“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit

atrocities.”

— Voltaire, Questions sur les Miracles, in Collection complète des œuvres de Voltaire, vol. 48, ed. Louis Moland, Paris: Garnier Frères, 1877, p. 294.

In the recent India-Pakistan conflict, a different kind of war was waged—not missiles, but microphones; not in mountain passes or skies, but in studios and social feeds. The role of media in shaping perceptions was starkly evident as India’s media machine—primetime anchors, social influencers, YouTube pundits—leapt into action, building a virtual theatre of war where facts were flexible and truth was a tool. This was not merely biased journalism. It was jingoism dressed in HD graphics. It was propaganda repackaged for the streaming era—instantaneous, viral and addictive. It was the old wine of nationalist fervour in the new bottles of Instagram reels and WhatsApp forwards.

It worked, until it did not.

The stagecraft of

conflict

War, traditionally, has been about soldiers, strategies and sacrifice. But in the digital age, it is also about signals. These signals, such as social media posts, news articles and viral videos, can shape public perception more than the actual events. We live in a post-fact environment where perception supersedes performance. When India launched retaliatory strikes, the battlefield was across the LoC and social media timelines.

Television anchors, some with the feverish energy of demagogues, staged the conflict like a Bollywood epic. Slogans screamed across screens. Fictional casualty figures were read like sports scores. Holograms and high-decibel debates simulated a hyper-reality that blurred the line between reportage and roleplay.

As journalist Gowhar Geelani argues in his book Kashmir: Rage and Reason, Indian television has often operated less as a source of clarity and more as a conduit for hysteria, particularly in moments of national tension and conflict. This framing reflects his broader critique of how media sensationalism amplifies state narratives while obscuring nuance. These were not just errors of judgment. They were deliberate performances. Dr Suhas Palshikar described it as a ‘juvenile sentiment about war,’ a fantasy of violence unmoored from consequence, where de-escalation became a betrayal.

Sensationalism is not a flaw of modern media. It is its business model. Anger and nationalism generate clicks, shares and advertising revenue. Conflict coverage is immensely profitable, especially when pitched as righteous and cinematic. There is no incentive to verify a story that has already gone viral.

Channels competed not just to inform but also to out-patriot one another. The truth was not just collateral damage—it was expendable. This was infotainment in its most dangerous form. It made military action a form of popular spectacle, packaging violence for consumption with nationalistic overtones.

The political machinery was complicit. Media did not operate in a vacuum; it took cues from a government eager to stoke nationalist fervour without taking responsibility for escalation. Silence at the top allowed the most strident voices to dominate.

The meme war:

misinformation 2.0

The volume and character of misinformation during this conflict were not entirely new, but they were unrelenting, as Pratik Sinha of Alt News reflected, “Not much really. It’s most of the same.” Much of the disinformation recycled content from the 2019 Pulwama-Balakot conflict: old images of downed aircraft, videos from unrelated geographies like Gaza or Lebanon; even video game footage from Arma 3. The misinformation was not especially sophisticated; what changed was its scale and the longevity of its circulation. “It was for a shorter period [in 2019],” Sinha explained, “this time it was a longer period.”

Channels competed not just to inform but also to out-patriot one another. The truth was not just collateral damage — it was expendable. This was infotainment in its most dangerous form. It made military action a form of popular spectacle, packaging violence for consumption with nationalistic overtones.

While there were a handful of AI-generated videos, including fabricated statements from Pakistani military officials and a fake video suggesting an attack on Karachi, most of the content remained rudimentary. Yet the cumulative effect was no less profound. In a climate of hyper-nationalism, even crude misinformation could inflame public sentiment and dominate digital spaces. This burden placed on fact-checkers was immense: verifying hours of gaming footage or locating the source of decades-old crash photos took critical time, during which falsehoods spread unchecked.

This digital fog of war overwhelmed fact-checkers. Zubair, co-founder of Alt News, stayed up through the first night of the conflict, debunking misinformation in real-time. As Pratik Sinha described, Alt News went from producing two or three stories daily to publishing up to fifteen during peak escalation.

The war also unfolded in the micro-theatres of TikTok, YouTube Shorts and WhatsApp groups. There, misinformation metastasised. Deepfakes, recycled war footage and deliberately misleading headlines were weaponised. Some videos purportedly showing Pakistani retaliation were traced back to Syrian airstrikes. Others showed celebratory crowds reacting to events that had not happened.

Asad Baig, founder of Media Matters for Democracy, outlined an even more profound crisis: the mainstream media became a primary source of disinformation, which was then rapidly distributed via social media. “That becomes tricky,” Baig said, “because people generally have a lot of trust in the media.” This media-generated misinformation, masquerading as journalism, blurred the lines between news and narrative.

Even more worrying is the erosion of platform responsibility. Fact-checkers are fighting an asymmetrical battle against algorithms that reward engagement over accuracy. As Baig said, “We always feel that we are working against the algorithms when we are fact-checking.” Their debunks reach only a fraction of the audience of the original misinformation.

Baig insists that the issue is not just fake content but also its distribution: “The platforms might actually be amplifying the conflict.” This shift from passive negligence to active amplification marks a turning point in the global information landscape.

National identity

in crisis

Media narratives do not merely describe reality—they shape it. During the conflict, three overlapping ideological constituencies surfaced, as Dr Palshikar outlined: the war romantics, the revanchists and the communalists.

 Truth is not censored; it is drowned.

The first viewed war as an exhilarating national catharsis. For them, conflict was less about geopolitics and more about spectacle—a symbolic affirmation of national strength. This constituency was cultivated by a media that substituted strategy for swagger.

The second group yearned to resolve the ‘unfinished business’ of Partition. For them, Pakistan was not a geopolitical adversary but an existential anomaly. The media reinforced this fantasy, depicting the conflict not as retaliation but as restoration. Victory was imagined as erasure.

The third constituency turned its gaze inward, conflating Pakistan with Indian Muslims. In the wake of terrorist attacks like Pahalgam, communal sentiment surged. Social media exploded with calls for economic and social boycott of Indian Muslims. As such calls gained traction, the government’s silence was a signal in itself.

This dangerous triangulation of war, religion and nationalism is not new. But media today gives it unprecedented reach. Television anchors and viral content creators offered not just news but a mythology: one that justified aggression, erased complexity and legitimised hate.

The irony

0The irony of this nationalist media blitz lies in its distinctly modern character. Traditional propaganda was slow, centralised and pedagogical—a tool of the state delivered through pamphlets, radio broadcasts or censored newspapers. It relied on top-down narratives crafted by bureaucracies and pushed with uniform clarity. Today, jingoism wears a different face: slick, meme-fied and user-generated. It is participatory and performative.

Propaganda now thrives not by hiding information but by flooding it—creating an overload that overwhelms the critical faculties. The tools have changed: algorithmic amplification, AI-generated content and virality metrics all play a role in propagating national myths. Influencers, meme accounts and anonymous trolls have replaced the old gatekeepers. Truth is not censored; it is drowned.

This phenomenon is global. Pakistan’s media is no stranger to the tactics. There, too, hyper-nationalist segments echoed counterclaims, mocked Indian losses and celebrated imaginary victories. Each side mirrored the other in a grim choreography of misinformation and moral high ground. Truth became collateral damage in the battle for audience loyalty.

But this is not just an India-Pakistan pathology. It is the media signature of 21st Century conflict. In Europe, information warfare has become as essential as drones and missiles—with both Russia and Ukraine vying to dominate global opinion through cinematic Twitter threads and Telegram leaks. In Gaza, TikTok has become a frontline of narrative control. In Taiwan, simulated war games circulate as viral hypotheticals, equally feeding public anxiety and political rhetoric.

We are not simply watching war; we are participating in it, re-sharing it, narrativising it and distorting it. The screen is not a window any longer—it is a hall of mirrors. We are watching war not just through a glass darkly but through a thousand cracked screens, each reflecting a different partisan truth. In this landscape, the first casualty is the idea that reality is knowable.

Between echo and

aftershock

Before drawing lessons, it is worth asking: why did India stand so diplomatically isolated in those four crucial days of crisis? Why did no major ally speak unambiguously in its favour while nations like China, Turkey and Azerbaijan rushed to back Pakistan? Why did the IMF disburse another billion dollars to Islamabad even as nuclear rhetoric flared? Why did international coverage lean more favourably toward Pakistan’s version of events and why did the United States, once again, dare to hyphenate India and Pakistan, proposing mediation against India’s long-standing diplomatic stance?

Perhaps the answer lies in what Arun Shourie, former editor of The Indian Express and cabinet minister in the Vajpayee government, told Karan Thapar, a senior Indian journalist known for his incisive, hard-hitting interviews, on The Wire: the media’s conduct amounted to ‘a crime against the country,’ a damning assessment of how sensationalist and jingoistic reporting by Indian media has destroyed its credibility. When media becomes performative, misinformation masquerades as reportage and hysteria substitutes for diplomacy, it is not merely internal cohesion that suffers but also global perception. India’s hyper-nationalist media spectacle did not just mislead its own citizens; it signaled to the world a country losing grip on its narrative and on its moral poise.

The flare-up between India and Pakistan revealed less about military strength than about the fragility of media ethics. It showed how quickly journalism can slide into nationalism and how easily nationalism can mutate into chauvinism.

The spectacle of war —complete with anchors as generals, memes as artillery and viewers as foot soldiers—points to a new kind of conflict: one where the battle for perception is more critical than any territorial gain. When the ceasefire was declared, there was no grand parade, no formal peace; jsust a collective exhale—and a lingering question: what, exactly, had we won?

In the noise of national triumph, we lost something more critical: our grip on truth, our ability to disagree and our vision of who we might have been. The next time conflict arises, as it surely will, the greatest weapon will not be a missile or a drone. It will be a story. And the only question will be: who gets to tell it first?

Narendra Pachkhédé, critic and writer, splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva