What their silence speaks loudly about Indian liberals

You would think the big questions would force a response. A country strikes across the border. Missiles fall. Lives are lost. The headlines swell with capital letters. Everyone is watching. And yet, those who usually speak—who dissect power, who quote Gandhi and Ambedkar, who hold a mirror to the state—stay quiet.

Not because they have nothing to say. But because they choose not to.

The operation had a name, Operation Sindoor, ripe with symbolic charge. The news lit up timelines. Politicians lined up to praise the army. News anchors leaned into a war footing. The mood, online and off, was tense, triumphant, and deeply binary. And in that noisy theatre, the silence from some of India’s most articulate moral voices began to echo.

This same silence vanishes when the news is easier to decode—when a minister makes a bigoted remark, or a school excludes a hijab-wearing girl, or a film gets banned for offending the majority. Then, the threads arrive quickly, rich with constitutional wisdom, dripping with historical precedent, buoyed by a deep sense of outrage. These are the battles where the moral coordinates feel clear, the audience predictable, the threat more manageable. But cross-border conflict? It scrambles the script.

Maybe they felt boxed in. To speak against the strike was to be accused of betrayal. To support it was to abandon the ethics they had spent a lifetime defending. Maybe they thought their words wouldn’t matter. That the script was already written. That the audience had left. That the language of justice had been hijacked. Perhaps they feared misreading the moment. Or feared the crowd. Or feared being told, again, to ‘go to Pakistan’. In a country where nuance has a price, silence can feel like a form of self-preservation.

Except, perhaps, one outlier, who said simply, “I am a pacifist.” That, at least, was a position. Everyone else vanished behind the curtain. It’s not about taking sides. It’s about showing up. If your politics cannot face the heat of war, what good are they? If your words fail you when the nation needs more than applause, what were they ever worth?

After Balakot, some liberal commentators had critiqued the timing and portrayal of the airstrikes, suggesting that the government might have been leveraging national security events for political gain, especially with general elections on the horizon. They had warned against the politicisation of the military and the use of patriotic fervour to suppress dissenting voices. Where are these voices now? There were those who did speak. A handful of liberal academics and journalists who dared to question the framing, or ask for evidence, or simply grieve without cheering. They were promptly dragged. Called traitors. The price of doubt was national disinheritance.

And while the moral vacuum expanded, something else rushed in to fill it: misinformation—fast, frantic. X became a battlefield of its own, where one side claimed five Indian jets had been downed and the other paraded doctored footage of bunkers exploding like action movie trailers. Pakistani handles, some state-linked, some freelance propagandists in the great meme war, flooded the feed with grand claims of retaliation and imaginary damage reports. Hashtags multiplied faster than facts. Into this noise stepped a few digital first-responders—fact-checkers, open-source intelligence analysts, retired officers—trying to slow the spin. They traced coordinates, debunked fake videos, clarified statements mangled in translation. But the virality calculus had already tipped.

A strange thing happens when the people who talk about justice stop talking. The other voices win by default. And in the end, what is remembered is not what was said, but who stayed silent, while the feed scrolled on, louder than ever.

Indian strikeOperation SindoorPahalgamPakistanPoKterror attack