No country for pacifists | What Operation Sindoor reveals

Operation Sindoor has laid bare the current shift in public opinion on what is the right response to conflict — blood lust and confrontational rhetoric drowning out common sense and calls for peace

On May 7, India woke up to ‘Operation Sindoor’, a series of precision strikes by the armed forces at nine sites in Pakistan and Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. This was in retaliation to the terrorist attacks in Pahalgam on April 22, in which 25 Indians and one Nepali citizen, mostly tourists, were killed.

This was the same week that a report on the Indian Wealth Divide revealed that most of the country earns so little that an annual income of just ₹2.9 lakh puts you in the top 10%. It came just two months after a venture capital company published a report that out of the 140 crore Indians, only the top 10% have enough discretionary money to spend on non-essential items.

That same evening, during the mock drills announced by the Ministry of Home Affairs to check if the country was prepared against “new and complex threats”, instead of staying in during the blackout and learning to hide their locations, many Indians thronged the streets and burst firecrackers — just like they would to celebrate an IPL cricket match victory. Meanwhile, street vendors, part of the bottom half of the Indian population, whose national income has fallen from 22% to 15% between 1990 and 2025, were made to prove their patriotism by shutting shop for the mock drills and giving up their daily wage.

That night and the following two days, most Indians fought a work-from-home war. Content creators and news channels threw a barrage of disinformation, reporting how India had captured Lahore, Karachi and even Islamabad. And how, many Indian cities were under attack too.

There were visuals of panic buying, throngs at ATMs to withdraw cash, and jammed train stations and bus stations as migrant workers rushed to return to their hometowns. Simultaneously, cross-border shelling and drone attacks were killing civilians, officials, soldiers, and causing the destruction of houses, property and livestock in Poonch, Ferozepur, Uri, Jammu, Srinagar, Rajouri, Samba and other border districts. The villagers there were displaced and looking for hideouts. But people sitting afar, experiencing the virtual war — trained to dehumanise others by rationalising abuse of those on the socio-economic margins because of their class, caste or religion — dismissed it as ‘collateral damage’ in the war against terror.

Common sense was thrown for a toss. Demanding preventive instead of combative approach in conflict became unpopular. Some of the WhatsApp users peddling fake news were now baying for blood and the escalation of military action by using war gaming language: morale, strategy, tactics, terrain, artillery, victory conditions, order of battle, zeroed in. Some even advocated the use of nuclear weapons to destroy Pakistan in a few minutes.

There was a clear shift in public opinion and expectations on what is the right response to conflict — which had earlier acknowledged that escalation of armed actions causes losses to all, economically, socially and morally.