Commentary | Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Meme wars: Strategic games & violent accumulation in South Asia
On 10 May, Donald Trump announced that his administration had successfully mediated a ceasefire between India and Pakistan, pulling the two nuclear-armed neighbours back from the brink of full-fledged war. Hundreds of millions of Indians and Pakistanis who had spent the previous two weeks sparring on social media were now charged with prosecuting a new phase in the information war. Irony died a thousand deaths as Trump played peacemaker even as Elon Musk’s X algorithm kept millions locked in echo chambers.
The brief military engagement between the two countries was triggered by a militant attack on downcountry Indian tourists visiting the lush Pahlagam valley in the mountainous highlands of Kashmir in late April. Delhi claimed that Islamabad orchestrated the attacks, and launched missile strikes into Pakistan on 7 May in response. India had also launched ‘surgical strikes’ into Pakistani territory in 2019 following another militant attack in Kashmir. In the intervening six years, Kashmiris remained but cannon fodder for both states. By 2025, however, social media emerged as a much more important ideological terrain for both war-making establishments.
Anti-state militancy has a long history in Kashmir and many other of peripheral regions in India and Pakistan, with both countries ever willing to instrumentalize organic grievances across the border while enforcing colonial statecraft and violent accumulation on their own side. In the fog of war and heightened state nationalism, keyboard warriors on both sides provided a pretext, inadvertently or otherwise, for the state to clamp down further on already brutalised peripheries within.
The Indo-Pak subcontinent is home to a quarter of the world’s population and is currently in the throes of a massive youth bulge. Of the approximately 1.7 billion people who live in both countries, 1.1 billion are below the age of 25. Close to two-thirds of these young people are now active social media users, up significantly from 2019. This rapidly expanding digital public is increasingly mobilized in the service of militarism and right-wing bigotry (I explore this at length in my The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan: Fear, Desire and Revolutionary Horizons [Pluto Press, 2022]).
The announcement of the ceasefire was greeted by a brief lull in online activity, highly charged netizens unsure what to do with themselves as the specter of war receded. For days prior to 10 May, millions had been feverishly producing content debunking the other side and glorifying their own. After some hours taking in a new reality, newly minted influencers now dedicated themselves to a fresh endeavor – pumping out information showing that their side had ‘won’ the war. The resounding ‘victory’ chorus then provided a pretext for a new phase of repression against progressive people’s movements inside both nation-states.
It is certainly true that the brief military exchange between India and Pakistan clarified that the world-system is in the throes of change. Most notably, Pakistan’s deployment of Chinese technology in the skies trumped India’s fleet of US, Israeli and French warplanes. While Delhi continued to obfuscate about its losses, most neutral observers were in agreement that at least two Indian French-made Rafale planes were shot down by Pakistan’s Chinese-made aircraft. India’s previously hallowed air defense systems also proved to be far from impenetrable.
Another feature was the deployment of unmanned drones by both sides, primarily for the purposes of surveillance. Many drones flying into crowded bazaars in Pakistani and Indian cities were ‘captured’ by ordinary civilians who promptly recorded videos on their smartphones and uploaded them onto their social media platform of choice. Outrage and joy flooded respective echo chambers in equal measure, triggering more memes, propaganda and disinformation.
The wars within
The deployment of unmanned drones and more brazen forms of violence are routine for Pakistani and Indian states in their unending wars against restive peripheries within. The Pahlagam killings exposed the Modi regime’s rhetoric that ‘normalcy’ reigns in Kashmir; the audacious militant attack succeeded despite the 700,000 Indian troops that are stationed in Kashmir.
The fact that militancy retains purchase in the region reflects both long-standing Indian state policy alongside more recent developments. In 2019, the Indian government revoked constitutional edicts – articles 35A & 370 – that granted Kashmir a special, autonomous status within the Indian Union. This was followed by an influx of non-Kashmiris who acquired formal residency status, bought up land, mineral exploration licenses and initiated ‘development’ projects that triggered dispossession of local communities whilst also devastating already vulnerable high mountain ecologies.
Since the late 1980s, Pakistan has consistently pursued a policy of ‘bleeding India’ by covertly supporting Islamist militants in Indian Kashmir, but India’s conflation of all anti-state sentiment with ‘Pakistan-backed terrorism’ reflects the complete insularity of Delhi’s effectively colonial state policy that remains centred around repression and extraction.
For its part, Pakistan also retains control over a smaller part of the historic Kashmir state, as well as the adjacent Gilgit-Baltistan territory; both are denied basic constitutional rights under the pretext that their ultimate futures will be decided when the ‘Kashmir dispute’ is settled in toto. On the Pakistani side of the border too, the state and private profiteers acquire land and mineral concessions to the detriment of locals’ livelihoods and the environmental landscape.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s most restive periphery of Balochistan is in the throes of a full-fledged insurgency, the fifth time since 1948 that Baloch nationalists have taken up arms against the state. Triggered in the early 2000s by a new wave of state-led accumulation of copper and gold deposits, as well as coastal ‘development’ featuring a Chinese-funded deep-sea port in Gwadar, the insurgency has attracted many educated Baloch youth. Pakistan’s military has provided fuel to the insurgency by systematically disappearing, torturing and sometimes killing young Baloch indiscriminately, whilst at the same time criminalising any and all peaceful avenue of dissent.
If Pakistan’s spymasters look to exploit Kashmiri disaffection against the Indian state, their Indian counterparts do the same in Balochistan. And just as the Indian state reduces Kashmiri demands for self-determination to the proverbial ‘foreign hand’, the Pakistani state and its ideologues conveniently put all Baloch nationalist sentiment and even peaceful mobilisation down to the designs of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).
As the dust settled on the brief military exchange between the two states, the meme wars waged by young people on either side were redirected to the peripheries, Kashmiris and Baloch rendered increasingly suspicious and disloyal to their respective nation-states, caricatured as proxies of the ‘enemy’.
Logics of colonial statecraft and violent accumulation prevail in many other parts of the subcontinent, including India’s northeast as well as the so-called Red Corridor where forest-dwelling indigenous peoples have been mobilised since the turn of the century by Naxalite insurgents in defense of natural resources and their very way of life. Here too the resurgence of state nationalism after the conflict with Pakistan has created the space for a new wave of counter-insurgency.
Meanwhile both India and Pakistan have continued to try and assert their influence over the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, with the bloody effects spilling over into Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Only days after India and Pakistan called a ceasefire, children were killed in a drone attack in the tribal district of Waziristan. In the Pakhtun belt too, strategic games and propaganda battles reflect the desires of various protagonists to secure coveted mineral resources, infrastructural contracts and pit local peoples against one another in endless wars.
The new cold war
The race to access and control so-called critical minerals implicates not only Indian and Pakistani establishments. US imperialism under the Trump administration has done away with liberal niceties entirely and is now angling for exclusive monopoly control over mineral deposits in hotspots all over the world. In his first conversation with Pakistani officialdom, US Secretary of State Mark Rubio explicitly noted that US-Pakistan ties in the coming years would hinge on cooperation over mineral exploration.
Even before Trump took office, Washington had made the containment of China its number one foreign policy priority. The Trump administration’s explicit desire to monopolize control over critical minerals is a crucial cog of the China containment policy, especially given the centrality of minerals to solar panels, electronic vehicles and others ‘green’ consumer goods in which China has established market dominance. Pakistan and Afghanistan, among other countries in the region, possess major deposits of critical minerals – making south west Asia into a major theater of the new cold war. Pakistan has been a major partner in Beijing’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) for the best part of a decade and the Chinese now seek to extend the BRI into Afghanistan.
On the other hand Washington has increasingly aligned itself with Delhi, at least in part because the US sees India as a major anti-China bulwark in the region. Indeed, the budding alliance includes Israel, which supplied many of the drones that Delhi deployed during the recent stand-off. It is noteworthy that India was one of the most vociferous supporters of the Palestinian cause through much of the 20th century. In contrast, Delhi’s alignments in the new cold war, along with its ambitions to be the regional strongman in South Asia and secure a permanent seat the UN Security Council, are decidedly more insidious. The Modi regime has been keen to assert its autonomy from the US in the aftermath of the India-Pakistan confrontation, but in the final analysis contemporary Indian foreign policy bears little resemblance to principles of non-alignment that India once held dear.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s ruling class, fronted by an army that has historically coveted its role as frontline state of US imperialism, is explicitly trying to play all sides in the new cold war, including China, the US, and other benefactors like the Gulf states. While the military escalation with India was playing out, and even as Islamabad was explicitly exhorting Beijing’s support, the government was signing a shady deal with a Trump family-backed crypto firm which has also secured billions of dollars of investment from the UAE. A little over a week after brokering the ceasefire, Trump hosted Pakistan’s army chief at the White House, with crypto and mineral deals amongst the major matters of discussion. To top it all off, the Pakistani government then farcically announced it would be proposing Trump’s name for the Nobel Peace Prize.
A militarized state apparatus with a penchant for brutalizing its peripheries cannot be counted on to deploy Chinese military technology in the anti-imperialist cause. Indeed, the increasing intensity of the new cold war points to an arms race pitting two belligerent and anti-people states against one another, and in which varieties of militant Islamists and Hindu supremacists spearhead the politics of hate.
An alternative future
The question, as ever, is whether Indian and Pakistani working masses, and particularly those in the core areas of what are extremely unevenly developed societies, can be won over to an alternative politics, recognizing that militarism, war, and right-wing bigotry benefit only the ruling classes and religious establishments of both countries. By propagating meme wars, both against the ‘enemy’ state as well as brutalized peripheries within, youthful Indian and Pakistani masses are in effect sacrificing their putatively collective futures.
South Asia is the world’s most vulnerable region to climate change, and the destruction of vulnerable ecologies by the nexus of state and capital is exacerbating an already perilous situation in which extreme heat, glacier melt and floods are increasing normal occurrences. Meanwhile, the land, mineral, water and other natural resource grabs at the heart of all South Asian political economies generate windfall profits for unaccountable establishments, domestic and foreign capital, whilst producing huge surplus populations bereft of the right to life itself. At least ten million South Asian join the labour force annually, and even the most highly educated struggle to find gainful employment. It is telling that remittances from foreign Pakistani workers constitute the country’s single biggest source of foreign exchange – that they try and go abroad by any means necessary despite being treated as virtual serfs without any rights in the countries in which they arrive offers even more insight into their desperate predicament.
A distinct political horizon for South Asia must be centered around this brutalized mass of working people, in core and peripheral regions alike. In addition, it is imperative to interrogate the ways in which social media platforms and the algorithms that dictate their logics are reinforcing dominant and retrogressive political and ideological forms. If complex histories of oppression and colonial statecraft continue to be reduced to meme wars, young masses will remain foot soldiers of hate rather than the vanguard of a genuinely revolutionary horizon.
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar is Professor of Political Economy at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan. He has also been an active organier, chronicler and advocate of the working class and progressive movements in Pakistan for more than 25 years
To cite this essay, please use the entry suggested below:
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, “Meme wars: Strategic games & violent accumulation in South Asia,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, July 22, 2025; https://doi.org/10.52698/KQCB8948.