Author’s note: This is a work of fiction. All characters, institutions, and transactions are invented. Any resemblance to actual events is a coincidence. Or maybe not? You decide.
Dhurandhar 3: Control the narrative. Control the outcome
Prologue: What Operation Sindoor taught us
India has been losing the narrative war for decades.
Not for lack of facts. Not for lack of achievements.
Not even for lack of money, though money always helps.
We lose it because we have never understood that perception is not the shadow of reality.
Perception IS reality. The true reality matters less.
By the time the correction of perception appears, the damage is done.
The next story has started, and nobody is reading page six.
Let me show you what I mean.
On a Wednesday morning in April 2026, a short message appeared in the private WhatsApp and Signal groups of fourteen senior journalists spread across four continents.
It was crisp.
It looked official.
It had the formatting of a government communication.
It said Iran’s Foreign Minister was flying to Islamabad for a second round of mediation talks between Tehran and Washington.
Pakistan, the message implied, was the indispensable bridge between two great powers.
By noon, the BBC had it.
Al Jazeera had it.
Reuters had it.
A television network with forty million viewers had it.
Three of these journalists had been in such a hurry, so eager to be first, that they had copy-pasted the message verbatim.
Including the original quotation marks in one case.
The source’s own punctuation, sitting there in the published article.
Like a Business Card left at the scene.
By evening, Tehran had denied everything.
Iran’s Foreign Minister had, in fact, stated publicly two weeks earlier that talks with Washington were simply not going to happen.
The whole story was a fabrication.
A classic influence operation, designed and distributed by Pakistan’s military PR machinery, the ISPR, to make Islamabad look like a global peacemaker, it most certainly is not.
The corrections came.
Quietly. Briefly.
On inside pages and in small social media posts that nobody retweeted.
The original story had already done its work.
In Islamabad, someone was very pleased with himself.
In New Delhi, K.R. Ramana was not pleased.
But he was not surprised either.
He had seen this before.
Many times.
What surprised him was that, after twenty-six years, India had still not built a serious response.
Until now.
He opened a document he had been working on for three years.
He made two additions.
He closed his laptop.
ACT 1: THE GHOST IN THE BOARDROOM
Let us first understand something that most Indians either do not know or prefer not to say aloud.
Pakistan, with a GDP roughly one-tenth of India’s, with a literacy rate that trails ours, with an economy held together by IMF loans and Saudi charity, has somehow managed to place its people, its narratives, and its framing inside the most influential media houses, think tanks, and policy circles in the Western world.
Fewer than one percent of influential voices in global English-language media are Indian.
Not even one percent.
Not because Indians lack ability.
Not because we lack money.
We have plenty of that now.
But because we never took this battlefield seriously.
We were busy debating each other on television, producing the highest number of news channels in the world, most of them shouting at each other about things that the rest of the world neither knows nor cares about.
Meanwhile, Qatar, a country with three million people, built Al Jazeera.
Russia built RT.
Even tiny nations have understood that a media presence is a national security asset.
We haven’t.
And when our own journalists went abroad and became prominent, a disturbing proportion of them found that the fastest route to credibility in Western media circles was to criticise India.
To confirm what Western editors already believed.
To be, in the memorable phrase of one of Ramana’s analysts, a Brown Sepoy, an Indian face delivering a colonial-era narrative, mistaking self-deprecation for sophistication.
Ramana had watched all of this for twenty-six years.
He had watched Kashmir terror attacks finding little space in the Western headlines, and disappearing quickly, while smaller incidents elsewhere ran for days.
He had watched fabricated stories about Indian military aggression circulate for forty-eight hours, long enough to become received wisdom, before any correction appeared.
He knew what every experienced observer knows: a lie travels around the world before the truth has finished putting on its shoes.
The direct solution was obvious.
Build a global Indian media house.
Fund Indian voices internationally.
Place Indian correspondents everywhere.
It had been tried. Or rather, it had been discussed, budgeted, approved in principle, sent to committees, revised, reapproved, and quietly abandoned.
Every time, the same problem: the moment it had an Indian government connection, its credibility was gone before it published its first story.
The Western media establishment would dismiss it as propaganda.
So Ramana had spent three years thinking about an alternative approach entirely.
Not ownership.
Not propaganda.
Something far more elegant and, frankly, more Indian in its philosophy.
He called it the Manasa Astra.
But first, the boardroom
The corner suite of the Century Club in New York had the particular smell of institutions in decline – old leather, expensive coffee, and the faint anxiety of men who have built something they can no longer afford to maintain.
Robert Sterling, Chairman of The Trans-Atlantic Post, was seventy-one.
He had given forty years to the belief that serious journalism justified its own existence.
He had believed this with the conviction of a man who had never seriously been tested on it.
He was being tested now.
The Post’s advertising revenue had fallen for the ninth straight quarter.
Three of his best editors had left for newsletter platforms that paid better and reached fewer people, and those editors seemed, infuriatingly, happier.
His most loyal advertiser, a Detroit carmaker that had bought the back page every Sunday for thirty years, had just moved its entire print budget to a social media platform where the average user was a teenager in Southeast Asia.
The three men sitting across from him did not look like rescuers.
They had the settled calm of people who had already made their decision and were simply waiting for him to make his.
Oliver Brown, London. Venture capital. The careful courtesy of someone who has learned that impatience is expensive.
Daniel Wong, the founder of a satellite communications company in California, whose recent preferential licensing agreement with an Indian state infrastructure authority – a contract worth USD 245 M structured across 3 years and described in the filings as a joint rural connectivity initiative, had been reported in the financial press as a model of emerging-market technology partnership.
The unnamed Asian government was not difficult to identify if you knew where to look.
Max Keller, Zurich. Hedge funds. His fund had, in the past eighteen months, become the primary vehicle for a fifty-billion-dollar green hydrogen initiative.
The geography of that initiative, if you examined the project documents carefully, was almost entirely subcontinental.
None of them was Indian.
None of them had any visible connection to Delhi.
None of them needed to.
Their balance sheets were already aligned.
“Robert,” Brown said, “the Post is a cathedral. We are not proposing to demolish it. We are offering to pay the heating bill.”
Sterling looked at the term sheet.
Four hundred million dollars.
A consortium board seat. No editorial mandate. No named government beneficiary.
“You are asking me to believe,” Sterling said carefully, “that three men of your combined wealth want to invest in print journalism out of fondness for the profession.”
“We want to invest in relevance,” said Wong. “The Post reaches people who shape policy. That is not sentiment. That is infrastructure. The most valuable infrastructure in the world.”
A pause.
“And if I say no?”
Brown’s smile was genuinely warm. “Then in eighteen months you will be having this conversation with someone who has considerably less respect for what you have built.”
Sterling looked out at Manhattan.
Forty years of front pages.
Journalists who still argued about commas at midnight because they believed it mattered.
He signed.
The view from North Block
Ramana watched the signing through an encrypted feed from a room that did not officially exist.
He had structured this carefully.
Not as a media acquisition – that would have triggered exactly the kind of Western alarm that makes direct approaches impossible.
The moment an Indian sovereign fund moves toward a Western media house, the story becomes the acquisition.
Congressional hearings.
National security reviews.
Investigative pieces in the very publications being acquired.
He had watched the Chinese try it bluntly.
He had watched the Saudis try it with money.
He had watched Russia try it with RT, which worked inside Russia and was dismissed everywhere else as obvious propaganda.
He had a name for it.
The Manasa Astra.
In the old understanding, Manas was not merely the thinking mind. It was the instrument through which reality was received, filtered, and constructed. Change the Manas, and you changed the world the person lived in — without touching a single fact.
Not propaganda. Not purchase.
The precise, patient reshaping of how minds received truth.
An astra that, once released, flew entirely on its own.
The Manasa Astra was different.
The principle, when stated simply, was almost embarrassingly obvious: you do not buy the journalist.
You make the truth profitable for the people who employ the journalist.
You do not plant a story.
You arrange the conditions under which the accurate story becomes the financially convenient story.
Brown, Wong, and Keller were not Indian agents.
They were businessmen whose interests now happened to coincide with India’s interests.
Nobody had instructed them to protect India.
Their own balance sheets now made it rational to do so.
A journalist who is told to write favourably about India becomes a liability.
A media owner whose multi-million dollar satellite contract depends on Indian goodwill becomes something else entirely – a stakeholder.
And stakeholders protect their investments without being asked.
ACT 2: THE EDITORIAL SIPHON
Three months after New York, the Trans-Atlantic Post announced the Global South Context Initiative.
The announcement was written in the language these things are always written in – commitments to “empirical rigour,” concern about “Northern Hemisphere priors,” the importance of “ground-truth reporting.”
Every phrase is calibrated to appeal to the professional vanity of journalists who consider themselves more sophisticated than their predecessors.
Twenty senior editors were invited on a two-week fact-finding mission to South Asia.
Now, here is where Ramana showed genuine understanding of how people, and especially journalists, actually work.
He did not take them to government press briefings.
He did not sit them in conference rooms with PowerPoint presentations and ministers reading prepared statements.
Any journalist with two years of experience knows exactly what to do with that material: ignore it, or worse, write a story about being shown propaganda.
He took them by private helicopter to the edge of the Thar Desert.
What they saw there was real.
Ramana had not constructed a Potemkin village.
He had simply ensured they would see what actually existed rather than what they had been expecting to see.
A solar field covering eleven thousand acres.
Modular biogas units are bringing electricity to villages that had lived without it for generations.
A water-reclamation system, designed and built by an Indian engineering firm, that had reduced groundwater extraction by forty percent in a region that the international press had, as recently as three years ago, described as heading toward catastrophic water scarcity.
Their guide was Dr. Elizabeth Daniel.
British. Professor at the London School of Economics.
No Indian connections, no visible political alignment.
Her research on developmental economics was published in all the right journals and cited by all the right people.
Her research chair had been established by a blind trust in Singapore.
If you traced that trust – and nobody had – it led to a foundation some of whose principals had, separately, individually, executed Indian infrastructure contracts worth several hundred million dollars over the previous decade.
The foundation funded good research.
The research happened to correct what it described as systematic inaccuracies in the Western narrative on Indian development.
Dr. Daniel was not an agent.
She genuinely believed what she said.
The funding had not purchased her opinions.
It had given her the platform and the resources to publish opinions she had already formed.
This is an important distinction.
Ramana understood it.
A purchased opinion is fragile; it requires continued payment and collapses the moment the arrangement is exposed.
A genuine opinion that has been given resources to flourish is durable, credible, and self-reinforcing.
“The data we rely on,” she told the editors that evening, as the last light turned the solar panels amber, “is frequently generated by institutions with a financial stake in a particular version of this region’s story.
I want to be clear: this is not a conspiracy.
It is the ordinary, mundane operation of institutional incentive.
But it means that those of us who consider ourselves rigorous journalists need to ask, more carefully than we have been, who benefits from the picture we have been painting.”
Among them was an editor, a deputy managing editor from Philadelphia, seven years on the South Asia beat, confident in his understanding of the region,
He said nothing.
But his heart rate, monitored through the complimentary smartwatch he had been given on arrival, had gone up eleven points.
Ramana understood the psychology precisely.
The most powerful force in journalism is not outrage.
It is not sympathy.
It is a professional embarrassment.
The cold, stomach-dropping realisation that you have been filing poorly sourced stories.
That a rival will now appear more rigorous than you.
That your confident coverage of a region was built on assumptions you never examined.
A journalist, when told that India is great, becomes defensive and dismissive.
A journalist, who realises that his own coverage was sloppy, becomes almost involuntarily evangelical about getting it right.
Ramana had not made these editors pro-India.
He had made them anti-misinformation.
In his experience, that was a far more durable and far more useful condition.
ACT 3: THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE MIND
The crisis arrived not on a single day but across seventy-two hours in May 20026, the kind of rolling crisis that begins as a news item and ends as history.
Ramana had been here before.
Fourteen months earlier, when Indian precision strikes had dismantled the terror infrastructure that had massacred tourists in Pahalgam, India had won the military operation within hours and lost the narrative war within days.
The strikes had been surgical.
The evidence had been overwhelming.
The justification had been, by any reasonable reading of international law, unambiguous.
None of it had mattered.
Pakistan’s information machine had moved faster. Within twenty-four hours, the framing in Western media had shifted from an Indian counter-terror operation to a regional escalation.
Within forty-eight hours, the ceasefire pressure from Washington had arrived, driven not by diplomatic calculation but by the television pictures and wire service framing that Washington’s own policymakers were consuming.
Within a week, a top US official had publicly described both sides as equally responsible for the crisis, an equivalence so historically illiterate that Ramana had sat with it for a long time, trying to understand how it had become possible.
He understood it now.
It had become possible because India had no one in the room.
Not in the editorial rooms of the wire services.
Not in the think tanks that briefed the State Department.
Not in the research institutions whose rapid-response papers shaped the first draft of history.
And Pakistan had its people everywhere.
Less than one percent of influential voices in global English-language media was Indian.
Of those, a significant proportion were professionally invested in confirming existing Western assumptions about the subcontinent.
The survivors of the October 7 attacks in Israel had no idea about Pulwama or Balakot; India had never managed to project those stories into the global consciousness with any force.
After Op Sindoor, India’s External Affairs Minister had given press conferences of remarkable clarity and precision that were watched approvingly in India, and largely ignored everywhere else.
Ramana had watched all of this.
He had watched it, and he had spent the fourteen months since building the conditions under which it would not happen again.
Now India had struck again.
A second series of precision operations, deeper and more comprehensive than the first, targeting the reconstituted infrastructure that had been rebuilt, with remarkable brazenness, in the months since Op Sindoor.
Call it Op Sindoor 2.0.
The military operation had been executed with the same precision as the first.
The evidence was, if anything, more overwhelming.
The justification was, if anything, more straightforward.
And the Pakistani information machine had started within hours.
Faster this time.
More coordinated.
They had learned from Op Sindoor 1.0 that the first forty-eight hours were everything.
Within six hours of the strikes, three wire services were running “Indian aggression” as their primary frame.
A former US State Department official, described only as a senior policy analyst, told a television network that India had escalated beyond a proportionate response.
A Washington think-tank whose funding, if examined carefully, traced partially to Gulf sources with obvious strategic interests, published a rapid-response paper calling the strikes destabilising.
A British MP raised the matter in the UK Parliament using language that, Ramana noted with the weariness of long experience, was almost word-for-word identical to a press release issued by a Pakistani diplomatic mission four hours earlier.
The old machine was running at full speed.
The difference was that this time, the Manasa Astra was already in place.
The call from the Post’s CEO to the News Desk came at hour fourteen.
The call from the Post’s CEO to the News Desk came at hour 14.
“We have a complete dossier from the Global South Context Lab. Satellite imagery of the original strike sites going back 18 months shows active terror infrastructure. Legal analysis from 3 universities on the doctrine of pre-emptive self-defence under international law. Intercepted communications already in the public domain through official release, cross-referenced with independent verification. The wires are working from a single-source Pakistani military briefing, and they know it. I want a Deep Dive. I want us to be the first with the complete picture. That is what this publication is for.”
The Deep Dive ran at hour 18.
Seven thousand words.
Written by a correspondent who had covered four conflict zones on three continents.
Fact-checked by four researchers.
It cited no Indian government source directly, only open-source satellite data, academic legal analysis, and the Post’s own archival reporting on the terror networks whose infrastructure had been struck.
It did not declare India right.
It did something more effective than that.
It made “Indian aggression” an untenable simplification.
By hour 36, two wire services had substantially revised their framing.
The CNN analyst had walked back his disproportionate assessment in a follow-up appearance, citing additional context that had emerged.
The Washington think tank paper had quietly stopped circulating.
Three European foreign ministers who had been preparing statements of condemnation had decided, without public announcement, to wait for further assessment.
The narrative had not been reversed.
It had been complicated.
Made 3-dimensional.
Filled with the inconvenient context that accurate facts always provide when someone finally has the resources, the will, and the right conditions to include them.
After Pulwama, the world had not known.
After Balakot, the world had not cared.
After this, the world at least could not claim it had not been told.
In the information war that shadows every military operation, this was the equivalent of establishing air superiority.
After Op Sindoor 1.0, India had won on the ground and lost in the room.
After Op Sindoor 2.0, it had won both.
Ramana was eating curd rice at his desk when Samson appeared in the doorway.
“There are questions,” Samson said.
He meant from the intelligence oversight committee, though he did not say so. “About our connection to the Post’s coverage. The timing is attracting attention.”
Ramana set down his spoon.
“What connection? The consortium investors are Western businessmen acting in their own financial interest. The CEO is Canadian. The journalist has covered four conflict zones and has never set foot in India. The Context Lab is a Swiss-funded research body. The professor chairs a department at a British university.”
He looked at Samson. “Precisely what is the theory being proposed?”
Samson was quiet.
“See, this is the fundamental problem with direct methods,” Ramana said. “They leave fingerprints. You bribe a journalist; you own a liability. You fund a newspaper directly; you own a target. The moment anyone looks, they find something to find.”
He gestured at the window.
Delhi at dusk. “The Manasa Astra leaves no fingerprints because there is genuinely nothing to find. Every transaction is legitimate. Every person is acting freely. The investors are protecting their own money. The professor is publishing her own research. The editors are correcting their own errors. We simply,” he paused, “arranged the garden so that these flowers grew naturally.”
“And if someone traces it all the way back?”
Ramana smiled.
It was the smile of a man who had spent three years thinking about exactly this question.
“Traces it to what? A sovereign guarantee for a satellite project that employs fifty thousand people and has been praised by every technology publication in the world? A green hydrogen fund that every climate organisation has publicly endorsed? These are not embarrassments, Samson. Even if every rupee of every transaction were printed on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow morning, each one would look precisely like what it is – good business, good policy, good science.”
He picked up his spoon again. “Let them trace it. They will find nothing except evidence that India is a good place to invest.”
He returned to his curd rice.
“Qatar has three million people and built Al Jazeera. Russia built RT. Both are identified, dismissed, and discounted as state propaganda within five minutes. You know why? Because they put their flag on it. They needed the credit. They wanted to be seen doing it.”
He shook his head with the mild contempt of a chess player watching someone play draughts. “We do not need the credit, Samson. We need the outcome. Direct methods are for those who want to be seen. Dhurandhar is for those who want to win.”
Samson left.
Ramana sat alone with his dinner, in a room that did not officially exist, in a city of eleven million people who were going about their evenings in complete and comfortable ignorance of the battle that had just been won on their behalf.
He was at peace with that.
The best victories, he had learned at considerable personal cost over twenty-six years, are the ones that nobody ever writes about.
Postscript: A note for the reader
Before you set this down, one thought worth sitting with.
Everything Ramana built – the stakeholder network, the blind trusts, the editorial education programme, the research chairs – is entirely replicable.
Pakistan’s ISPR does a cruder version of it with less money and more noise.
China does a far more sophisticated version of it with far more money and almost complete silence.
The Manasa Astra is a weapon, not exclusive to India.
And like all weapons, it works equally well in any hand that picks it up.
The question India must ask is not whether this weapon should be used.
It is whether we have any other practical option.
Note:
1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
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