Chennai: Army chief General Upendra Dwivedi has hit out at Pakistan for creating a false narrative regarding the outcome of Operation Sindoor. Despite being brought to its knees by India in the four-day conflict, Pakistan attempted to mislead people by promoting Asim Munir to the rank of Field Marshal, Gen Dwivedi said at an event in IIT, Madras.
According to him, through such ‘narrative management’, Pakistan managed to convince its own population, the adversary’s population and the neutral population that things had gone in its favour.
“Narrative management played a crucial role for Pakistan during and after Operation Sindoor. After all, victory is in the mind. If you ask a Pakistani whether he lost or won, he would say, my chief has become field marshal, so we must have won. Why else would he get promoted,” Gen Dwivedi said.
The Indian forces countered Pakistan’s strategy in their own way – using social media and other platforms to convey their message to the masses.
“Strategic messaging was very important, and that’s why the first messaging that we did was, ‘Justice Done’. That hit the maximum, I am told, in the world today, the number of hits which we received,” he said.
The strategic messaging was “simple” but travelled worldwide, the COAS underlined, pointing to the press conferences held by two women officers of the Indian Army and Indian Air Force.
“The logo which you see all over the world was created by a Lieutenant Colonel and an NCO. We prepared all this. When we were going in for these kinds of operations, we were also going for these things (strategic messaging) because the narrative management system is important. It took a lot of time and a lot of effort,” said the Army chief.
Gen Dwivedi also shared with the IIT-M faculty and students how the intelligence-led operation marked a doctrinal shift. He compared the military operation with the game of chess, where the enemy’s next move could not be guessed.
“In Operation Sindoor, we played chess. We did not know what the enemy’s next move was going to be, and what we were going to do. This is called the grey zone. Grey zone means that we are not going for the conventional operations. What we are doing is just short of a conventional operation. We were making the chess moves, and he (enemy) was also making the chess moves. Somewhere, we were giving them the checkmate and somewhere we were going in for the kill at the risk of losing our own, but that’s (what) life is all about,” Gen Dwivedi told the gathering.
He also repeated what Air Chief Marshal A P Singh had said regarding “political will” that gave a free hand to the forces to decide their next move. “On April 23, a day after the Pahalgam terror attack, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh sat down with the chiefs of the Indian armed forces, and exclaimed, “Enough is enough”, the Army chief recalled.
“All three chiefs were very clear that something had to be done. A free hand was given: “You decide what is to be done”. That is the kind of confidence, political direction, and political clarity we saw for the first time. That is what raises your morale. That is how it helped our army commanders-in-chief to be on the ground and act as per their wisdom,” he said.
