Victory is in the mind, Army chief General Upendra Dwivedi underlined, while explaining Pakistan’s narrative management system during Operation Sindoor, which managed to convince its citizens that they had won in the recent conflict. That is how you influence the domestic population, adversary’s population, and the neutral population, Gen Dwivedi told a gathering at IIT Madras.
“Narrative management system is something which we realise in a big way because victory is in mind. It’s always in mind. If you ask a Pakistani whether you lost or won, he’d say, my chief has become field marshal, we must have won only, that’s why he has become field marshal,” said the Chief of Army Staff (COAS).
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.
Operation Sindoor was India’s response to the Pahalgam massacre, the deadliest terror attack in decades. On April 22, Pakistan-linked terrorists surrounded innocent tourists in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam and shot 26 of them dead.
As the country swelled with grief and anger, the forces executed a befitting response, targeting nine terror targets deep inside Pakistan and Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. Early May 7 morning, aerial attacks eliminated over 100 terrorists at these terror camps.
Three of the terrorists involved in the massacre were hunted down by the forces during Operation Mahadev last month.