(From left) IUML MP et Mohammad Bashir, BJP MP Bansuri Swaraj, BJD MP Sasamit Patra and Shiv Sena MP Srikanth Shinde arrive at IGI Airport in New Delhi on May 21, 2025, to leave UAE, Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leon. , Photo Credit: Annie
The decision to send India’s diplomatic messengers and representatives to various countries raises an important question to explain its position on recent combats with Pakistan and terrorist attacks: Is this an indication of active diplomacy’s performance power or assurance?
On the surface, this step can be seen as a strategic attempt to manage international perception, pre-scorched wrong, and to strengthen India’s standing as a responsible global actor. Nevertheless, in a world below the story is a more complex reality of validity, where perception often overtakes the fact, and cannot be taken for international sympathy. While the government’s domestic strategy in selecting members of the delegation and the political calculations behind it is a lot of debate centers, more important questions to worry about such a step, effectiveness and anticipated results.
In contemporary global order, it is no longer enough to act with self-judicial belief; States should continuously demonstrate their validity to the audience of colleagues, media and institutions. India’s outreach can certainly be seen as part of this performance. Its purpose is to explain to the international community that its military reaction has been calibrated, directed on non-state actors, and is essentially implied to protect its sovereignty against terrorism-not as an excuse to increase the old and unresolved national rivalry. From this angle, this step reflects a calculated strength: a belief that the case of India, if properly communicated, can take the moral high land and secure international solidarity.
But at the same time, such a widespread exercise requires greatly required for a built -in validity deficit. If the situation in India was completely beyond reprimand or was accepted universally, will such an explanation be necessary to have tourism? The fact that India should engage in diplomatic explanation, a concern suggests that its actions can be done incorrectly, can be done wrong, or lose in the noise of global crises. In this sense, this effort not only reflects the desire to claim control over the story, but also has a silent recognition of the fragility of the international opinion.
Reliability crisis
This vulnerability is amplified in an era when misinformation travels faster than official briefing. Recent examples during the India-Pakistan struggle show how false false facts become in public imagination. Older video footage, unrelated disaster clips, and even digital war sports scenes have been broadcast online and passed as a real -time evidence of military operations or civil victims. These are not state-proposed manipulations alone; They are generated and shared by general users. Nationalist enthusiasm, emotional response, or a tornado of digital mischief was caught. Both Indian and Pakistani social media users have shared sensational materials which are fabricated. AI-borne pictures and deepfecks complicate the picture, as they become difficult to detect.
In such an environment, the attempt to set India’s record straight may look like floating upwards, especially when people from both sides have already made their mind based on viral clips and emotionally charged stories.
Then, what is the implication of this collapse of credibility in the news? Does anyone now care about a publicly verified information? Or the idea of the news has been influenced by itself and absorbed into a large game of performance, where the truth only matters the insofar because it confirms the prejudice of someone already existing? This erosion of faith creates a deep philosophical crisis. The old saying is that “the first casualties of the truth war” were limited to the argument of state secrecy – governments in the name of national interest governments hiding facts from their citizens. At the end of World War II, the Radio address of the Japanese emperor never mentioned the word “surrender”, but said that the war was not necessary for the benefit of Japan. ” It was an elite strategy to soften the state-acceptance, reality.
Today, however, the deformation of truth is no longer the top-down alone-it is bottom-up, lateral and participation. Citizens actively produce lies that they want to believe, and in doing so, dissolve a lot of difference between truth and confusion.
This situation is powerful with the stimulating claim of the gene boderlard that “the Gulf War did not occur.” That did not mean that the bombs were not demolished or people did not die. Instead, he argued that the war was completely eaten as a spectacle – television, mediation, edited – such as the reality of war was displaced by its simulation. In our time, this idea is almost literal: Simulated now override the real in public perception.
The end of reliable news represents a deep loss in the realm of humanities, where the meaning, fiction and moral clarity chase is central. Without the possibility of shared facts, even the argument becomes impossible. The disagreement determines the agreement on the original basis of what is happening. When that land collapses, what lives is not a debate but disorientation.
In this sense, India’s diplomatic campaign is not just a strategic function of persuasion – it also represents a fight to restore the conditions under which the persuasion is meaningful. It is not clear whether this effort indicates the entry of vulnerability or a revaluation of strength-attempts to re-confirm the authenticity of the country, lies in the accumulated legacy of the years of non-union movement.
However, if this effort fails, no amount of military precision or moral clarity will matter, as the audience will no longer be able to separate a appropriate action from a manufactured confusion.
Therefore, the deep question is not whether India can explain itself to the world, but whether the world still retains a framework within which such clarification is heard as a truth and is not rejected as just another version of the story.
It is to lose that losing more than reliability – this is to lose our last dialect for politics of authenticity.
TT Srikumar Professor, University of English and Foreign Language is Hyderabad
Published – May 22, 2025 02:08 am IST