Welcome to Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief.
The highlights this week: The recent India-Pakistan crisis fuels a disinformation spiral, Bangladesh bans the activities of the once-powerful Awami League party, and Pakistan marks two years since violent protests targeting military facilities.
Disinformation Spirals in India and Pakistan
The most dangerous India-Pakistan confrontation in decades came to an end over the weekend after a cease-fire went into effect. The crisis yielded numerous unsettling takeaways, chief among them being the willingness of both nuclear states to deploy significant force. Each side launched missiles and drones deep into the other’s territory to target military sites.
What also stands out is the dangerous escalation in use of another weapon: disinformation. An overload of misleading information or propaganda during conflict inflames emotions and increases miscalculation risks. It also heightens the possibility of a boy-who-cried-wolf effect: Confronted with frequent lies, people are more likely to be skeptical about accurate news.
Disinformation proliferated throughout the latest India-Pakistan crisis. Fact-checkers compiled social media threads showing how photos and videos purporting to depict the confrontation were actually images from other locations—and, in many cases, video games.
One of the most viral misleading posts, viewed nearly 1.5 million times on X, sought to pass off Iranian missile strikes on an Israeli air base last year as Indian missile strikes against Pakistan. Others made false claims, such as assertions that a female Indian pilot was shot down in Pakistan and boasts that Pakistani cyberattacks damaged 70 percent of India’s electricity grid.
Perhaps the most stunning examples of disinformation came late on Friday local time, when several Indian media outlets posted wildly inaccurate claims alleging that an insurgent group had seized the Pakistani city of Quetta; that the port of Karachi, Pakistan’s financial capital, was destroyed; and that Pakistani Army chief Asim Munir was arrested.
The World Economic Forum recently ranked India as the country most at risk for misinformation and disinformation. But false reports surged in Pakistan during the crisis as well. Examples ranged from reports of internal dissension within the Indian military to boasts of Pakistani hackers breaching Indian military networks. The Pakistani government’s official X account even used a clip from a video game to depict its military actions against India.
Of course, the use of disinformation during military crises, including between India and Pakistan, is not new. But the emergence of social media as a powerful multiplier has made propaganda and misinformation campaigns more potent—especially in these two countries, where internet penetration and social media usage rates have surged in recent years.
But two factors help explain the recent flood of false content. One is the crisis itself: It featured intense amounts of kinetic action—the most since a brief India-Pakistan conflict in 1999—and it played out over several days. There was plenty of fodder to misrepresent. And such a serious crisis meant that emotions were high and the desire for real-time information was strong, creating incentive for more content.
Further, the emergence of artificial intelligence technology loomed large. AI-generated disinformation—including deepfake videos depicting a Pakistani military officer acknowledging the loss of jets and U.S. President Donald Trump vowing to “erase Pakistan”—supplemented other false reports. The popularity of AI produced an online spectacle: Many social media users asked Grok, X’s AI tool, to indicate if unverified claims were true.
For India and Pakistan, the stability implications of shifts in their uses of technology—from deploying drones on the battlefield to weaponizing AI—are especially concerning. They raise the risk that the next crisis will be even more escalatory than this one, which was arguably the most serious India-Pakistan standoff since both formally became nuclear states in 1998.
What We’re Following
India-Pakistan ties remain tense. The Friday cease-fire that ended the India-Pakistan crisis got off to a shaky start, with each side claiming that the other had violated the agreement soon after it was implemented. However, neither has since reported any further violations, and the situation has stabilized considerably.
Pakistan reopened its airspace on Saturday, and India reopened 32 airports on Monday. Both countries’ directors-general of military operations also used a hotline on Monday to hold talks about maintaining the cease-fire.
However, the broader state of relations between India and Pakistan remains extremely tense. None of the nonmilitary steps taken earlier in the crisis have been reversed. Their main land border remains closed, trade is still halted, diplomatic presences are downsized, and the Indus Waters Treaty is still suspended.
Additionally, public statements by top leaders have been far from conciliatory. On Saturday, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said that Pakistan had triumphed over Indian “aggression,” and that India had learned a lesson. On Monday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered a blistering address to his nation and warned that India won’t “differentiate” between terrorists and their government sponsors from now on.
Bangladesh bans Awami League activities. Bangladesh’s interim government announced on Saturday that all activities of the Awami League, former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s political party, will be banned under the country’s anti-terrorism act. The ban will remain in place until trials conclude for party leaders accused of complicity in a brutal crackdown on mass protests last year.
According to the United Nations, as many as 1,400 people may have died in the crackdown; Hasina resigned under pressure from the protests in August. Bangladesh announced the ban on Awami League activities a few days of new protests in Dhaka calling for such a measure.
Then, on Wednesday, Bangladesh’s election commission suspended the Awami League’s registration, essentially banning it from contesting elections, which will likely happen within a year. Sidelining the Awami League could worsen long-standing polarization in Bangladesh, hamper the restoration of democracy, and raise questions about the credibility of the truth and reconciliation commission that Dhaka intends to set up to promote national unity.
But the government’s rationale is easy to understand: The Awami League has refused to apologize for or acknowledge its excesses, defiantly blaming others for the violence last year. And given the public anger directed at the former ruling party, officials likely fear that Awami League mobilizations—especially during campaign activities—could turn violent.
Pakistan marks two years since violent protests. Last Friday was the two-year anniversary of the large protests that swept across Pakistan in response to the arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan. Some of the demonstrations turned violent and targeted military facilities, including the home of a lieutenant general in Lahore and military monuments in Islamabad.
Violent protests targeting Pakistan’s powerful military are extremely rare. The military called May 9, 2023, a “black day,” and some of its supporters likened the protests to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. The protests also marked a turning point in a growing confrontation between the military and Khan, along with his large support base.
After the protests, which Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party said were a false flag operation orchestrated by the military itself, Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership ramped up a clampdown on Khan and his supporters.
The government controversially decided to hold military trials for the demonstrators who are accused of involvement in the attacks on military targets. Military courts have so far sentenced 85 PTI activists to prison terms ranging from two years to 10 years, and more than three dozen appeals have been filed. But last week, Pakistan’s Supreme Court ruled that the appeals don’t hold up to judicial scrutiny and that the military trials should continue.
Under the Radar
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that it will remove protections for Afghans residing in the United States to ensure that they won’t be deported to Afghanistan. The change is scheduled to go into effect on July 12.
The conditions, known as temporary protected status (TPS), were implemented for Afghans under former U.S. President Joe Biden. The TPS designation is meant to ensure that Afghans won’t have to return to a country deemed to be too dangerous for them.
But the Trump administration says that the protections are no longer needed because economic and security conditions in Afghanistan have sufficiently improved. This may be true to an extent: The end of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan in August 2021 restored a semblance of stability. Still, the Islamic State-Khorasan is a potent threat in the country.
The Taliban’s return to power also means that many of the nearly 200,000 Afghans who fled to the United States after the fall of Kabul—women, religious and ethnic minorities, as well as others who worked for the pre-Taliban Afghan government or for NATO militaries—would face significant danger. Finally, humanitarian conditions in Afghanistan remain dire.
The Trump administration’s decision puts the roughly 10,000 Afghans with TPS in a serious bind. They will hope for relief, and at least one lawsuit has already been filed on their behalf.
FP’s Most Read This Week
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- Joseph Nye Was the Champion of a World That No Longer Exists by Suzanne Nossel
- Modi Has Changed India’s Military Doctrine by Anchal Vohra
Regional Voices
In the Daily Star, economist Fahmida Khatun argues that Bangladesh’s new budget can deliver economic boosts. “The FY2025-26 budget presents a critical opportunity for Bangladesh to recalibrate its fiscal policies and lay the groundwork for sustainable economic growth,” she writes. “[T]he interim government can navigate the current economic challenges and set the stage for a more resilient future.”
In the Nepali Times, journalist Chandra Kishore writes that the India-Pakistan crisis had significant implications for Nepal, including more intense policing of its border with India. “The two sides of Punjab in India and Pakistan may be 2,000km away, but the war between two South Asian neighbours sent aftershocks here to the India-Nepal border,” he writes.
An anonymous letter to the editor in the Daily Mirror expresses concern about the rising number of road accidents in Sri Lanka: “People place their ultimate trust in public transport; but when drivers show careless attitudes, who will be held accountable for these shortcomings? No amount of compensation can replace the value of a life.”
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