After Operation Sindoor, experts call for action against cognitive warfare spreading anti-India narratives
At a symposium — Communicating India’s Global Strategic Narratives: Imperatives and Impediments — hosted by a think-tank here, the experts cited that “many key lessons” have emerged from the Operation Sindoor experience, when it comes to how the message was conveyed to the audience at home and abroad, during and after the decisive military action.
Scholar and strategic affairs expert Daya Thussu made a PowerPoint presentation at the event, in which he lamented the “falling level” of credibility in television media, and cited cases when some TV networks had “erroneously reported” about Indian armed forces allegedly attacking Karachi and Islamabad during the four-day conflict.
Operation Sindoor was launched on May 7 in the wake of the Pahalgam terror attack, triggering the nearly 88-hour conflict between India and Pakistan, which ended after they reached an understanding on May 10.
Other panellists, including two former diplomats, a retired officer of the Army, and the head of a Delhi-based defence think-tank, also corroborated Thussu’s views and said a “credible platform” should be built which can project India’s strategic interest based on facts and verified information.
Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain (retd), also a strategic affairs expert, said modern wars will be beyond kinetic domains, being fought in multiple domains, and “cognitive or narrative warfare” is one key aspect.
He said that during Operation Sindoor and after it, strategic communication about it could have been done in a much more effective way.A “cognitive or narrative warfare” intends to inflict damage on a nation’s image and its strategic interests in a bid to gain advantage in the cognitive domain, he said.
The experts concurred that there is a need to establish an “institutional body” that can contribute towards projecting India’s strategic interests and effectively countering any narrative.
India’s former ambassador and another strategic affairs expert, Ashok Sajjanhar, said India today is experiencing what one would call a “Goldilocks moment”.
A Goldilocks moment refers to an economic condition where there is balanced growth.
“And, though we missed the industrial revolution, in the technological revolution, we are there,” he said, and cited the India AI Impact Summit being hosted in Delhi from February 16-20.
Sajjanhar also said India’s policy of multi-alignment, multi-polarity and strategic economy has “found resonance” around the world.
The event was hosted at the Vivekananda International Foundation (VIF) here.
Arvind Gupta, director of VIF, also said an “institutional” mechanism was essential to deal with a “narrative warfare” in the cognitive domain.
Strategic analyst Nitin Gokhale also supported the idea of establishing a comprehensive institutional body that can contribute towards projecting India’s strategic interests and countering narratives which are inimical to it.
