Useful Idiots

Eight months after the guns fell silent, Pakistan has done what India’s opposition and its attendant media ecosystem refused to do when it mattered: tell the truth. Ishaq Dar, Pakistan’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister, has now publicly acknowledged that Indian strikes under Operation Sindoor hit the Nur Khan airbase in Rawalpindi, damaging a key military installation and injuring personnel. The admission, delivered with customary Pakistani bluster about intercepted drones, nonetheless settles the central question that animated India’s loudest sceptics – which is that India penetrated deep, hit hard and forced a response.

It is to be hoped that this admission from the horse’s mouth finally demolishes a cottage industry of crass insinuation, scepticism and outright derision against the Modi government that has flourished among the Opposition, particularly the Congress, and sections of India’s purportedly ‘progressive’ media class.

At the time of Sindoor, in a bid to eagerly echo Pakistan’s narrative, Rahul Gandhi and the Congress he claims to lead, assisted by a familiar chorus of retired strategists, freelance alarmists and the so-called ‘left-liberal’ press, rushed to question not merely the execution of Operation Sindoor, but its very legitimacy. Commentators at these outlets strained to suggest that India had blundered or had been tactically outmanoeuvred. Some even implied that Pakistan had emerged stronger, an argument that now lies buried under Islamabad’s own reluctant confession.

For such people, the Indian Armed forces are always suspect while Pakistani claims deserve the benefit of the doubt and any assertion of Indian state capacity must be punctured before it grows inconvenient.

Democracies debate strategy after wars, not during them. To insist in mid-conflict that one’s own country has failed on the basis of Pakistani statements and speculative analysis suggests less a hunger for truth than a reflexive discomfort with national success. Dar’s admission overturns months of confident commentary that claimed it was India that had escalated foolishly or blundered.

What explains this chronic error of judgment? The Congress, long stripped of strategic credibility, finds it easier to attack than to articulate a coherent worldview of its own. Gandhi’s interventions, heavy on insinuation and light on evidence, betray this incoherence.

The media ecosystem that orbits him compounds the problem. Platforms styling themselves as ‘guardians of democracy’ have grown addicted to the thrill of calling Modi’s India ‘wrong’ at every step.

None of this argues for blind nationalism or the suspension of scrutiny. Military operations deserve examination and governments must be held to account. But evidence matters, and so does basic intellectual honesty.

Those who proclaimed Indian ‘defeat’ during Sindoor should now find the humility to admit error. The question is do they have the courage to apologize to Indian armed forces they undermined, and to a public they misled? In a democracy, criticism is a right. But when criticism becomes indistinguishable from contempt for one’s own country, it ceases to enlighten. It exposes its authors as what Lenin once called “useful idiots.”