Silencing the war drums, amplifying her voice

On May 7, India launched Operation Sindoor, a retaliatory strike on Pakistan to ‘avenge’ the terror attack in Pahalgam that killed more than 30 civilians. Touted by the Indian government as "measured" and "non-escalatory”, the operation resulted in the deaths of over 40 civilians on both sides of the border. Yet these facts remain largely overshadowed by nationalistic headlines and wartime spectacle.

More troubling than the military action itself is the gendered imagery and language that surrounded the strike. It is an unsettling reminder of how women’s grief, bodies and identities are routinely conscripted into nationalist rhetoric.

The name itself, Sindoor, refers to the red powder worn by Hindu married women. Days after the attack, a stylised, anime-inspired image of Himanshi Narwal, a grieving widow, went viral. In it, she wears bridal attire, sitting solemnly beside her husband's body. This symbolic tableau transformed personal loss into a nationalistic emblem.

When Himanshi later called for peace and urged citizens not to respond with communal hatred, she was met with a bombardment of online abuse. Her patriotism was questioned and her agency was erased. The message was unmistakable: women may mourn, but only in ways the state can exploit. Their grief is not theirs to define; it belongs to the nation.

In a widely televised press conference, Colonel Sofiya Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh became the faces of India’s military leadership. Media outlets across India rushed to celebrate their presence as proof of a progressive, inclusive nation. But this is not feminism in action. It is feminism co-opted to sanitise violence.

This is part of a broader trend scholars call femonationalism, where states use feminist optics to promote exclusionary or militaristic agendas. The presence of women in combat roles, especially in front of the cameras, provides moral cover. Violence seems more palatable when narrated by empathetic faces. The military appears inclusive. The nation seems just.

Colonel Qureshi’s identity as a Muslim woman was also weaponised, a calculated move to counter accusations of communal targeting. Yet her visibility does little to address the systemic discrimination faced by countless Muslim women under the same regime. Her role, while significant, was instrumentalised.

Across borders, the rhetoric of war is deeply steeped in misogyny. In Pakistan, one female politician was reported as saying that Pakistan’s counterstrike would “take care of what happens post Sindoor”. It was a deeply misogynistic metaphor that equated military violence with sexual conquest.

On social media, users on both sides gleefully speculated about who ‘gets’ which actress after the war, trading women’s identities like war trophies. Female celebrities and media personalities were treated like objects on a battlefield candy shelf. What some might dismiss as dark humour is, in fact, a window into a toxic masculine culture that equates peace with femininity, and femininity with weakness.

This language is not just crude but dangerous. It reflects a symbolic system where women’s bodies represent honour, territory and purity, and where violating them becomes a metaphor for national conquest. As feminist scholars have long argued, during conflict, sexual violence against the ‘other’s’ women is not incidental. It is deliberate, used to symbolically destroy the enemy group’s identity and dignity.

These constructions do not end with ceasefires. They persist in everyday discourse and policy, continuing to restrict women’s agency, casting them as vessels of honour or icons of victimhood long after the missiles stop falling.

Violence against women during conflict is often as much about masculinity as it is about warfare. While maleness is biological, masculinity is a performative status – asserted, reaffirmed and displayed.

In wartime, men assert dominance not only over women but over other men by ‘defiling’ the honour of their enemies’ mothers, wives and daughters. It is not random. It is ritualistic. When a man fails to protect ‘his’ women, his masculinity and, by extension, the strength of his community, is deemed compromised. This fuels retaliatory cycles where women’s suffering is used not as a reason for peace, but as justification for more war.

In both India and Pakistan, nationalism is steeped in the logic that Women are avatars of family, community, religion, and the nation itself, thus, to violate their purity is to stain the social order.

In ‘The Power’, novelist Naomi Alderman imagines a world where women acquire the ability to physically dominate men. But power, she warns, is not redemptive just because it is held by women. “Power has her ways. She acts on people, and people act on her.”

We are watching this play out in real time. States are dressing up patriarchal violence in feminist language, placing women in leadership to project moral superiority while preserving the very systems feminists seek to dismantle. A woman in uniform reading a press statement does not signal liberation; it sadly proves that even feminism has been weaponised.

As airstrikes shook the region, children stayed home from school, frightened and confused. With both countries already grappling with high numbers of out-of-school girls, child marriages, infant mortality and femicide, this is not just a momentary disruption. It is a deafening alarm. It is not only soldiers who carry the burden of war. It is mothers, daughters, and wives who live with its social and psychological costs long after the headlines fade.

The ceasefire was announced a day before Mother’s Day, a poignant intersection that reminded us of environmentalist Vandana Shiva’s words: “We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a human future at all.”

If we are to protect both Mother Nature and the women and girls who bear the brunt of war’s aftermath, we must stop using feminine metaphors as rhetorical tools to justify violence. Instead, we must place women in positions of real power. Not to validate nationalism, but to reshape it. To prioritise justice over vengeance and care over conquest.

True feminism is not a performance. It is a transformation. It does not look like grief turned into propaganda or uniforms used to soften the blow of airstrikes. It looks like equity, justice and peace.

Here’s to a world where girls grow up knowing they are not symbols, not trophies, not excuses for violence, but thinkers, leaders, and change-makers. Let us stop fighting wars in their name. Let us start building a future worthy of them.

The writer is a development sector practitioner interested in the intersection of gender and human rights. She can be reached at: iftikharwardah@gmail.com