Poorer Pakistan is not a competitor to India. So why does the Indian media seem obsessed with it?

This week, Pakistani media is running measured analysis on Field Marshal Asim Munir’s calls with US President Donald Trump, Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar’s shuttle diplomacy and the extraordinary tightrope walk between Washington, Tehran, Riyadh, and Beijing. Indian media is running wall-to-wall coverage of the same story, oscillating with impressive speed between fury, denial and indignant cope.

The asymmetry is not new. It is a documented pathology with an international paper trail.

Pakistan appears on India’s front pages every single day. Every channel. Without fail. When this obsession reached its operational peak during Operation Sindoor in May 2025, the results were documented by institutions that cannot be dismissed as hostile to India.

The New York Times ran a piece titled “How the Indian Media Amplified Falsehoods in the Drumbeat of War.” It reported that during a live military conflict between two nuclear-armed states, mainstream Indian news outlets engaged in the widespread dissemination of fabricated information, with “even credible journalists and mainstream news outlets running straight-up fabricated stories,” quoting Sumitra Badrinathan of the Reuters Institute.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford published a detailed investigation titled Truth is the Casualty, documenting how Indian television “looked like an animated video game, with graphics and crude sounds”. The BBC and France 24 explicitly criticised Indian newsrooms for breaking journalism norms.

The Al Jazeera Media Institute called the coverage “a national embarrassment that undermined journalistic integrity”. Columbia Journalism Review covered it under the headline “The Fog of War in India and Pakistan.”

What these outlets documented was specific. Times Now Navbharat reported that Indian forces had entered Pakistan. Zee News reported that the Indian Army had captured Islamabad and that Pakistan had surrendered. One channel reported that INS Vikrant had attacked Karachi port.

A video of a plane crash in Philadelphia in January 2025 was broadcast as footage of an Indian airstrike on Pakistani targets. Israel’s Iron Dome intercepting rockets in 2021 was aired as live footage from Jaisalmer. A Turkish military rescue photograph from 2016 was presented to Indian viewers as evidence of a captured Pakistani pilot.

The Indian authorities, simultaneously, blocked 8,000 Twitter accounts, shut down Pakistani YouTube channels, and arrested a freelance journalist for what they described as disseminating “distorted content”.

India’s government response to the New York Times investigation was to accuse the newspaper of holding a personal grudge against Narendra Modi. A spokesperson for the Congress party, from within India, wrote publicly that “all sensible people in the world have lost faith in the reports of India’s mainstream media”.

This is not a media criticism. It is a documented international record of what a decade of Pakistan-as-obsession produces when the pressure is applied. A public fed fabricated battlefield victories. Anchors in pilot costumes. Viral memes circulating globally showing Indian newsrooms as theatre.

The Reuters Institute’s conclusion: the episode demonstrated “a significant and troubling shift” in which institutional credibility had been subordinated entirely to nationalist performance.

What the obsession has cost

A media ecosystem built around one obsession stops doing other things. It stops watching China, which for years prior had been the benchmark ambitious Indians would measure themselves against. It stops holding power accountable. It produces a public that can be told Islamabad has surrendered and believes it, because it has been prepared over years to believe exactly that.

While Indian primetime was manufacturing Pakistan content around the clock, China’s defence budget reached $314 billion against India’s $86 billion. The IISS Military Balance 2026 said that Chinese-origin aircraft and missiles used by Pakistan shot down Indian Rafales in May 2025, noting it generated “notable reputational gain for Beijing’s defence industry”.

India’s own Air Chief Marshal said publicly, without apparent irony: “We are chasing technology now. We should reach a stage where technology comes out of India and others are chasing it.”

India started the century chasing China, setting itself ambitious targets and racing to close the gap. Today it has become a prime ally of Israel and nobody in Indian primetime seems to have noticed.

The information failure is not limited to live television. It has been industrialised. Dhurandhar, released in December, became India’s highest-grossing Hindi-language film ever, both domestically and in North America. The film follows an Indian spy infiltrating Karachi’s criminal and political networks, depicting Pakistan through a gallery of caricatures that critics from IGN to Al Jazeera described as walking the line between entertainment and naked propaganda.

The film’s storyline is accompanied by real-time intercepted audio recordings and news footage, making it, critics said, impossible to distinguish between what actually happened and the version that authorities or intelligence agencies want Indian audiences to believe.

It was banned in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

The sequel, Dhurandhar: The Revenge, opened on March 19, one week ago. It crossed Rs 500-crore globally within days. Critics noted it goes even more blatantly in its propagandistic direction, depicting the Modi government’s failed demonetisation as a masterstroke against terror financing, and portraying Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence as having funded Indian elections to install favourable governments.

The Deccan Herald called it “party agenda brazenly packaged as nationalism”. India’s own commentators, including prominent YouTuber @dhruv_rathee , described it as “brain rot”, noting that “well-made propaganda is more dangerous” precisely because it is engaging.

Indians are walking out of these cinemas and posting, in substantial numbers, that what they just watched was real. The films are careful to blur the line. They use real event names, real attack dates, real intelligence terminology and real news footage, then fill the gaps with wish-fulfilment. The public cannot tell where the archive ends and the fantasy begins.

That is the design. And then, on the same Thursday that Pakistan’s role as a certified mediator between the world’s most powerful nation and one of the region’s largest was confirmed in a White House Cabinet room, Bollywood announced its next product.

Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri, director of The Kashmir Files, has joined Bhushan Kumar’s T-Series to make Operation Sindoor, a film he describes as “a revelation” that will expose “Pakistan’s nuclear bluff”. The announcement dropped on the same news cycle in which United States Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff stood before the assembled cabinet and credited Pakistan for helping architect a potential end to a war.

The timing is not coincidental. It is the ecosystem responding to a threat. Nor is the Bollywood propaganda machine pointed only at Pakistan. Maatrubhumi, formerly Battle of Galwan, where India actually lost territory China now controls, now rechristened with a softer title ahead of its release this later this year, depicts Salman Khan as a colonel who battles Chinese forces in the 2020 Ladakh clash.

China’s state-backed Global Times called it a film that “distorts facts” and fuels anti-China sentiment, with Chinese netizens noting that the costumes, weapons, and tactics depicted bore no resemblance to actual People’s Liberation Army equipment or the documented realities of the engagement. The film features aerial combat sequences in which Indian pilots engage Chinese military aircraft, aircraft that, in the documented reality of Operation Sindoor, were operated by Pakistan.

The inversion is complete. The audience has been prepared to believe India wins the battles in which it took a hit. This is how you dumb down a public at industrial scale. You do not need to lie about each individual event. You build a framework in which India always wins, the enemy is always subhuman and complexity is always treason. Then, when the news catches up with reality, the audience already has a narrative infrastructure that makes the facts unacceptable.

At the White House Cabinet meeting on Thursday, US Special Envoy Witkoff told President Trump: “I can report to you today that we have, along with your foreign policy team, presented a 15-point action list that forms the framework for a peace deal. This has been circulated through the Pakistani government, acting as the mediator, and this has resulted in strong and positive messaging and talks.”

Not a suggestion. Not a diplomatic hint. The word mediator, in a cabinet room, on the record, delivered to the President of the United States by his chief Middle East envoy, in front of the international press corps.

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar had already written publicly: “US-Iran indirect talks are taking place through messages being relayed by Pakistan.” Iran, which is in the middle of an active war, is deliberating a US peace framework that arrived in Tehran via Islamabad. Trump, for his part, has repeatedly and publicly described Pakistan’s leadership in terms that his own foreign policy establishment has never applied to India’s government.

Earlier this year he said of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Munir: “I get along with Pakistan very very well. They have a great prime minister, a great general. They have a great leader. Two of the people that I really respect a lot. Pakistan is doing terrifically well.”

His special envoy has a direct personal relationship with Munir. His Vice President is expected in Islamabad. Iran is deliberating a peace plan that passed through a Pakistani intermediary.

India’s response, delivered through former Indian Ambassador to Iran Dinkar P Srivastava, quoted within hours of the Witkoff announcement, was to call Pakistan a “dishonest broker”. This is not a foreign policy response. It is the sound of a machine that spent a decade preparing a country for Pakistan’s failure, confronting the day that machine is publicly, formally, and irreversibly contradicted in front of cameras showing the feed live, unscripted, unedited, to the world.

Irrational obsession

Pakistan should not matter. Yet it does. What makes the obsession structurally irrational is the disparity it requires ignoring. Pakistan’s GDP is roughly a tenth of India’s. Its defence budget is a fraction. By every conventional measure of national power, it is not a peer competitor. It is a significantly smaller country that has, through a combination of geography, relationships, and strategic patience, consistently occupied a space in regional and global affairs that the arithmetic does not explain.

That is the part India’s political and media establishment cannot process. A country this size should not matter this much. It keeps mattering anyway. Pakistan is in the room. India is watching from outside, running the story on every channel, hosts and guests shouting unhinged at each other, collectively deciding they would have turned down this role anyway.

Forgetting, in their noise, that the only diplomatic role currently available to them is legitimising the government of Taliban terrorists in Kabul. The obsession was never really about Pakistan. A country with genuine confidence in its own direction does not need another country on its front page every morning.

What India built over a decade is a mirror, and this week the reflection became impossible to manage.

Dan Qayyum is a writer, media strategist, and long-standing advisor to government institutions and media organizations across the region. His upcoming book, The Other Side of Endurance, examines his own journey through crisis, resilience, and reinvention.