically produced weapons platforms was battle-tested—and passed with flying colours.

This piece examines how major Western and Gulf media outlets misrepresented facts, elevated Pakistani propaganda, and downplayed Indian legitimacy in Operation Sindoor, turning a clear case of counter-terrorist retaliation into an ambiguous "border crisis." More importantly, it lays bare the vulnerabilities in India’s strategic communication—and why this needs to change, fast.

How Major Outlets Framed Operation Sindoor

When missiles strike and fighter jets deploy, the battle plays out on radar screens. But in the 21st century, another war begins instantly—this time across newsrooms, push notifications, and Twitter feeds. In the case of Operation Sindoor, international coverage revealed more about entrenched biases and narrative preferences than about actual events on the ground. What should have been reported as a measured, internationally lawful counter-terrorist operation by India was instead buried beneath recycled tropes of "South Asian instability" and irresponsible escalation.

Let us examine how some of the world's most influential outlets shaped, shaded, and in many cases, distorted the story.

Despite its claims of impartiality, CNN’s coverage was marred by early reliance on anonymous Pakistani military sources, many of whom asserted that five Indian aircraft had been shot down. These claims were carried without due diligence or parallel investigation.

The use of the passive voice subtly legitimised Pakistani narratives while planting seeds of doubt about India’s military efficacy. The report also used an anonymous French official who claimed that at least one Rafale was shot down. Only a buried update noted that Pakistan’s claims “could not be independently verified.”

The framing was familiar: India is reactive, volatile, and potentially destabilising, while Pakistan—despite sponsoring the initial attack—was cast as the actor seeking "restraint."

Even worse, BBC’s security analysts framed the Indian response as aggressive posture-making and escalation, with limited mention of the Pahalgam massacre—the causal event. On the other hand, they talked about Pakistan’s potential “retaliation”. This framing is key as it was India who was retaliating to state-sponsored terror; Pakistan remains the escalator. The channel gave disproportionate airtime to Pakistani officials, while Indian officials’ statements were used sparingly and often buried mid-article.

Nobody did this false framing better than The Guardian which adopted a tone of contemplative moralism. Its editorial warned of a “slide into war” in their piece called:

However, it failed to acknowledge that India had already sought dialogue—and had been met with massacres. The Guardian ran op-eds accusing India’s Defence Minister of using “nationalist fervour”.

More disturbingly, the outlet refused to examine Pakistan’s long history of state-sponsored terrorism. The death of 26 tourists in Pahalgam, all of them killed because they were Hindus, was given a single paragraph, while Pakistan’s fears of escalation dominated three full columns.

Indian statements were either left out entirely or cut into small, out-of-context quotes. The channel alleged that India had bombed civilian infrastructure in Pakistan—claims that were directly debunked by satellite images released by Indian authorities and independent OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) groups.

It also claimed that Indian Air Force pilot Squadron Leader Shivani Singh was taken into custody by the Pakistan Army after the Pakistani forces shot down a Rafale fighter jet. As Al Jazeera made this claim based on Pakistani sources and without confirming the facts with the Indian Air Force, Pakistani social media users widely circulated this claim even though neither Al Jazeera nor the Pakistani forces had shown evidence of shooting the Rafale jet or capturing Singh. Later, the Pakistan Military denounced this claim stating that no Indian pilot was in their custody.

The wire agencies Reuters and AP, while more neutral in tone, served as the distribution system for much of the misinformation.

Early Reuters dispatches included headlines like:

“Exclusive: Pakistan's Chinese-made jet brought down two Indian fighter aircraft, US officials say.”

Heaping immense praise on the Chinese military equipment, these lines by Pakistan-based correspondents, Saeed Shah and Indrees Ali, were picked up and amplified by dozens of outlets worldwide before any Indian denial or clarification could be issued. By the time the truth caught up, the false perception had taken root.

The War of Narratives

Despite India’s exceptional operational performance, global media largely failed to report the story as a strategic, calibrated strike that upheld international law.

This coverage gap has real-world implications, not only for diplomatic perception, but also for India’s emerging military-industrial ecosystem and its position in global defence diplomacy, especially in the African and Southeast Asian markets where battlefield performance influences arms procurement decisions.

Narrative warfare is not merely about misreporting; it’s about how language, framing, emphasis, and omission shape public perception more enduringly than facts ever could. In the 2025 Indo-Pak conflict, the global media's selective vocabulary, structural biases, and entrenched paradigms formed a subtle but potent front of conflict in themselves.

Let’s decode the bias architecture that allowed disinformation and misrepresentation to flourish—even in so-called “reputable” newsrooms.

1. The “Both-Sides” Trap: False Equivalence as Neutrality

A consistent pattern across CNN, Reuters, and The Guardian was the use of "both-sides" framing, a supposedly balanced approach that actually distorts moral clarity.

Phrases like:

•  “Both sides reported casualties…”

2. The Omission of the Trigger Event

In almost all early international coverage, the Pahalgam massacre was treated as a footnote. Its causal link to Operation Sindoor was often omitted or diluted.

In contrast, headlines on Indian military strikes were vivid, immediate, and morally loaded:

• “India Launches Cross-Border Air Raids…”

By marginalising the catalyst, the media flipped the chronology. The aggressor appeared victimised. The victim appeared aggressive. This is narrative inversion, a hallmark of information warfare.

3. Reliance on Pakistani Military Sources

Despite a history of documented disinformation campaigns by the Pakistani military, many outlets again relied on unverified briefings from ISPR (Inter-Services Public Relations), Pakistan’s military media wing.

Wire services like AP and AFP, and channels like Al Jazeera, amplified these claims in real-time, creating a fog of war that delayed the global understanding of India’s success. When the truth emerged, it lacked the dramatic punch of the earlier, false reports.

4. Loaded Language: Semantics of Bias

The word choices alone tell their own story:

• India “retaliates” — Pakistan “responds”

This kind of asymmetrical language subtly undermines the legitimacy of Indian action. It paints India as the side disrupting equilibrium, rather than the party re-establishing deterrence.

Even when acknowledging India’s justification under Article 51 of the UN Charter (self-defence), few outlets included legal experts or references to India’s longstanding grievances with cross-border terror infrastructure.

5. The Colonial Hangover and the “Strongman India” Trope

A deeper current underlying this bias is the persistence of neo-colonial mental models, in which India is seen not as a rules-based democracy defending its citizens, but as a volatile giant prone to “Hindu nationalist overreach.” Terms like “strongman government,” “populist retaliation,” or “BJP’s militarism” were thrown around liberally by Western correspondents—often without applying the same lens to Pakistan’s military-dominated polity or its support for jihadist proxies.

This ideological filtering primes the global audience to view Indian military action not through the prism of justice or deterrence, but as political theatre for domestic consumption.

Preventing the Rise of a New Arsenal for a New World

What unfolded in the aftermath of Operation Sindoor was not mere bias or oversight — it was strategic narrative suppression, possibly aimed at blunting India’s emergence as a credible arms supplier in the global market.

In the fog of war, India's arsenal stood tall:

• Tejas LCA maintained air dominance and performed support missions with remarkable agility.

These systems weren’t imported—they were designed, built, and deployed by Indian engineers. And they won. Decisively.

But such victories threaten the status quo — a tightly held global duopoly dominated by the United States and China, both of which have relied on a captive market in the Global South.

If the world saw the truth — that India has combat-proven systems at half the cost of Western platforms and none of the strategic strings attached to Chinese exports — it would revolutionise global arms dynamics. From Africa to Southeast Asia, countries looking to modernise their militaries without selling their sovereignty would naturally look to India.

This is precisely what Western media apparently sought to prevent. It was information warfare with an econo-military-industrial complex motive.

In 2024-25, India inked defence export deals worth over $2.76 billion. With Operation Sindoor, its credibility in high-intensity, high-tech warfare surged exponentially — a development that could erode market share for Western contractors and Chinese exporters alike.

Suppressing this success through media misdirection served a strategic function: to slow India's defence export growth, to undermine confidence in its systems, and to paint its assertiveness as instability, not self-defence.

Yet, not all audiences were fooled.

For defence planners in Nigeria, Kenya, Vietnam, Egypt, and Indonesia, the picture was clear.

India’s military-industrial complex may have been underreported by Reuters, dismissed by The Guardian, or obscured by CNN, but it was watched with admiration in Abuja, Hanoi, and Addis Ababa.

These countries understand the deeper meaning: India doesn’t just offer arms—it offers strategic autonomy.

The fallout from this narrative sabotage won’t last. Facts have a way of resurfacing.

And as India continues to deliver proven platforms — from drones and radars to missiles and light combat aircraft — its military-industrial complex will rise, not in Western headlines, but in defence procurement ledgers across the Global South.

Learning to Fight on All Fronts

And therein lies the lesson.

India must now fight on three fronts simultaneously:

1. Operational Warfare — where its armed forces have proven themselves capable and precise.

2. Industrial Warfare — where its military-industrial complex is emerging as a credible, competitive alternative to entrenched monopolies.

3. Narrative Warfare

Because in this century, power is as much about who controls the story as who commands the sky.

India has passed the test of fire. Now it must master the war of words.