Operation Sindoor has strengthened Brand Modi, especially in the constituency that matters most to his party: women. Widely touted and perceived as an expression of Nari Shakti (woman power), the operation has, in fact, been framed in manifestly patriarchal terms.

The punitive bombing of terror bases in Pakistan was dubbed Operation Sindoor for obvious reasons. As the widow of a Pahalgam victim said, the codename gave her a sense of “personal connect” with the operation. After the strikes, several of the bereaved women told reporters they felt more at peace because justice had been served. The whole exercise was framed as the chaste Indian wife avenging the brutal erasure of her sindoor—a modern-day Kannagi setting an entire city on fire for the wrongful death of her husband.

The flip side of this narrative is the reduction of the woman’s identity to her marital and post-marital status, the loving wife and the aggrieved widow, and the state emerging as protector in place of the husband. The faux empowerment of the avenging widows has been called out by feminists, who point out that the bereaved women were foregrounded to add emotional hype to the operation.

Semiotically speaking, sindoor is a touchy subject. Whatever its origins, as a........

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