Balochistan in the Battle of Narratives: Pakistan’s Calculated Focus on India

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Pakistan blaming India for terror attacks bears hints of an old strategy to both obfuscate and distract from Pakistan’s own sponsorship of terrorism in India. However, in the nearly three months since Operation Sindoor, it is evident that this strategy has become more concerted, with both constant repetition of older allegations and fresh creativity in how these allegations are expressed. These claims are now resurfacing not merely as a follow-up to the attacks by insurgent groups on Pakistani security personnel, but also as part of official statements issued following intelligence-based counterinsurgency operations. Undeniably, what also stands out today is the timing, frequency, and specific terminologies employed to buttress such allegations, especially in the aftermath of the Pahalgam terror attack in April 2025.

Manufacturing Blame, Evading Accountability

Following the Pahalgam terror attack and before Operation Sindoor, the Director General of Inter-Services Public Relations (DG ISPR)—Pakistan Army’s media arm—held a series of press conferences, during which it alleged that Pakistan is a victim of Indian-sponsored terrorism. The claim was repeated ad nauseam even after the ceasefire, with Pakistan blaming India for militant attacks on its soil - an oft-repeated claim typically made following spikes in militant activity in Pakistan’s Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) provinces.

By stressing India’s purported role in fomenting instability, Islamabad, perhaps inadvertently, both appeared to be admitting to and justifying the Pahalgam attack as a tit-for-tat response to the March 2025 Jaffer Express hijack by the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA). After the hijack, there was increased alarm in India over the possibility that Pakistan might escalate terrorism in Kashmir to offset the ignominy it faced on the global stage after homegrown insurgents captured a train - a first in its history and a rare occurrence globally. In any case, a heightened state of alert usually prevails when the snow starts melting and the passes open, making infiltration easier for terrorists. Some observers have also retrospectively pointed to a speech delivered by Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff, General Asim Munir, as an indication of a planned terror attack, who had thundered that ‘Kashmir is Pakistan’s jugular vein’ just days before the Pahalgam incident.

That Pakistan went on to rechristen all Baloch insurgent groups as Fitna-al-Hindustan - a term suggesting that these groups act at India’s behest - in the aftermath of Operation Sindoor only confirms that blaming India and its intelligence agency has become Pakistan’s single-point Balochistan policy.

In its own calculations, Pakistan arguably believes that it succeeded in avenging the Jaffer Express incident in four ways: striking at the heart of the ‘normalcy’ narrative in Kashmir by targeting its economic mainstay, i.e., the tourism sector; demonstrating its ability to orchestrate attacks in Kashmir despite Pakistan’s own deteriorating economic and security situation; draw international attention to the Kashmir issue which India treats as a strictly bilateral problem, and reassert its strategic relevance by undermining India’s de-hyphenation policy. Moreover, the crisis also allowed freshly elevated Field Marshal Asim Munir to improve his popularity ranking—and the Army’s by extension—which had dipped, not least due to keeping the most popular politician, Imran Khan, behind bars. By all indications, this objective was achieved. Take, for instance, a recent Gallup Pakistan survey, which shows that 93 percent of its respondents reported an improvement in their opinion of the military. After all, a perceived external threat from India has long been the Pakistan Army’s raison d’être, upon which the latter has erected its edifice of power and legitimacy.

With the Pahalgam attack yielding these perceived successes, Pakistan has subsequently sought to keep the focus on India - especially in Balochistan. To be sure, Pakistan used to parade surrendered Baloch militants as both trophies of its counterinsurgency efforts and supposed Indian proxies before the cameras. That Pakistan went on to rechristen all Baloch insurgent groups as Fitna-al-Hindustan - a term suggesting that these groups act at India’s behest - in the aftermath of Operation Sindoor only confirms that blaming India and its intelligence agency has become Pakistan’s single-point Balochistan policy. The complete absence of this term until mid-2025, along with its high-frequency use within a dense timeline in the last two months alone, undermines the credibility of Pakistan’s claims and further testifies to their manufactured nature.

The DG-ISPR now also has a proclivity for construing extensive Indian media coverage of attacks in Balochistan by homegrown insurgents as proof of Indian involvement or endorsement. Notwithstanding the inherent flaws in its reasoning, it remains objectively true that the Balochistan insurgency is a hot-button issue for media across the region and beyond. This is true not only because it is one of the longest-running but also decidedly among the region’s deadliest insurgencies, showing no signs of petering out. Pakistan’s failure to provide the Baloch their rightful share in the resource-extraction economy, redress their legitimate grievances, and empower them cross-sectorally ensures that these attacks continue.

Figure: A list of allegations levelled by Pakistan against India post-Pahalgam

Source: Author’s own

While Pakistan bears the cost of continuing Baloch insurgent attacks, it also uses these incidents to sustain its newly re-invented line of attack against India. For Pakistan, cementing this narrative is also a foreign policy priority. In late June 2025, during the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Defence Ministers’ Meeting, India refused to sign the proposed joint communique because it condemned the March 2025 Jaffar Express hijacking by the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), but conspicuously omitted any mention of the Pahalgam terror attack. That this omission, reportedly an upshot of Pakistan’s efforts backed by China, was projected as a narrative win for Pakistan was unsurprising. Then, came the joint statement from the 01 July  2025 Quad Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, which condemned the Pahalgam attack and called for the ‘perpetrators, organizers, and financiers’ to be brought to justice - yet, notably did so without mentioning Pakistan.

Lessons for India

Both during and after Op Sindoor, it is now evident that despite proving its mettle militarily, India has fallen short in shaping and sustaining its narrative against Pakistan. Perhaps one of the most telling signs of Pakistan’s narrative dominance came in early June, roughly a month after Operation Sindoor, when it secured key positions in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) subsidiary committees, most strikingly as the Vice Chair of the 1373 Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC). While these roles may not bestow Pakistan with any real power to undermine India’s diplomatic interests, their symbolic heft is hard to ignore – if not downright ironic, then certainly indicative of a narrative win, or, at the very least, a signal that Pakistan did not suffer a moral narrative loss on the global stage, despite its continued use of terrorism as a foreign policy instrument against India. With the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) condemning the Pahalgam attack (a rare move) and with the Indian government sending a dossier to the body, arguing in favour of pushing Pakistan back to its ‘grey list’, it appears as though India’s diplomatic manoeuvring is not yet over.

That military success must be complemented by winning the war of narratives, is now beginning to cement itself in India, especially when the opposing side (Pakistan in this case) is attempting to position itself as a victim of the very terrorism it is often accused of enabling.

The idea, that military success must be complemented by winning the war of narratives, is now beginning to cement itself in India, especially when the opposing side (Pakistan in this case) is attempting to position itself as a victim of the very terrorism it is often accused of enabling. While India dispatched seven multi-party delegations to scores of countries to explain its stance, much needs to be done diplomatically to secure the unqualified support of its neighbours and allies, given that no country explicitly held Pakistan responsible for the attack. Beyond that, recent events have underscored the need for New Delhi to move beyond reactive diplomacy and engage more proactively in shaping global opinion at multilateral forums. More so, as Pakistan's censure of India has become part of a calculated narrative shift, driven by its establishment’s inability to contain the militant threat in KP and Balochistan.

As deflecting blame onto India becomes an integral part of Pakistan’s counterterrorism toolkit, India ought to counter this narrative deftly – for example, by leveraging the abundant historical and globally accepted evidence of Pakistan being a haven for terrorists of all stripes. While Islamabad lacks any substantial proof to support its allegations, New Delhi possesses incontrovertible, verifiable evidence of Pakistan’s involvement in attacks on Indian soil, such as the 2001 Parliament attack and the 2008 Mumbai attacks. More recently, the United States’ (US) designation of The Resistance Front (TRF) - a Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyiba militant proxy responsible for the Pahalgam attack - as both a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO)’ and ‘Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT)’ spoke to the credibility of India’s claims, whilst undermining Pakistan’s regurgitation of Pahalgam being a false-flag operation. However, this produced only a temporary dent in its narrative, as Pakistan quickly recuperated to lobby for similar wins. On 11 August 2025, the US Department of State classified the BLA and its suicide squad, the Majeed Brigade, as an FTO, while also adding the latter as an alias to BLA’s previous 2019 SDGT listing. Arguably, this decision appears to be driven less by Pakistan’s proffering of evidence against BLA and more by Washington’s trade agreement with Islamabad to explore untapped oil reserves (likely located in Balochistan), as well as the concomitant warming of US-Pakistan ties amidst an unprecedented downturn in US-India relations.

As deflecting blame onto India becomes an integral part of Pakistan’s counterterrorism toolkit, India ought to counter this narrative deftly – for example, by leveraging the abundant historical and globally accepted evidence of Pakistan being a haven for terrorists of all stripes.

Additionally, amidst its spate of measures against Pakistan following Pahalgam, such as holding in abeyance the Indus Water Treaty, India also pronounced that any future terror attack will be treated as an ‘act of war’. Nevertheless, a caveat remains: India has not yet officially articulated what scale or nature of a terror attack would amount to a declaration of war. While this leaves room for Pakistan to test the credibility of India’s threat with, perhaps, another act of terrorism, what is certain is that Pakistan looks to increase the frequency of its allegations of ‘India-sponsored terrorism’ to keep up its anti-India focus both at home and abroad to reap the respective benefits thereof.

Bantirani Patro is a Research Associate at the Centre for Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies, New Delhi, India. 

• Neighbourhood
• India
• Pakistan
• armed conflict in balochistan
• balochistan liberation army
• balochistan unrest
• conflict in balochistan
• pakistan policy on balochistan
• unrest in balochistan

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