Operation Sindoor: The Troll Tax

When people woke up on May 7 after Operation Sindoor unfolded during the night, the reality was starkly different from the drama that had been building up on television until then. Islamabad hadn’t been captured, Karachi Port was intact, and the anticipated escalation along the border with Pakistan had failed to materialise. No intensification of the conflict. No ‘annihilation’ of the western neighbour. What was written into the next chapter also wasn’t escalation—it was a ceasefire, announced early in the evening of May 10.

It was an unexpected letdown for trolls and hyper-nationalists, after viral posts and TV broadcasts had continuously fuelled war rhetoric. They now demanded their first victim: unsuspecting Foreign Secretary, Vikram Misri. Late on the same evening, the moment he announced violations by Pakistan of the ceasefire agreement, online trolls unleashed a barrage of invectives on him and his family, forcing him to protect his tweets and retreat from public view.

Ever since the terrorist attack that killed 26 Indian tourists in Pahalgam, Kashmir on April 22, social media had become a parallel warfront. It was flooded with viral posts, aggressive hashtags and doctored footage that amplified war rhetoric and fanned public outrage. Even after the ceasefire was declared, the digital noise grew louder, exerting pressure on the government to act and dragging the narrative back towards escalation.

“With some TV channels whipping up emotions based on events that never happened—and with trolls and other online influencers spreading those sort of untruths—we’re not far from a time when fake information outweighs the real,” cautions Pavan Duggal, a cyberlaw expert and Supreme Court advocate.

In response to the escalating rhetoric, the Indian government’s response was swift. It used its executive powers to ask X (formerly known as Twitter) to ban over 8,000 accounts allegedly violating laws related to national security. The move, however, sparked concerns over how misinformation was being curbed, and free speech safeguarded, as it did not stem the tide of misinformation available online or propagated by TV channels. There’s a reason why it didn’t: trolling has become an inexpensive proposition, and virtual armies are no longer led by a handful of influential leaders with vast followings.

Today, just a few hundred rupees a month for a blue tick, and a dozen followers are enough to spark an online storm. The key is that they echo a lead follower. So, if United States President Donald Trump writes on X that India and Pakistan have decided to announce a ceasefire, simply amplifying that message is enough to make it go viral, no matter the number of followers.

Interestingly, that is where the government decided to intervene, says a spokesperson for the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), which oversees orders to X and other online platforms to withhold content. “We asked the intermediary [X] to act against content with viral potential that could cause harm, such as by affecting the morale of the armed forces,” he says, adding that the government has legal powers under the Information Technology Act to control “misinformation campaigns and anti-national activities”. He said some blocked X handles were un-banned after the content deemed risky was “deleted”.

“The problem is that the government sought to control the flood of disinformation by exercising its discretionary power, and in secret,” says Apar Gupta, a Delhi-based advocate and founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation. (The MeitY spokesperson clarified that no list of banned X handles has been released to the public, making the action opaque). “It appears to have selectively applied regulation to media outlets and X accounts, and those that raised questions were presumed to be a threat to national security, and not heard,” says Gupta.

While advisories were issued for TV news coverage during Operation Sindoor, broadcasts remained sensational and continued war-mongering, despite the implications for national security and India’s role in the world. “Perhaps, the government got the accounts blocked as per its own political interests along with [addressing] national security [concerns],” says Gupta.

But the biggest ever order to block handles did not control the outpouring of trolls’ vitriol. The Misri case is a perfect illustration of this. Within days, demands arose on social media that India downgrades ties with Turkiye. This added to the diplomatic disaster caused by right-wing YouTuber Major (Retd.) Gaurav Arya, who denounced, in distasteful language, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, who visited India to commemorate 75 years of the India-Iran Friendship Treaty and discuss bilateral issues.

Arya’s language—apparently sparked by Araghchi visiting Pakistan before he came to India—forced the Indian embassy in Iran to distance itself from his remarks, which invited a sharp reaction from the Iranian Embassy in India. Similarly, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Member of Parliament Kangana Ranaut recently withdrew a tweet after instructions from her party. She had asked her 2.9 million (29 lakh) followers on X why the American President had told Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, not to expand iPhone manufacturing in India. Then, comparing Prime Minister Narendra Modi favourably with Trump, she had written: “This is personal jealousy or diplomatic insecurity?”

On May 15, five days after the conclusion of Operation Sindoor, sudden calls were raised to boycott Turkiye. Promoted by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh affiliate Swadeshi Jagran Manch, trolls amplified its call. The country came under attack from both Hindutva organisations and hyper-nationalist mobs, who accused it of having supplied arms to Pakistan—arms it is said to have deployed in the recent skirmishes. This rhetoric reached a point where private travel companies halted tour bookings to Turkiye and universities such as Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jamia Millia Islamia put on hold Memorandums of Understanding with Turkish educational institutions.

“Fascinatingly, the trolls are upset with Turkiye and want trade restrictions against it—not China, which is known to supply far more arms to Pakistan,” says M. Reyaz, who teaches at the department of Journalism and Mass Communication at Aliah University, Kolkata. “These incidents—Turkiye and Misri—reflect the upset feelings within the right-wing ecosystem. It’s a manifestation of the anger against the government, but they are making a scapegoat of Misri. Trolling also is a way of channelising anger, so people never demand accountability,” he says.

So, does the buck stop elsewhere—perhaps not at Misri, Turkiye, or Iran? If social media trolls attack a top government official, or demand escalation of the conflict with Pakistan, is it, along with telecasting misinformation, not adversely affecting national interest, or is their doing so acceptable for some reason?

According to the MeitY spokesperson: “Our priority is to halt false and misleading information regarding India that has a viral potential on social media, and is seen by Indians. Even if we presume that there was such information about Pakistan and its losses; that’s the responsibility of Pakistan to control. That’s the law of war at work.”

It’s a slightly difficult logic to follow, since, for instance, Pakistan defence minister Khawaja Asif’s Sky 타이산카지노 interview, admitting that Islamabad had backed terrorist groups, went viral in India and internationally. “The same thing applies to India—online content crosses borders, so what beams on TV news channels here reaches the world,” says Gagan Jain, Chief Technology Officer at Cyber Safe, a Bengaluru-based information security firm. This is why many Indians are calling the trolls a security risk themselves, for demanding war and weighing into foreign policy matters.

Conflicts can whip up a heady mix of nationalist rhetoric anywhere but the context can make all the difference. “In India, the population isn’t opposing the government, unlike the situation in, say, the United States during the Vietnam War, when American people had turned against their government over the violence, injuries and huge losses. However, where the media stokes ultranationalist sentiment, like in India of late, you cannot restore sanity easily—the TRPs depend on that not happening,” says Srinivas Kodali, a Hyderabad-based researcher and advocate for open data and cyber security standards.

TV news presented actions taken by the armed forces in highly emotive language, sought retributive action against Pakistan, and claimed more injuries across the border than were delivered—far in excess of what satisfied the Indian government’s strategic goals. The biggest victim in this process became TV news itself, which lost the little credibility it had. “Now, we’re at a point where unless news becomes not-for-profit, viewers won’t believe it,” says Kodali.

The crisis partly arises from the latest technological enhancements in warfare, replete with drones, missiles and other lethal flying objects—TV news seems to be imitating drone camera footage, blurring the border between the two. “Wars may be televised, but war and conflict are not movies,” says Kodali, suggesting that makeshift studios resembling military war rooms are not real, and shouldn’t pretend to be.

Besides, media content has a psychological effect. If people can be made to imagine the destruction of Karachi Port, then, logically, they can be convinced that the government has fulfilled its promise of unprecedented action against Pakistan after the Pahalgam terrorist attack—although, in reality, the port was never destroyed.

“If you start feeding the online mob with such hyper-nationalist information, you cannot suddenly stop, or there will be a frenzy. The bottom line is that you cannot control the mob, as we’re realising after recent events,” says Kodali.

According to cyber security experts, another complication to the scenario was the mass creation of social media accounts, starting on day one of Operation Sindoor, with many of them indicating their origin in Pakistan. This trend picked up alarmingly in the next couple of days as accounts purporting to be of Indian military staff—people impersonating army generals and so on—mushroomed.

“Such accounts were sending absolutely incorrect reports about drone attacks, missiles falling, and so on. That launched the social media competition [between India and Pakistan],” says Jain. It set off a chain reaction: when people realised on 7 May that TV news was unreliable, they shifted to social media. “But social media already had people spreading misinformation, so things snowballed,” he says.

“Of course, now, people are fighting this, including fact-checkers, and things will return to normal,” he says, adding that the government’s regular press conferences also helped cool tempers.

But in the process, has India’s soft power, its goodwill, been eroded? Incidents like Arya or calls against Turkiye show that social media and TV news can have a negative outcome, especially when war hysteria is whipped up, including by the ruling party. That started when the name of a military operation was emotively packaged and made into a spectacle, effectively burying questions: Who were the four terrorists who gunned down the tourists? What is the current security situation in Pahalgam? In the end, Operation Sindoor wasn’t just a military episode—it was a mirror held up to the nation, in which it saw trolls.

Pragya Singh is senior assistant editor, 해외카지노. She is based in Delhi

This article is part of 해외카지노’s 1 June 2025 issue, 'Gated Neighbourhood', which examines the state of diplomacy, media, and democracy in the wake of the ceasefire. It appeared in print as 'The Troll Tax.'