On the night of 28 September 2025, after the Asia Cup final in Dubai, Chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, Mohsin Naqvi, stood at the podium holding the winner’s trophy. India had beaten Pakistan, and the trophy was theirs to collect. The Indian team did not walk up to take it. Across two weeks of play, not one Indian cricketer had shaken a Pakistani hand, a policy India’s captain Suryakumar Yadav described as set in line with the board and the government.¹ The win was never in doubt. What India withheld was only the courtesy of accepting it from the most senior Pakistani in the room.
That is the power you can watch. It is loud, emotional, and open about itself. It is also the visible edge of something quieter and far more effective, and the quiet part is what this article is about.
Over the past year, a recognisable habit has run through India’s influential English-language writing on the May 2025 conflict and what followed it. The habit works in three movements. It concedes a specific Pakistani gain, then claims a larger Indian win, then settles the meaning of strategic success so that whatever Pakistan actually achieved falls outside the count. The writing that does this is not the shouting kind. It is the measured kind, which is exactly why it reaches Chatham House, Brookings, and the IISS while the cinema and the cricket stay at home. And in the past two months, that measured layer has begun to show strain, not because anyone in Pakistan rebutted it, but because some of its own predictions stopped matching events, and some of its own side stopped agreeing with it.
Why this should matter to a reader with no stake in the scoreboard is plain. The framing is not decoration. It shapes how arms transfers are assessed, how escalation risk is read, and who is treated as a serious mediator in a nuclear pair. If the measure that governs all of that is fixed before the evidence is examined, the people relying on it are working from a loaded instrument and do not know it. Showing where the instrument is loaded is the point of what follows.
One guard belongs at the front, because the obvious objection is that any qualified claim could be forced into this shape. It cannot. A writer who admits a loss, claims an advantage, and then tests that claim against the actual record is doing ordinary analysis, and good analysis often reaches conclusions Pakistan would not enjoy. The habit described here is narrower. Its defining feature is the third movement; the quiet fixing of what strategy is allowed to mean before the record is consulted. Where that movement is absent, there is no pattern, only argument. The Indian commentator Pravin Sawhney is a useful marker of the line. He concedes the May result, follows the evidence, and arrives at conclusions awkward for India rather than comforting to it. That is analysis, and the test clears it. The pattern is something else, and the rest of this article is about that something else.
Villains Before the Verdict
The commentary did not have to build its audience from scratch because the Indian cinema (Bollywood) had been building it for years. Since PM Modi took office in 2014, a cluster of big-budget Hindi films has worked the same seam, a trend tracked by New Lines Magazine,² the Springer journal Contemporary Islam,³ and a growing body of scholarship. Two strands run through it.
The first reaches into the deep past and stages it as a siege of “Hindu virtue” by Muslim cruelty in the Sub-continent. For instance, Padmaavat in 2018 offered a leering Alauddin Khilji. Chhaava in 2025 built its drama on Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb and the killing of Sambhaji.⁴
The lesson repeats across the films. The Muslims arrive in Hindustan (India) as barbarians and looters, the Hindu suffers, and the victimhood is the point.
Yet the camera never turns on the deeper past it claims to defend. No comparable film dramatises the Indo-Aryan migrations of the second millennium BCE, the movement of peoples that scholarship links to the arrival of Vedic culture and the Sanskrit ritual that would later feed into Hinduism. The cinema remembers only the arrival; it can code as Muslim and forgets the earlier one that unsettles any story of a pure and rooted Hindu homeland.
The second strand drops the costume and moves the same feeling onto the present-day Pakistani. Uri in 2019 turned the cross-border raids of 2016 into a crowd-pleasing fantasy of clean revenge and handed the country a slogan in the bargain. Fighter in 2024 restaged Pulwama and Balakot, and reworked the most awkward episode of that week, the Indian pilot shot down over Pakistani territory and handed back, into a story of airmen who lose nothing the script does not let them recover in glory.⁵ Article 370 in the same year dramatised the revocation of Kashmir’s special status as a thriller of decisive statecraft. Then came the Dhurandhar films of 2025 and 2026, in which an Indian agent burrows into the Karachi underworld and tears the ISI’s terror network apart from within.⁶ Pakistan banned the first instalment and called it propaganda. It became the highest-grossing Hindi film yet released, playing to packed houses across the Indian diaspora in North America.
What ties the two strands together is not a theme so much as a workshop, and behind the workshop a movement that has moved from the margins to the centre of the state. Hindutva is no longer an insurgent current in Indian politics. It is the governing common sense, and its cultural project now addresses a national audience of more than a billion. The signal comes from the very top. When Chhaava was released, the Prime Minister Modi praised it as a window into Sambhaji’s true character, and Parliament screened it for the party’s senior leadership.⁷ Within weeks, the anger the film had stirred spilled into communal riots in Nagpur over the demand to raze Aurangzeb’s tomb, and a chief minister from Modi’s own party traced that anger back to the film.⁸ The endorsement and the unrest sat in the same sequence. This is not fringe production. It is the mainstream, watched by tens of millions, blessed from the top, and consistent in its lesson.
The historical films teach that the Muslim has always been besieged. The contemporary films teach that the Pakistani besiegers are still.
This is the work the cinema does for the commentary, and it is the only work the section needs from it. An audience that has spent a decade watching the Pakistani cast as schemer, hijacker, and torturer does not meet a Pakistani gain neutrally. It meets that gain already disposed to read it as a fluke, a theft, or somebody else’s doing rather than an achievement. The technique is older than this and well understood. The Reich propaganda ministry under Goebbels treated feature films as conditioning rather than argument, and Jud Süss in 1940 was made to teach an audience to fear a group before any case against it was stated. Soviet cinema worked the heroic register, where Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky in 1938 dressed a medieval invasion as a national parable aimed at the enemy of the hour. The point of the comparison is method, not magnitude. India is neither of those states, and the dissent its own press still carries is proof of the difference. What recurs is the instrument. A screen that readies the feeling does the work that no editorial later has to admit to.
Two thinkers help name what the commentary does, and then they can step aside. Antonio Gramsci described how a ruling group secures the agreement of those it rules by making its own picture of the world look like plain common sense.⁹ The cinema and the commentary both belong to that work of winning agreement. The cinema works on feeling, and the commentary works on knowledge, two registers of one task rather than two kinds of power. Michel Foucault sharpened the second register. The deepest form of influence, he argued, is the one that decides what counts as knowledge in the first place, which questions are sensible, and which measures are treated as obvious.¹⁰ Hold both in view, and the pattern stops looking like a run of strong opinions. It starts to look like a settled way of producing knowledge, one in which the definition of victory is fixed before the evidence arrives, and the reader takes the result for analysis rather than for a position.
The Three-Card Trick
The first is the tactical admission. The writer concedes something small, specific, and verifiable. The Pakistan Air Force downed an Indian aircraft on 7 May 2025. Pakistan will host the United States and Iran in April 2026. The PL-15 missile is performing past Indian expectations. These concessions are true, and their truth is the point, because they buy the writer the look of fairness and draw the reader inside the frame.
The second is the larger reclaim. Having paid for credibility, the writer asserts a bigger Indian victory that is rarely dated and almost never sourced. India kept escalating its dominance. Pakistan sued for peace. The small true thing underwrites the large unproven one.
The third movement does the real work. The writer settles in advance what strategy is permitted to mean and settles it so that whatever Pakistan gained lands outside the boundary. If strategic means ground taken, diplomacy does not register. If it means independent leverage, a Field Marshal received in Tehran does not register. The definition is never defended. It is simply assumed, and the assumption is the move.
The cleanest worked example to date is Shekhar Gupta’s column in ThePrint on 16 May 2026.¹¹ It grants the Indian side’s own admission of tactical error at the Shangri-La Dialogue, moves to a sporting scoreline in India’s favour, and then lands its verdict, that Pakistan is tactically brilliant and strategically disastrous, a judgement that decides the meaning of strategic before a single post-May gain is weighed. Gupta is candid about where the idea comes from. He credits the Pakistani writer Shuja Nawaz and the book Crossed Swords for the argument that the Pakistani military mind plans well for the short term and fails to imagine how India will answer.¹² The borrowing is itself revealing. Nawaz offered that diagnosis inside Pakistan as a call to reform an institution. Gupta turns it outward into a label for the enemy. An idea meant to improve an army from within becomes a weapon aimed at it from across the border, which shows the frame does not even need fresh material. It can run on Pakistan’s own self-criticism, repackaged.
Two definitions keep the whole thing turning, and they sit underneath every specimen. The first measures 2026 with the ruler of 1999, treating strategic success as territory held and lines of control respected, so that a contest which long ago moved off the map and onto defence pacts and arms markets cannot be scored at all. The second is the borrowing just described, an internal reform critique lifted and reused as external classification. Between them, they guarantee that Pakistan’s gains are either invisible or somebody else’s.
The third movement can also run on its own, ahead of the facts, and a second specimen shows it. On 8 April 2026, The Hindu dismissed Field Marshal Munir’s West Asia diplomacy, reaching for Clemenceau on war being too serious to leave to generals, and concluding that the world’s serious actors would find little use for the Pakistani Field Marshal.¹³ There is no admission and no reclaim here, only the closure. FM Munir filed under irrelevant before the record could vote. I return to that prediction below because it did not age well.
One Battle, Two Scoreboards
The honest place to begin is with the losses, because any serious account must. The Indian strikes of 7 and 10 May 2025 did real damage to Pakistan Air Force bases, and open-source analysis confirmed structural hits at Nur Khan, Jacobabad, and elsewhere.¹⁴ The outgoing Chief of Defence Staff conceded tactical mistakes in Singapore. None of that is in dispute.
What the frame then erases is what came after. Within a year, the army chief was received at the White House in a way no serving Pakistani military leader had been granted since the early 2000s. The Saudi-Pakistani defence pact was signed.¹⁵ Chinese J-10C and PL-15 systems were validated in combat against frontline Western aircraft, the first such validation to be widely publicised, and it was watched closely from Cairo to Ankara.¹⁶ Economic talks with Washington reopened across the stablecoin track and the rare earth framework. Semafor noted that India was bristling while Pakistan enjoyed a diplomatic moment.¹⁷ The Economist called Pakistan a deft handler of global power politics.¹⁸ The Council on Foreign Relations called it an unlikely but indispensable mediator.¹⁹
Then comes the recoding, and the moves are easy to track even when the exact phrasing varies by writer. The Saudi pact is reduced to mere signalling on paper. The White House lunch becomes transactional theatre rather than standing. The Chinese validation becomes a rented capability, as the South China Morning Post²⁰ and CBS²¹ later supplied directly with their reports of Chinese personnel in Pakistani control rooms and Iranian aircraft at Pakistani bases. Each gain is admitted as fact and then stripped of meaning. The move, performed in the open, more than once.
The Prediction That Aged Badly
The strongest test of the frame came over Iran, because here the frame committed itself to a prediction. The Hindu had filed Munir as irrelevant on 8 April.¹³ The facts were answered within days. Pakistan was hosting direct United States and Iran contacts, with a ceasefire that Washington publicly credited to Munir and the Prime Minister, and that was later extended at Pakistan’s request. By 22 May, the Field Marshal was in Tehran in person, received by Iran’s interior minister, with a Qatari delegation arriving alongside and Saudi Arabia backing the role.²² The frame had filed him away. The record refused to cooperate.
The response to inconvenient facts was to question their authorship rather than their existence. On 8 May, the South China Morning Post reported that Chinese engineers had sat in Pakistan Air Force control rooms.²⁰ CBS followed with claims of Iranian aircraft at Pakistani bases.²¹ Indian outlets amplified both within hours.
The capability became borrowed, and the mediation became compromised. The same machinery that admits a gain and then drains it went to work on the gains it could not ignore.
The Cracks Show from Within
Here, the more interesting story begins, because the victory frame is now under pressure, and the pressure is coming from inside India. The clearest evidence is the part that bears directly on the May result. The outgoing Chief of Defence Staff conceded tactical mistakes in public. The Congress demanded a review of the scale of the Kargil inquiry. Pravin Sawhney called openly for the Chief of Defence Staff to resign. These are not Pakistani rebuttals. They are Indian voices declining to hold the triumphal account of May 2025, and they matter precisely because the recoding frame depends on that account staying intact. When a country’s own strategists stop scoring the result as a clean win, the writers who insist on the clean win are left defending a line their own side has begun to abandon.
A second and broader shift sits alongside this, though it should be read with care because it is adjacent to the frame rather than identical to it. The appetite for dialogue with Pakistan is rising inside the Indian establishment. The RSS general secretary Hosabale called for talks, and the Congress attacked him for it.²³ The former army chief Naravane backed the idea.²⁴ At the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in Bishkek, the defence minister Rajnath Singh said that terrorism carries no nationality and no faith, a line the Congress read as appeasement.²⁵ ²⁶ Farooq Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti welcomed the opening.²⁷ Al Jazeera read the signals as deliberate sequencing.²⁸ This is not the same act as a columnist conceding a gain and defining it away. It is movement in the wider consensus of hostility that the victory frame sits within. But the two are connected. A frame that scores Pakistan as strategically beaten becomes harder to sustain in a season when the establishment around it is talking about sitting down with the beaten party.
This is what Gramsci called an organic crisis, the moment when a ruling account can no longer be made to stick.⁹ It does not arrive because the other side argued better. It arrives because the account’s own custodians, the strategists and the retired commanders, can no longer hold the line between what the frame says and what the world keeps doing. The Congress fury at its own side is not a side note. It is the symptom.
Whose Knowledge Counts
Honesty requires the other column. Pakistan’s weaknesses are real and not rhetorical. Imran Khan remains imprisoned. The Baloch insurgency grinds on. The economy leans on the IMF. The balance between the civilian and the military is unhealthy, and The Diplomat was right to flag all of it.²⁹ The Tehran channel may yet collapse. A fair reading holds these in view. The claim here is not that Pakistan is winning. It is narrower and more exact that a particular way of writing admits real gains and then drains them of meaning by deciding the scoreboard in advance.
The fair question to put to this article is whether it does the same thing in reverse, framing Pakistan for what it accuses others of framing it. The honest answer is that the standpoint is not hidden, and the test stated at the start is the safeguard. Sawhney concedes Pakistani gains, follows the record, and lands on conclusions India would rather not hear. By the test offered here, that is analysis, and it is not the pattern. The pattern is only the third movement, the definition is fixed before the evidence, and the third movement is checkable by anyone who cares to check it.
For the institutions where this commentary lands, the practical lesson is modest and a little uncomfortable. A measured tone is not the same as a neutral measure. When an assessment of the South Asian balance arrives sounding even-handed, the question worth asking is what the writer has allowed strategic to mean, and whether that meaning was fixed before the evidence or after it. Arms-transfer judgments, escalation reading, and the choice of who counts as a credible mediator all ride on the answer.
For the wider field, the lesson is about gatekeeping. The asymmetry between Indian and Pakistani framing is not one of volume. Pakistan has a nationalist framing of its own and plenty of it. The asymmetry is about which framing reaches the rooms where strategic reputations are settled, and at present, one side reaches those rooms in the register that travels, and the other mostly does not. If Pakistan has an interest here, and it does, it lies less in answering each column as it appears and more in contesting the measure itself. The predictions are dated, and the record is public, which means the frame can be left to be tested against events rather than against rebuttals. The Hindu’s April dismissal was overtaken within weeks, and that is the more durable form of correction. It asks for capable voices placed where the measure currently goes unchallenged, not where it is already disbelieved.
Twelve years of conditioning and a year of classification have built something that works. It prepares an audience to feel a verdict and then hands that audience the verdict dressed as knowledge, and it works because it sounds like balance, the register that crosses borders into the rooms that matter. It is not beyond reach. Its predictions are checkable, and some have already failed, and its own custodians have begun to break ranks. The contest that remains is not over any single column. It is over who gets to define victory, and over whose knowledge is allowed to count. That is the field worth entering, and this article is one attempt to enter it.
See also: Moazam Jahangir, “The Crisis Brokers of a Fragmented World Order”, GSSI, 25 April 2026.
Notes
- Sidharth Monga, “Salman Agha skips presentation after India refuse handshakes,” ESPNcricinfo, 14 September 2025.
- “Hindu Nationalism Has Found New Allies in Bollywood,” New Lines Magazine, 14 August 2024.
- On affective production in post-2014 Hindi cinema, the Contemporary Islam literature (Springer).
- Maroosha Muzaffar, “A Bollywood blockbuster portrayed one of India’s Mughal rulers as a villain,” The Independent, March 2025; on Chhaava, dir. Laxman Utekar, 2025.
- Fighter, dir. Siddharth Anand, 2024, a fictionalised retelling of the 2019 Pulwama attack, the Balakot airstrike, and the air skirmish that followed.
- Encyclopædia Britannica, “Dhurandhar (film series),” updated April 2026.
- “Parliament to host special screening of Chhaava, PM Modi to attend,” The Tribune (India), February 2025; “Nagpur Riots: How Netas, Hindu Outfits Fueled Aurangzeb Narrative Post Chhaava,” The Quint, March 2025.
- “Why 17th-century emperor Aurangzeb’s grave is India’s latest flashpoint,” Al Jazeera, 19 March 2025.
- Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (Lawrence & Wishart, 1971).
- Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Pantheon, 1980).
- Shekhar Gupta, “The Pakistan paradox: tactically brilliant, strategically disastrous,” ThePrint, 16 May 2026.
- Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (Oxford University Press, 2008).
- “A Closer Look at Gen Asim Munir’s West Asia Diplomacy,” The Hindu, 8 April 2026.
- Damien Symon and open-source corroboration of structural damage at PAF installations, May 2025.
- Belfer Center and APLN assessments on the Pakistan-Saudi Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement, September-November 2025.
- Open-source and specialist assessments of the May 2025 air engagements over the India and Pakistan frontier, May-June 2025.
- “India bristles as Pakistan has its diplomatic moment,” Semafor, April 2026.
- “Pakistan: a deft handler of global power politics,” The Economist, April 2026.
- Joshua Kurlantzick, “How Pakistan Became the Iran War’s Unlikely Peace Negotiator,” Council on Foreign Relations, 28 April 2026.
- South China Morning Post anniversary-week report on Chinese personnel in PAF facilities, 8 May 2026.
- CBS News reporting on alleged Iranian fighter aircraft at Pakistani airbases, May 2026.
- ISPR press release on Field Marshal Asim Munir’s arrival in Tehran, 22 May 2026.
- “RSS leader calls for dialogue with Pakistan, Congress hits back,” The News International, 12 May 2026.
- “Former Army Chief MM Naravane Backs Dialogue With Pakistan,” Free Press Journal, 13 May 2026.
- “Terrorism has no nationality, no theology: Rajnath Singh at SCO meeting in Bishkek,” Deccan Herald, 28 April 2026.
- “Under US Pressure: RSS Leader’s Call for Dialogue With Pakistan,” The Wire, May 2026.
- “Farooq Abdullah Backs RSS Leader Hosabale on Dialogue with Pakistan,” Kashmir Observer, 14 May 2026.
- Abid Hussain, “Are India and Pakistan quietly preparing to restart dialogue?”, Al Jazeera, 23 May 2026.
- The Diplomat, “Pakistan’s global role sees diplomatic shift,” April 2026.
