Manufacturing Enemies

 On India, Pakistan, and the military-industrial complex

To reduce the India-Pakistan conflict to a matter of borders or bruised egos is a dangerous simplification. There is Kashmir, of course — the aching, unresolved wound — but to treat the dispute as merely territorial is to look away from the deeper rot: a crisis of propaganda, and the deliberate cultivation of hate. In truth, neither state has any real interest in resolution. Perpetual conflict pays dividends: at the ballot box, in the barracks, and on the international frontline.

India, under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has embraced a kind of muscular nationalism that doesn’t merely centre Hindus; it glorifies a hyper-masculine, vengeful version of Hindu identity. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological engine of this movement, dreams of an India cleansed of its secular past. Pakistan, in this vision, is not just an adversary but a symbol of the Muslim identity that must be repelled. Within this framework, military aggression is not a last resort. It is a spectacle of purification that legitimises this extremism under the guise of state policy. 

The 2019 Pulwama attack (and India’s response in Balakot) is a case in point. What followed was not just state retaliation but a full-blown media circus. News anchors became foot soldiers. Dissenters were cast as traitors. Most importantly, elections were won. And when voices questioned the credibility of India’s claims, or pointed to past false flag operations like the 2007 Samjhauta Express bombing — in which an Indian army officer was eventually implicated — they were met with silence or slander. The facts, as always, were inconvenient.

Today, after the recent attack in Pahalgam, the same script plays out. Before any investigation could even begin, fingers were pointed at Pakistan. For a government that thrives on crisis, the timing, conveniently, again, on the eve of elections, was just right. To question this choreography is not to excuse militancy, but to demand rigour before rage. It is to resist being co-opted into a narrative that thrives on bloodlust rather than truth.

More disturbing still is the way some Indian voices, including otherwise “public intellectuals” like Shashi Tharoor and Barkha Dutt, have responded to violence with open glee. When Palestinian children are bombed in Gaza, echoes of that same cruelty appear in Indian discourse. The logic is imported straight from the Israeli playbook: “They would grow up to be terrorists anyway.” That such dehumanisation is so easily applied — and celebrated — speaks volumes about what Hindutva ideology has normalised. Children are no longer innocent; they are pre-emptive threats. War is virtue.

Pakistan, for its part, is far from innocent. Its military, long the most powerful institution in the country, has consistently exploited anti-India sentiment to justify its budget, political overreach, and its ideological grip on the nation. The nexus between certain religious hardliners and the military is strategic and dangerous. Just as India has allowed the RSS to creep into the bloodstream of state policy, Pakistan has permitted clerics with extremist leanings to speak in the name of national defence. And yet, the global portrayal of Pakistan as a “hub of terror” often erases more than it reveals.

Pakistan has paid an immense price in the so-called War on Terror, a war it was dragged into, quite literally, at gunpoint. Entire towns in the north were reduced to rubble, with over 80,000 lives lost to suicide blasts, drone strikes, and targeted militancy. To brand Pakistan as monolithically complicit in terror is to insult the memory of its victims, and to ignore how the war was less about rooting out extremism and more about protecting Western geopolitical interests in Afghanistan.

It is here that the complicity of the United States becomes inescapable. None of this theatre would be possible without American patronage. Whether it is blind support for Israel’s atrocities in Gaza or the selective silence on India’s human rights violations in Kashmir, the US has time and again chosen strategic utility over moral responsibility. Military deals, trade partnerships, and China containment have all taken precedence over justice. Washington knows what Delhi is doing. It simply does not care.

And then there is China. For all its regional rivalries with India, Beijing continues to offer Pakistan both economic and diplomatic lifelines. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is more than an infrastructure project. It is a geostrategic bet that ensures that while China does not intervene in Pakistan’s ideological battles, its support insulates Islamabad from total isolation. For better or worse, Pakistan has a powerful friend, and that recalibrates the regional balance.

So what, then, is left? A region held hostage by toxic masculinities and cynical statecraft. A generation raised on tales of eternal war. Media that cheers for blood. Children killed and then blamed for their own deaths. Leaders who wear nationalism like armour, and call it peace.

The India-Pakistan conflict is no longer just a geopolitical crisis, but a spiritual one. It tests our ability to see the other as human, whether we can remember, in a time when states forget so easily, that war is not a television drama. It is families destroyed, futures stolen, and importantly, histories rewritten. And until we stop applauding this theatre of cruelty, we are all complicit.

Photo Credit:

[Header]: The Diplomat