Poorer Pakistan is not a competitor to India. So why does the Indian media seem obsessed with it?
· Scroll
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This week, Pakistani media is running measured analysis on Field Marshal Asim Munir’s calls with US President Donald Trump, Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar’s shuttle diplomacy and the extraordinary tightrope walk between Washington, Tehran, Riyadh, and Beijing. Indian media is running wall-to-wall coverage of the same story, oscillating with impressive speed between fury, denial and indignant cope.
The asymmetry is not new. It is a documented pathology with an international paper trail.
Pakistan appears on India’s front pages every single day. Every channel. Without fail. When this obsession reached its operational peak during Operation Sindoor in May 2025, the results were documented by institutions that cannot be dismissed as hostile to India.
The New York Times ran a piece titled “How the Indian Media Amplified Falsehoods in the Drumbeat of War.” It reported that during a live military conflict between two nuclear-armed states, mainstream Indian news outlets engaged in the widespread dissemination of fabricated information, with “even credible journalists and mainstream news outlets running straight-up fabricated stories,” quoting Sumitra Badrinathan of the Reuters Institute.
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford published a detailed investigation titled Truth is the Casualty, documenting how Indian television “looked like an animated video game, with graphics and crude sounds”. The BBC and France 24 explicitly...