The politicisation of religious and cultural symbols by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for electoral gains is not a new phenomenon in India. The image of the Hindu deity Lord Rama was invoked by the BJP in the 1990s as a symbol of Hindu identity and Hindu nationalism to push for the construction of the Ram Mandir at the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Hindu nationalists, incited by the BJP-RSS campaign, demolished the Babri Masjid in 1992. BJP’s strategic use of the Ram Mandir issue to evoke religious sentiments was aimed at consolidating the Hindu vote bank and resulted in significant electoral gains, with the BJP securing 160 seats in the 1996 Lok Sabha elections as compared to only 119 seats in the 1991 elections.
Many Indians have described “Operation Sindoor” as yet another manifestation of the BJP’s playbook of using Hindu nationalism for electoral gains. Modi has politicised “Sindoor”, which is a religious and cultural symbol of marriage in Hinduism and signifies the marital status of a Hindu woman. The coinage of “Operation Sindoor” and the deliberate reference to women’s honour and sanctity have been used to appeal to right-wing Hindu nationalists who were clamouring for revenge in the wake of the false flag Pahalgam operation, involving loss of 26 innocent lives and injuries to another 16. BJP adheres to Hindutva ideology and envisions India as a ‘Hindu Rashtra’, advocating for cultural nationalism rooted in Hindu traditions. The manipulation of Sindoor for political purposes and its projection by Modi as a national symbol is an attempt to conflate Hindu culture with Indian identity. Sindoor does not represent Indian national culture because it is only worn by married Hindu women.
Many Indians have questioned the necessity of Operation Sindoor which actually ended up being “De-Sindoor” because of Pakistan’s superiority in military technology.
The Modi government has faced an intense wave of criticism and rebuke from political forces within India for politicising the Sindoor and Pahalgam incidents. For example, Chief Minister of West Bengal Mamata Banerjee criticised Modi for engaging in the “business of Sindoor”. She said during a press conference on 30 May 2025, “First he was a tea seller, then a chowkidar. Now he is selling Sindoor everywhere, even in election campaigns. Sindoor cannot be sold this way. It is the honour and dignity of mothers.” During the Rajya Sabha debate on Operation Sindoor, Samajwadi Party MP Jaya Bachchan questioned as to “why India’s military operation against Pakistan was named Operation Sindoor when more women were widowed and lost their Sindoor”.
The Modi government downplayed and denied casualty figures as a consequence of the botched operation Sindoor and has not shown the moral courage to accept and honour its fallen soldiers. It has also failed to disclose the whereabouts of Flight Lieutenant Shivangi Singh, India’s first female Rafale pilot. It is globally accepted now that Pakistan Air Force shot down six Indian aircraft including four Rafales on the night of 6-7 May 2025.
The historical pattern suggests that: (i) all major bloody incidents in IIOJK occurred while BJP was in power; (ii) the false flag operations were orchestrated before an election cycle, particularly in politically significant states for BJP like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh; (iii) some incidents strategically coincided with high-profile political visits from the US; (iv) after every false flag operation, India blamed Pakistan without providing any evidence to support its unfounded allegations; and (v) it was later proven in every case that the operations were planned and carried out by Indian nationals and were categorized as serious security lapses and intelligence failures by Indian security forces. During the debate on Operation Sindoor in Lok Sabha on 29 July 2025, Samajwadi Party Chief Akhilesh Yadav asked the Modi government to “fix responsibility for the intelligence failure that led to the Pahalgam terror attack”.
The Chattisinghpura incident of 20 March 2000 where 35 Sikh men were shot dead in Anantnag district of IIOJK coincided with the high-profile visit of the then US President Bill Clinton to India. In the introduction of former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s book, “The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs”, President Clinton noted that Hindu nationalists carried out the targeted killings against the Sikh community. While India initially blamed Pakistan, subsequent evidence indicated that Indian forces orchestrated the incident to malign Pakistan during the visit of the US President.
Judging by the past pattern, it was no coincidence that the Pahalgam false flag operation of 22 April took place in IIOJK during the four-day visit of the US Vice President JD Vance to India from 21-24 April 2025. As in the past, India blamed Pakistan within the minutes of the bloody incident and launched a military attack on 6-7 May 2025, thus acting as the judge, jury and executioner. Military aggression by nuclear-armed India against a nuclear-armed Pakistan was yet another manifestation of India’s irresponsible and reprehensible nuclear behaviour.
According to former Home Minister of India, Palaniappan Chidambaram, there was no evidence of Pakistan’s involvement in the Pahalgam incident. During an interview with The Quint on 26 July 2025, Chidambaram emphasised that the Indian government is “unwilling to disclose what the National Investigation Agency has done all these weeks. Was the agency able to identify the terrorists? And where did they come from? For all we know they could be homegrown terrorists”.
Modi has used IIOJK as a laboratory to experiment with his false flag operations for political manipulation and electoral gains. Anando Bakhto, Senior Assistant Editor at the Frontline Magazine highlighted this trend in his article titled, “Terror before Elections: A Pattern” published on 31 July 2021, observing that “in recent years, there seems to be a pattern of elections being preceded by terror attacks, providing a perfect pretext to the government to go on an overdrive of ultranationalism.” Bakhto further noted that “exploiting national security issues and acts of terrorism to further political agendas and spur the electorate’s appetite for hypernationalism has long been the BJP’s staple of politics. The model, however, was perfected and turned more brazen with the emergence of Narendra Modi in Delhi’s power corridors in 2014”.
Former External Affairs Minister of India Yashwant Sinha, during an interview with Kapil Sibal on 21 May 2025, underscored that “Operation Sindoor, Pulwama, Uri, everything is for elections. The Pulwama terrorist attack was followed by 2019 general elections and now after the Pahalgam terror attack, the Bihar assembly elections are approaching”. This claim has been also validated by Sushant Singh who wrote in the “The Balakot Misdirection: How the Modi government drew political mileage out of a military failure” published in the Caravan Magazine on 1 March 2025, that the Modi government drew political mileage from the Pulwama episode, which was a military failure, enabling Modi to secure a second term with a massive victory in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
Similarly, during an interview with Karan Thapar for The Wire on 14 April 2023, former Governor of IIOJK Satya Pal Malik revealed that he was told by Modi and Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval to “keep quiet” over security lapses by the Home Ministry that led to the Pulwama incident in 2019. This was done because Modi wanted to use Pulwama to blame Pakistan for the benefit of his BJP government. The current governor of IIOJK Manoj Sinha has also admitted in an interview with the Times of India that the Pahalgam attack happened because of a grave security lapse by Indian security forces.
At the global level, it is now evident that under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi, India has lost its credibility and is isolated on the world stage owing to his war-mongering and manufactured narratives. India has suffered major diplomatic setbacks in the wake of its defeat in the recent four-day war against Pakistan. These include: (i) internationalisation of the Kashmir dispute; (ii) re-hyphenation of India and Pakistan; (iii) warming of Pakistan-US relations; and (iv) rejection of India’s attempts to blame Pakistan in the outcome documents of important meetings by the SCO, QUAD and BRICS. Also, India’s inability to serve as a “net security provider” in the Indo-Pacific region became evident after the resounding success of Operation Bunyanum Marsoos and the failure of Operation Sindoor.
The international community has refused to accept India’s narrative on the Pahalgam incident. At the domestic level, Modi’s inability to answer questions of his political opponents about the downing of six IAF aircraft by PAF, his silence on President Trump’s repeated assertion that he brokered the India-Pakistan ceasefire and the intelligence failure that resulted in Pahalgam have raised serious concerns about Modi’s handling of Operation Sindoor and cast a shadow on his political future. Operation Sindoor was a political, diplomatic and military failure due to Modi’s attempt to blend statecraft with religious symbolism.
As a result of this RSS-induced ideological intoxication, more Indian women lost their Sindoor. According to media reports, India lost more than 250 soldiers along the Line of Control (LoC). Many Indians have questioned the necessity of Operation Sindoor which actually ended up being “De-Sindoor” because of Pakistan’s superiority in military technology and training which has shattered India’s image of being the top dog in South Asia.
The writer is Associate Director (Research) at the Centre for International Strategic Studies Sindh (CISSS), Karachi.