(From left) IUML MP E.T. Mohammed Basheer, BJP MP Bansuri Swaraj, BJD MP Sasmit Patra and Shiv Sena MP Shrikant Shinde arrive at the IGI airport in New Delhi on May 21, 2025 to leave for UAE, Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone.
| Photo Credit: ANI
India’s decision to send diplomatic envoys and delegates to various countries to explain its position on the recent combats with Pakistan and the terrorist attack that triggered them raises an important question: is this display of proactive diplomacy a mark of strength or a gesture of reassurance?
On the surface, the move can be seen as a strategic effort to manage international perception, pre-empt misrepresentation, and reinforce India’s standing as a responsible global actor. Yet beneath that lies the more complicated reality of narrative legitimacy in a world where perception often outweighs fact, and international sympathy cannot be taken for granted. While much of the debate centres on the government’s domestic strategy in selecting members of the delegation and the political calculations behind it, the more important questions ought to concern the necessity, effectiveness, and anticipated outcomes of such a move.
In the contemporary global order, it is no longer sufficient to act with self-justified conviction; states must constantly perform their legitimacy before an audience of allies, media, and institutions. India’s outreach can certainly be viewed as part of this performance. It aims to convince the international community that its military response is calibrated, directed at non-state actors, and rooted in the imperative to defend its sovereignty against terrorism — not as a pretext for escalating an old and unresolved national rivalry. From this angle, the move reflects a calculated strength: a confidence that India’s case, if communicated properly, can take the moral high ground and secure international solidarity.
But at the same time, the very need for such an extensive exercise points to an underlying legitimacy deficit. If India’s position were entirely beyond reproach or universally acknowledged, would such explanation tours be necessary? The fact that India must engage in diplomatic clarification suggests a concern that its actions might be misread, misframed, or lost in the noise of global crises. In that sense, the effort reflects not just a desire to assert control over the narrative but also a tacit recognition of the fragility of international opinion.
Crisis of credibility
This vulnerability is amplified in an era when misinformation travels faster than official briefings. Recent examples during the India-Pakistan conflict show how easily falsehoods become facts in the public imagination. Old video footage, unrelated disaster clips, and even scenes from digital war games have been circulated online and passed off as real-time evidence of military operations or civilian suffering. These are not state-sponsored manipulations alone; they are generated and shared by ordinary users. caught in a whirlwind of nationalist fervour, emotional reaction, or digital mischief. Both Indian and Pakistani social media users have shared sensational content that turns out to be fabricated. AI-generated images and deepfakes complicate the picture, as they become harder to detect.
In such a climate, India’s attempt to set the record straight may seem like swimming upstream, particularly when the people on both sides have already made up their minds based on viral clips and emotionally charged narratives.
What, then, is the implication of this collapse of credibility in the news? Does anyone care anymore about verifiable information as a public good? Or has the idea of news itself been absorbed into a larger game of affect and performance, where truth matters only insofar as it confirms one’s pre-existing bias? This erosion of trust poses a deep philosophical crisis. The old saying that “truth is the first casualty of war” was once confined to the logic of state secrecy — governments hiding facts from their citizens in the name of national interest. The Japanese emperor’s radio address at the end of World War II never mentioned the word “surrender” but instead said the war had “developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” This was state-sanctioned euphemism, an elite strategy of softening reality.
Today, however, the distortion of truth is no longer top-down alone — it is bottom-up, lateral, and participatory. Citizens actively produce the falsehoods they wish to believe, and in doing so, dissolve the very distinction between truth and illusion.
This situation resonates powerfully with Jean Baudrillard’s provocative claim that “The Gulf War did not take place.” He did not mean that bombs were not dropped or that people did not die. Rather, he argued that the war was consumed entirely as spectacle — televised, mediated, edited — such that the reality of war was displaced by its simulation. In our time, that idea has become almost literal: the simulated now overrides the real in public perception.
In the realm of the humanities, where the pursuit of meaning, narrative, and ethical clarity is central, the end of credible news represents a profound loss. Without the possibility of shared facts, even argument becomes impossible. Disagreement presupposes agreement on the basic ground of what is happening. When that ground collapses, what remains is not debate but disorientation.
In this sense, India’s diplomatic campaign is not just a strategic act of persuasion — it also represents a battle to restore the very conditions under which persuasion is meaningful. It remains unclear whether this effort signals an admission of vulnerability or a reassertion of strength — an attempt to reaffirm the nation’s authenticity, rooted in the accumulated legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement years.
However, if this effort fails, then no amount of military precision or moral clarity will matter, because the audience will no longer be capable of distinguishing a justified action from a manufactured illusion.
Hence, the deeper question is not whether India can explain itself to the world, but whether the world still retains a framework within which such explanations are heard as truth and not dismissed as just another version of the story.
To lose that is to lose more than credibility — it is to lose our last bid for a politics of authenticity.
T.T. Sreekumar is Professor, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad
Published – May 22, 2025 02:08 am IST