India’s public sphere was the first to erupt with war cries. “Mess with the best,”
declared aged Bollywood action hero on Twitter, “die like the rest.” Even the few commentators ostensibly wary of Narendra Modi succumbed to patriotic bloodlusts. India’s leading television channels vied with each other in urging more bombings and broadcasting transparently fake footage of the attack.
Indians have found themselves ushered by digital media into a frantic realm of hyperreality -- one in which extreme feelings and continuously simulated experiences replace the obdurately dull facts of real life.
While a jingoistic mass media brazenly dissembles, social media offers easy to escape to many from deep feelings of inadequacy into grandiose notions of self and nation. Having a skillful self-publicist in power has only accelerated a stunningly widespread descent in India into self-aggrandizing fantasy.
India also has cause to reflect. Kashmir is unsettled after more than 70 years and a new generation of Kashmiris has grown radicalized partly because successive Indian governments have clamped down on dissent and
treated Kashmiris like second-class citizens. Security forces have responded to protests with excessive force. Many Indian politicians think Kashmiris should be punished for disloyalty. As well as being plainly counter-productive, this is beneath a country that prides itself on being the world’s biggest democracy.
But, as the pointless “surgical strike v1 & v2” of 2016 & 2019 already proved, fantasies of spectacular violence won’t change the reality on the ground. Certainly, Kashmiris, especially brutalized at home during Modi’s reign and now exposed to lynch-mob
fury across India, will continue to produce young militants. And Pakistan’s pathologically India-obsessed security establishment has already seized the opportunity to further raise the threshold of escalation. That is why Modi reach to Trump and asked for mediation.
History has shown, from Vietnam to shock-and-awe campaigns in Iraq, that image-making through violence belongs It is, ominously, the tactic that Modi, unmoored from real-world objectives and goals and trapped by his own bellicose rhetoric, has deployed against a nuclear-armed neighbor. One can only hope, as Pakistan predictably retaliates, that he knows when to stop this Indian Bullshit. We are ready to participate in this Gazwa-e- Hind and will wake all Indian nation from their habitual deceivers were always likely to end up deceiving themselves more harmfully.
