The missiles land, the satellites photograph, the analysts count craters. The kinetic war has evidence. The information war has something more dangerous: it has reach. When Pakistani social media accounts falsely claimed to have destroyed India's S-400 system in Adampur — a claim debunked when Prime Minister Modi visited the base days later and posed with the intact system — the false claim had already been seen by tens of millions. The correction was seen by fewer. In the modern conflict, this asymmetry is not a side effect. It is the strategy.
T1 AI-generated deepfakes: The 2025 India-Pakistan conflict was the first large-scale South Asian confrontation where AI-generated content played a central role in shaping public perception, per the International Federation of Journalists. The deepfake of PM Modi used AI voice cloning and lip-sync technology to deliver an entirely fabricated concession narrative. Indian media, separately, aired animated footage of Indian missiles intercepting Pakistani drones — presented without clear simulation labelling. Both sides participated in the AI content ecosystem. One side weaponised it offensively.
Bot networks and coordinated amplification: The Observer Research Foundation's October 2025 report documented that Pakistani information campaigns featured bot networks operating across Pakistan, Nepal, China, and Gulf diaspora communities. The bot density and reposting frequency matched "paid engagement networks" — the same pattern previously documented in Russian and Iranian operations. During Sindoor, hashtag campaigns including #IndianFalseFlag were deployed within hours of the Pahalgam attack, framing India's response as premeditated aggression before the evidence had been assessed by anyone.
Cyber operations as information force multipliers: T1 Between April 22 and May 10, 2025, India faced over 2,500 targeted cyber entities, more than 1,000 documented cyber incidents, and 1.5 million cyberattack attempts. The attacks targeted defence, finance, and telecommunications. Pakistan-linked threat actors deployed ransomware, DDoS attacks, data breaches, and malware. One specific claim — that Pakistani hackers had disabled 70 percent of the Indian power grid on May 10 — was false and was the kind of claim designed not to be operationally true but to be psychologically destabilising. The distinction between a cyberattack as an operation and a cyberattack claim as a narrative weapon is often missed in coverage. Pakistan used both.
Textbook rewriting: Within months of the conflict, Pakistani school history books carried a chapter on "Operation Bunyan-Um-Marsoos" framing Pakistan's response as a decisive victory. An image of the textbook page was shared with ORF researchers by the Indian Army. This is not a post-conflict information operation. It is a multi-generational one. Pakistan's narrative about Sindoor will be taught to Pakistani children as institutional fact. India's counter-narrative will not reach them.
Think-tank capture: T3 The Pakistan China Institute (PCI) — a Islamabad think-tank headed by Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed, described by the Vivekananda International Foundation as "a known acolyte of the Pakistan military" — published a paper titled "16 Hours that Reshaped South Asia: How Modi's Miscalculation Led to Pakistan's Primacy." The paper systematically omitted the events of May 8–9 (when India destroyed the HQ-9 and LY-80 systems), presented only Pakistan's offensive operations, and made no mention of Pakistan seeking the ceasefire via the DGMO hotline on May 10. It was positioned as independent analysis and distributed through international think-tank networks. The packaging was academic. The content was military propaganda. The distinction is increasingly invisible to readers who do not have access to the underlying evidence.
Pakistan cannot win a sustained conventional war with India. It has therefore invested for decades in the infrastructure of making military outcomes ambiguous — or reversible — in the public mind. ISPR's operational budget matches the Air Force's because in Pakistan's strategic calculus, the narrative battlefield is as important as the physical one. India does not have an equivalent doctrine. It has not needed one against Pakistan. It will need one against China.
T2 The fundamental mismatch during Sindoor was doctrinal, not technical. India's military communications apparatus was designed for a pre-social-media era: announce results after verification, do not engage with enemy claims until debunked, maintain operational security as the primary constraint. These are sound principles. They are also irrelevant to an information environment where the Pakistani claim that an S-400 was destroyed circulates to 50 million people in 40 minutes, and the Indian denial — accurate, documented, eventually confirmed by the Prime Minister's visit — follows 72 hours later to 5 million.
The structural challenge is that India is a democracy with an adversarial domestic media environment, and Pakistan is a military state with a controlled media environment. ISPR can coordinate a single narrative across all Pakistani platforms within hours. India's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, PIB, CERT-In, and individual service public affairs commands operate independently. The Ministry issues a fact-check. The Air Force issues a statement. They do not contradict each other. They also do not reinforce each other with the timing, format, and platform coordination that modern information warfare requires.
T1 China's involvement in the Sindoor information theatre went beyond amplification. The ORF August 2025 brief on China-Pakistan collusive grey-zone warfare documented that China controls a significant portion of Pakistan's digital infrastructure — including satellite communications (PAKSAT-MM1 and MM2) and fibre-optic networks along the CPEC corridor. This is not incidental. An adversary that controls the physical communications infrastructure of a partner state has visibility into that state's information flows and the ability to shape them. The EU DisinfoLab's previous investigation into a Pakistan-linked network of fake media outlets — the "India Chronicles" — documented over 265 fake media outlets in 65 countries, with overlapping Chinese state media amplification. The playbook predates Sindoor. Sindoor activated it at its most visible scale yet.
The strategic logic for China is coherent: every hour that India spends managing Pakistan's information operations is an hour India is not focused on China. Every domestic division sown by disinformation targeting Indian Muslims, India's secular tradition, or India's democratic legitimacy serves China's broader interest in a distracted, internally contested India. China does not need to run the operation. It needs to provide the infrastructure and the amplification. Pakistan provides the content and the motivation. The division of labour is efficient.
The information war is not a sideshow. It is the primary theatre for a state like Pakistan that cannot match India kinetically. It is a useful instrument for China that wants to keep India's attention divided. And it is a genuinely unsolved problem for India, which is simultaneously a democracy that values press freedom and a security state that is losing the narrative in every crisis to adversaries who have no such constraints.
Operation Sindoor produced a clear kinetic result: Indian strikes were more precise, more damaging, and better verified than Pakistani ones. The information outcome was muddier: Pakistan's early claims circulated farther and faster than India's corrections. Months later, Pakistani schoolchildren are learning that Pakistan won. That is not an accident. It is a programme.
India has world-class engineers, a sophisticated IT sector, and a demonstrated capacity to build digital infrastructure at scale. What it lacks is a doctrine for information warfare that is compatible with its democratic values — and the political will to build one. The invisible war does not pause while India debates whether to fight it.