India’s decision to place the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance after the Pahalgam terror attack appears to have triggered more than diplomatic concern in Islamabad.
According to a leaked briefing attributed to Pakistan’s Directorate General of Inter-Services Public Relations (DG ISPR), television anchors, digital influencers and media personalities were reportedly tasked with mounting a coordinated campaign against India.
The objective was to portray India as a country on the brink of fragmentation, amplify the Khalistan movement, attack the Modi government and rally international opinion over the Indus dispute.
Among the more imaginative ideas was an apparent attempt to claim the Indus Valley Civilisation as Pakistan’s historical inheritance, in the hope of strengthening its case over the Indus river system.
It is certainly an ambitious proposition.
Pakistan is younger than the refrigerator, the jet engine and the United Nations. The Indus Valley Civilisation, by contrast, is over 5,000 years old. Yet Rawalpindi now appears eager to wrap itself in the prestige of a civilisation that disappeared nearly five millennia before Pakistan itself came into being.
History, however, is not inherited by geographical accident. If ancient civilisations conferred modern sovereign rights, Italy could reopen the Roman Senate tomorrow morning. Archaeology is part of humanity’s shared heritage, not a title deed to twenty-first century geopolitics.
Mohenjo-daro and Harappa lie inside Pakistan because Sir Cyril Radcliffe drew a border for British India in 1947, not because their builders left behind instructions for future diplomats. Ancient bricks do not issue modern water rights.
The reported briefing also urges the media to convince audiences that India is approaching inevitable fragmentation.
There is something almost reassuring about the consistency. For nearly eight decades Pakistan has predicted India’s imminent collapse—after wars, insurgencies, elections and almost every domestic political crisis. If persistence alone determined truth, Rawalpindi would have settled the argument sometime in the 1970s.
Instead, India kept confounding the prophecy.
It weathered political shocks, remained a functioning democracy, emerged as one of the world’s largest economies and steadily expanded its global influence. Democracies are noisy, argumentative and frequently untidy, but that is because they are designed to absorb disagreement rather than suppress it.
The irony, of course, is that these predictions come from a country grappling with insurgency in Balochistan, deteriorating ties with Afghanistan, a major anti-government uprising in Occupied Jammu and Kashmir, recurring terrorist attacks and chronic economic fragility. Pakistan currently holds the record for the highest number of bailout programs with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) globally.
Even Pakistani commentators have questioned whether the establishment is investing more effort in scripting India’s crises than confronting its own.
Then comes the obligatory Khalistan chapter.
Like an ageing actor who insists on appearing in every sequel, it faithfully returns whenever Pakistan’s information machinery requires a familiar plot. The movement undoubtedly retains visibility among sections of the Sikh diaspora, particularly in North America, Canada and parts of the United Kingdom.
But social media campaigns and community-hall referendums abroad are not political reality in Punjab, where repeated elections have shown little appetite for separatism. The distance between trending hashtags and electoral legitimacy remains inconveniently wide.
The leaked directives also reportedly encourage media outlets to amplify criticism of the Indian government voiced by opposition leaders. That may be the most revealing instruction of all.
Pakistan seeks to weaponise precisely what distinguishes India from itself: a democracy where governments are criticised openly, opposition leaders challenge those in power without requiring military approval, and elections—not generals—determine political legitimacy. Democratic argument is untidy, often bruising and occasionally unpleasant. It is not evidence of impending state collapse.
The broader purpose of the campaign is difficult to miss. Pakistan today faces an economy under strain, persistent internal insecurity, rising separatist violence and increasingly troubled relations with Afghanistan. Water mismanagement has compounded its vulnerabilities.
Against that backdrop, India becomes the ideal distraction. It is easier to accuse New Delhi of weaponising rivers than to explain why decades of poor planning have left Pakistan’s own water infrastructure in such precarious condition.
Then comes the familiar nuclear rhetoric. Pakistani officials periodically suggest that interference with the Indus waters could trigger catastrophic consequences, accompanied by reminders of the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Such statements are intended to project resolve but often achieve the opposite. Threatening nuclear escalation over water management is rather like threatening to burn down your own house because the neighbour has disputed the boundary wall.
India, meanwhile, should resist the temptation to answer propaganda with propaganda. Every troll account does not require an official rebuttal, nor does every hashtag deserve strategic importance.
New Delhi’s response should remain measured, institutional and rooted in facts.
It should defend the legal case on the Indus Waters Treaty, expose disinformation with evidence, build permanent capabilities to counter information warfare instead of improvising during crises, and let Pakistan’s own governance failures speak for themselves. Credibility is a strategic asset, outrage rarely is.
The greatest advantage India possesses is one that Pakistan cannot manufacture through coordinated messaging: it does not need to borrow history.
The Indus Valley Civilisation belongs to the shared heritage of South Asia and to the wider story of human civilisation. Pakistan is perfectly entitled to celebrate that inheritance. What it cannot do is transform a Bronze Age civilisation into legal evidence for twenty-first century geopolitical claims any more than Britain can claim the Roman Empire because Hadrian’s Wall still stands.
The leaked memo ultimately reveals less about India than about the anxieties of Pakistan’s military establishment. Countries confident of their future rarely spend so much energy trying to appropriate someone else’s past.
A nation born in 1947 trying to annex five thousand years of civilisation is not practising strategic communication. It is conducting an archaeological land grab.
And like most land grabs founded on fantasy, it is unlikely to survive contact with the facts.
