PUBLISHED
April 27, 2025

KARACHI:

It’s the year 2018. India prepares to head to poll next year. “Narendra Modi is facing an unexpected image problem: he’s starting to look weak,” writes Nikhil Kumar in an analysis for CNN. Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party lost a number of key state-level elections in December 2018, with the Congress vanquishing the BJP in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh. The charisma of Modi, who has portrayed himself as the champion of the poor, is waning amid growing unemployment, rising inflation, agrarian crisis, rampant corruption, and the Rafale deal controversy.

And then Pulwama happens.

On Feb 14, 2019, 40 Indian reserve police personnel are killed in a suicide attack on their convoy in the Pulwama district of the disputed Jammu and Kashmir state. As if the BJP was waiting for this godsend; the Modi government quickly dumps blame on Pakistan, dial up tensions with its neighbour, and starts drumming up war hysteria at home. Modi and his cabinet aides make sombre public appearances with the coffins of the dead police personnel draped in the national flag. National security and jingoism become the single agenda of BJP’s election campaign as party leaders trigger a raucous chorus of calls for revenge. Suddenly, the issues that haunted Modi are drowned in the cacophony of jingoistic frenzy.

And then Balakot happens.

On Feb 26, 2019, Indian jets violate Pakistan’s airspace, fly over the densely-wooded Balakot area of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and bomb a purported militant training camp. Pakistan delivers “Swift Retort” within hours, carrying out air raids deep inside disputed Kashmir state and shooting down two Indian warplanes in dogfights. Modi’s PR team, aided by a pliant media, portrays the inconsequential incursion as a tremendous military feat. “What Narendra Modi’s team designed was a classic dodge, distract, derail scheme,” wrote noted political scientist Yogendra Yadav.

The scheme works – and Modi gets his poll mojo back.

The 2019 polls defied all projections. The BJP emerged as the single largest party, clinching 303 seats against 282 in the 2014 elections. The party and its National Democratic Alliance strengthened their electoral wins in states like West Bengal, Odisha, Telangana, and Karnataka, where their performance in the 2014 election was lacklustre. This surprising electoral victory was made possible by a 67% turnout as Indians imbued with jingoistic euphoria turned out in huge numbers to vote for BJP.

Tellingly, most of the police personnel killed in Pulwama were low-caste Hindus, who were apparently used as cannon fodder for the revival of BJP’s political fortunes. “The 40 jawans were primarily from lower-caste communities – 19 from the Backward Classes, seven from Scheduled Castes, five from Scheduled Tribes, four from Upper-Caste backgrounds, one High-Caste Bengali, three Jat Sikhs, and one Muslim. Only five out of the 40 jawans, or 12.5%, came from Hindu Upper-Caste backgrounds,” wrote Ajaz Ashraf in his research article for “The Caravan,” a journal of politics and culture.

Modi managed to kill multiple birds with one stone. He successfully sold the Balakot “military feat” to the nation to quell the controversy surrounding the purchase of Rafale jets at an escalated cost. “India’s airstrike by Mirage 2000 planes in Balakot could have brought better results had the Rafale planes been used,” he later said at the India Today conclave. Modi blamed the rival Congress for delaying the Rafale deal for “vested interests.”

Turned out Pulwama was a drama!

Years later, Indian politicians began to doubt Modi’s narrative. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee called the Pulwama attack “fake and staged”, while former IIOJK governor Satya Pal Malik concluded that it was a “systemic failure involving gross security and intelligence lapses.” Similarly, Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut and Tripura Chief Minister Manik Saha suspected that it was a “conspiracy hatched by the BJP to win the 2019 elections.”

Fast-forward to 2025. India is caught in a diplomatic tight spot.

Delhi has long been carrying out “pre-emptive assassination” of dissidents and critics it perceived as disloyal to the government. However, such extrajudicial killings sharply escalated during Modi’s tenure – perhaps because he thought his country is an emerging power in the new geopolitical competition which the US cannot afford to alienate. RAW became so emboldened in the use of Israeli intelligence’s playbook that its hitmen assassinated a dissident Canadian Sikh leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar in a brazen violation of Canada’s sovereignty.

India was wrong. It may be a darling of the West, but India is not Israel. It cannot expect the same level of Western protection as Tel Aviv. Canada’s then prime minister Justin Trudeau publicly blamed “the government of India” for Nijjar’s murder. As if this wasn’t enough, the FBI also thwarted an Indian plot to assassinate another Sikh leader on American soil.

“The foiled assassination was part of an escalating campaign of aggression by RAW against the Indian diaspora in Asia, Europe and North America,” The Washington Post reported in April 2024. “RAW officers and agents have faced arrest, expulsion and reprimand in countries, including Australia, Germany and Britain,” according to officials who provided details to The Post that have not previously been made public.

After the RAW extrajudicial killing spree was exposed, the US Commission on International Religious Freedoms recommended in its 2025 report that sanctions be imposed on the Indian agency.

In further damning proof of RAW’s rogue activities, Britain’s Guardian newspaper published an exposé of how the Modi government had orchestrated as many as 20 extrajudicial killings of Kashmiri and Sikh leaders through a complex network of spies, arms dealers, and assassins in Pakistan since 2020.

Turned out that India – which accuses Pakistan of exporting terrorism – was itself perpetrating transnational terrorism. Modi, who has vowed to make Pakistan a pariah state, ended up isolating India globally. Foreign Minister Jayshanker, who called former Pakistani counterpart Bilawal Bhutto “spokesperson of terrorism industry”, deserved that label himself. Facing growing international scrutiny and diplomatic heat over RAW’s transnational terror campaign, India desperately wanted to shift the spotlight.

And Pahalgam happens.

On April 22, 26 tourists were killed in a gun attack at Pahalgam’s Baisaran area, dubbed “mini Switzerland” for its mist-veiled meadows. The Indian media, as if reading from the post-Pulwama script, quickly trained their guns on Pakistan and whipped up war hysteria. A little-know group, The Resistance Front, was identified as the culprit which Delhi claims is an affiliate of the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant group.

Pahalgam is deep inside the disputed Kashmir state and the nearest distance to the Line of Control is more than 100 kilometres (as the crow flies), while Baisaran is heavily guarded due to frequent VIP movement in the idyllic resort. This raises a few questions: 1) how could the attackers cross the heavily-militarised and surveilled LoC, evade multiple layers of security, trek to Baisaran unnoticed, segregate non-Muslim male tourists, and massacre them before disappearing in a region where India has over 700,000 troops deployed? 2) Why security forces didn’t respond to the 30-minute-long rampage even though a security post is located just 10 kilometres away from the crime scene? How come the FIR was registered within 10 minutes after the attack and how come it named the perpetrator group without any details? And 3) Why RAW-affiliated social media accounts started pointing finger at Pakistan within five minutes of the incident?

All day long, Indian media rattled all sabres in its arsenal with hyperventilating anchors and analysts baying for revenge. In the evening, India’s top diplomat made a TV appearance to share the official version. And it wasn’t different from what the media had spun throughout the day. Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri officially blamed Pakistan and spelled out several punitive measures, including suspension of the Indus Water Treaty with Pakistan, closure of the Wagah-Attari border crossing, and downgrade of diplomatic ties.

The timing of the Pahalgam incident was significant as US Vice President JD Vance was in India on a private tour, while Modi was in Saudi Arabia signaling a need to control diplomatic optics. The episode appears to be a choreographed attempt by India to once again portray itself as a “victim of terrorism” and quash the global portrayal of its top spy agency as a “perpetrator of transnational terrorism.”

But it wasn’t the only bird Modi wanted to kill with one stone. The Pahalgam victims belonged to several major cities – including Mumbai, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Indore, Kanpur, Bihar, Bangalore, Pune, Bhavnagar, Tamil Naido, and Gujarat – where the incident stirred up anger against Muslims. The Modi government may cash in on this nationwide outrage to snub widespread opposition to the controversial Waqf Amendment Bill which critics believe is part of the hardline Hindu nationalist government’s plan to reshape the country’s socio-political landscape, particularly that of the Muslim community.

India has long sought to scrap the World Bank-brokered Indus Waters Treaty of 1960. The desire stems from its strategic plans to build hydroelectric and storage projects along the western rivers – including Pakal Dul, Ratle, Kiru, and Sawalkot – which have long been delayed due to objections from Pakistan. In the Pahalgam incident, Modi found an excuse to execute these plans. There’s also a sinister side to it. By turning off the tap, India plans to undermine crop yield to cause food insecurity, which it believes will trigger social unrest in Pakistan.

Pakistan, however, has warned that such a move will be considered “an act of war” because water is a “vital national interest.” Rightly so, because water is a matter of life and death for millions of people in Pakistan, where agriculture is 90% dependent on the Indus drainage system. There’s a strong possibility that if and when India tries to build any dam by stopping or diverting river water, Pakistan will militarily take out that facility.

Right now, India is turning up the heat on Pakistan. But once the dust settles and the war hysteria fades, what if Pahalgam turns out to be another Pulwama?