Public diplomacy and Indian war of reputation

Express Tribune

17-05-2025

The writer is a non-resident research fellow in the research and analysis department of IPRI and an Assistant Professor at DHA Suffa University Karachi
Listen to article
India sought glory, and when the achievement of glory became the war-fighting aim, the only way you ended up fighting was a war of reputation. Ideally, a war of reputation is fought to influence perception and control of a given narrative. In a war of reputation, an actor would use all measures short of war to harm the reputation of an adversary.
India was doing so over a long period, spreading misinformation, manipulating public opinion of the audience at home and abroad, and engaging in negative publicity against Pakistan. It should have understood the limits of the reputational war it was fighting and should have desisted from undertaking a military adventure against Pakistan and making it part of this reputational war.
Two great differences were highlighted during this period of short Indian aggression: the difference in technology and the nature of the two adversaries. India lost the battle of supremacy of the technology, and while undermining our national resilience, it ignored, with disastrous results, the extent of our national enthusiasm and spirit.
Post-Pahalgam India is a different India. Its political and military reputation is dented. It has lost one of the most essential components of power politics that makes any power great — military credibility. Post-Pahalgam, at the apex of the Indian pyramid of political and military mediocrity stands PM Modi, an impulsive leader who's violent and aggressive ambitions now threaten peace and security of the entire region and need to be controlled and held back.
His external affairs minister, S Jaishankar, made a laughing stock of himself by claiming that Pakistan was informed about the Indian plan of attacking the alleged terrorist camps in Pakistan, and that the Pakistan military should not have interfered and should have stepped aside.
This sounded quite similar to the language that the Israeli ministers spoke when they proceeded to execute the genocide of Muslims in Gaza and Lebanon. The incoherent and incomprehensible manner in which the Indians are trying to defend their mistake is even forcing people in India to doubt the false reality being fed to them by the Indian government, and people in India are raising their voices against their country's political and military incompetence.
Information is the building block on which a true reality is built. Pakistan did a good job in communicating the true picture of Indian aggression, not only through the official government channels but also through the public sphere by its mass media.
Given our success in the information warfare during the Indian aggression, the government should take the lead and should consider modifying the implementation of our foreign policy and adopt an approach that gives centrality to the establishment of public diplomacy. The digital warriors, the common patriotic Pakistanis should be allowed full access to the internet and all digital platforms to push back the Indian and promote our narrative.
The core purpose of public diplomacy is to influence the external policy environment, and Pakistan must continue to encourage the public in the development of a credible anti-Indian narrative that must highlight India as the perpetrator of terrorism and a country that threatens peace and security in the region.
Outwardly, the public must be allowed to participate in the narrative building and share the same with the outside world. The Indian domestic audience needs to be bombarded with the truth and actual reality of the misadventure by their political and military elite.
We must do that with greater visibility and strong voices on all platforms of social media to influence the Indian preference, which was built on choosing the worst course of action that de-glorified India. This will only encourage the outside world to understand more and share more about the incompetence and failure of the Indian political and military elite.
Harvard professor Joseph Nye leads the soft power discourse in the world and has authored many books on the subject. He terms soft power as the ability of the state to set an agenda. The Indian aggression, I am sure, has multiplied many times our will to now set a reformed agenda against the state of India which should move beyond the rooted-in-the-past and traditional two-nation theory and bring the discourse to what constitutes terrorism and how India has a state policy of exporting terrorism not only in the region but around the globe.
The public must be encouraged to relentlessly build this narrative for the outside world through all platforms of social media. Official channel diplomacy and public diplomacy must work hand in hand to make this practice successful.
The war clouds are still hovering, and as long as PM Modi is in power, Pakistan can expect the worst from the Indian government. Despite this assumption, I do think that our great success in information warfare opens up the debate for the role of public diplomacy in our foreign policy.
While we may never lower our guard and our defence forces will remain prepared to counter any future Indian aggression, we must also not give up on the use of skillful statecraft and the new role that public diplomacy can play. In this context, Joseph Nye identifies three dimensions of public diplomacy practice.
First is daily communication, which he recommends should be built around mass public participation and should be relentless. The government digital outlook teams may work to control the misinformation, but daily communication may continue from all public platforms to ensure the promotion of the national narrative, with the objective that it should be favourably received and accepted by the outside world.
Second is dimension of public diplomacy that Nye identifies as strategic communication. This, he recommends, should rest on broader foreign policy aspirations than the specific objectives, like building a national narrative. The strategic communication seeks leader-to-leader engagement, including the possibility of meetings or a summit, social and cultural interactions, like sporting events organised to facilitate strategic communication.
Third is public diplomacy dimension in building lasting relationships. It is built around the spirit that all differences are solvable and is the culminating point of the success of the first two public diplomacy dimensions.
Lastly, as per Winston Churchill's goodwill dictum, it is goodwill that one should pursue during peace. We showed our resolution in war, and we must now switch on to raise the standard of our official and public diplomacy and stop celebrating victory, and demonstrate what Churchill termed as magnanimity in victory.