Opinion | The Battle For Perception: Why Information Is The New Frontline Of National Security

For years, India treated information operations as an afterthought, something to be cleaned up once the real fighting was done. That has changed

War used to end where the ceasefire began. Not anymore. The guns fall silent, but the narrative war carries on for weeks, sometimes months, fought not over territory but over what people believe happened.

That shift didn’t arrive with Operation Sindoor. It has unfolded over the years, and India has been learning its lessons one crisis at a time.

Opinion | Global Media And Activist Outrage: What’s Good For Gaza Isn’t Good For PoJK

Global Watch | When Words Whitewash Violence: The Media's Blind Spot On PoJK

Opinion | (Part- 2) Kamakoti Episode Exposes Congress’s Antipathy Towards The Indic Universe

Opinion | Sanctions Shift Focus To Transnational Terror 'Control Rooms'

India’s own long apprenticeship

Kashmir taught India this lesson first. Security forces killed Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in 2016. Within hours he was a symbol. The unrest that followed ran for months across the Valley, organised largely online, and Delhi’s official messaging never caught up.

The Army had already been working the ground version of this problem. Operation Sadbhavana, its hearts-and-minds programme in Jammu and Kashmir, treated schools, roads and goodwill as a form of counter-narrative decades before. Slow work. Unglamorous. Almost nobody outside the region noticed it. It still mattered.

Balakot made the contest explicit. India said its jets hit a Jaish-e-Mohammed camp and killed a large number of terrorists inside it. Pakistan’s answer came within hours: nothing but trees, it said, and its forestry department actually filed a........

© News18