Dawn Images

After the deadly Pahalgam attack in the Baisaran valley in India-Occupied Kashmir on April 22, the image of Himanshi Narwal sitting stoically by her husband’s body went viral. This image of a young woman, newly married to a naval officer, and widowed on their honeymoon in India-Occupied Kashmir, became the symbol of the Pahalgam attack in India. More critically, it was extended into the signifier of what the Pahalgam attack means and must mean for India and its people.

In his speech after Pahalgam, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared it an assault on the soul of India and vowed unimaginable punishment for the attackers, while his audience chanted his name. On May 6, India launched “Operation Sindoor”.

Sindoor is the vermilion red powder that, traditionally, married Hindu women wear in the middle parting of their hair as a marker of their married status, as a religious symbol to wish for their husbands’ prolonged lives, and to show a wife’s commitment to protect her husband. Upon becoming widows, women stop wearing the sindoor. After the Pahalgam attack, many reported that the attackers exclusively targeted Hindu men, thus effectively erasing women’s sindoor.

With these significations, Operation Sindoor, dubbed “a tribute to the women who lost their husbands in the terror attack,” became the mission to symbolically restore women’s sindoor, to showcase that the state is capable of protecting them and their families. Many applauded the operation’s name for its commitment to women and their honour.

But in a patriarchal context, this name has broader connotations. Operation Sindoor draws an equivalence between the honour of the nation-state and its women nationals. It assigns a woman’s marriage a higher value than a woman’s full life, which may extend well beyond her marriage. It conflates a gendered religious marker with militaristic aspirations and in doing so, it attempts to expand the meaning of what sindoor means in Indian imagination. It tries to create an affiliation, one based on emotion, between Hindu women’s lives and the Indian military’s operation. It capitalises on women’s emotional attachments and familial investments to use them to promote war, which, as history shows us, hurts both women’s emotional well-being and family stability.

Wars take place in gendered histories and between gendered nations. In her book, Twelve Feminist Lessons of War, American political theorist Cynthia Enloe points out a wartime narrative centring “a story or a photograph intended to make a complex, violent conflict” where “the women featured are usually crying. They are crying over the dead body of a husband or son.” But rarely “are they interviewed and asked for their ideas about the war.”

Narwal, in an interview after the attack, made an appeal for peace, saying she did not want any hate towards Muslims or Kashmiris. She faced a barrage of vitriol, trolling, slut-shaming, and rape threats for expressing her desire for peace and justice, and for implicitly challenging brewing pro-war national sentiments.

In another interview after India launched Operation Sindoor, Narwal thanked the government for the operation and hoped that it was only the “start of the end of terrorism.” Given the criticism and harassment she faced for her anti-violence and pro-peace position, it is unclear whether her tilt towards supporting Operation Sindoor and giving up her pro-peace position was a strategic response shaped by personal loss, online harassment, and demands to prove her allegiance both to her late husband’s memory and to the state.

These pre-war (and post-war) patriarchal conditions lead Enloe to observe that “women’s wars are not men’s wars” because women’s wars are shaped by “gender politics during patriarchal peacetime.” Sexual violence, gender-based violence, underemployment, unpaid and underpaid work, and limited reproductive rights are women’s wars.

Criticising the name of this operation, Vaishna Roy, editor of Frontline, an English language magazine published by The Hindu Group, noted in a tweet that has since been made private, that it “reeks of patriarchy, ownership of women, ‘honour’ killings, chastity, sacralising the institution of marriage, and similar Hindutva obsessions.” Roy was also trolled and harassed for her critique, which again proved that “women’s wars are not men’s wars.”

Given the challenges of gender-based and sexual violence, responses to Narwal, Roy, and other women’s anti-violence positions and critiques of the patriarchy make it even clearer that South Asian, particularly Indian, women’s wars are different than South Asian men’s wars. However, Operation Sindoor conjoins men’s and women’s wars.

Examining Operation Sindoor is, therefore, important because men’s wars are often played around the spectacle of women’s bodies — like the photo where a shocked Narwal is sitting by her husband’s body.

In another viral image, Colonel Sofia Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh sat alongside Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri to lead the Operation Sindoor media briefing, lending a feminist face to the lingering India-Pakistan conflict. Indian media reported this as a historical milestone for Indian women’s representation. However, this curated image of communal and religious unity has been criticised as being mere “secular tokenism” that hides Indian Muslims’ and Kashmiris’ lived reality of discrimination and violence. The name also misrepresented women like Qureshi and Singh.

The name centres on women’s role as wives in traditional marriages. The professional work of women like Colonel Qureshi and Wing Commander Singh only becomes visible when they step in to protect the sindoor. This valorisation of militarism as feminism also overlooks the fact that Indian women are significantly underrepresented in the Indian military. In 2023, Indian women made up only one per cent of the army, one pc of the air force, and six pc of the navy.

The image also created women heroes of the war to ramp up support for the war. One headline read: “The terrorists ‘spared’ women, but India’s women will not spare them.” Unsurprisingly then, many Indian celebrities with feminist reputations shared the image of Qureshi and Singh’s media briefing to express their support and celebration. One viral image on X portrayed Qureshi and Singh’s portraits in military uniform alongside a topi-burqa-clad woman to compare feminist India against regressive Pakistan, to show that Indian women are ‘better’ than Pakistani women.

But the fact remains that both Pakistani and Indian women fight similar fights in pre-war or peacetime conditions. Eventually, this feminised spectacle that centred two women became one more building block for the hyper-masculinised spectacle of the conflict that followed soon after.

The image of Qureshi and Singh was the bandaid for the problem that Narwal inadvertently named when she asked for nonviolence toward Muslims and Kashmiris and advocated for peace and justice. However, what remain missing in these images and spectacle are Indian and Pakistani women married to men on the other side of the border, and images of Kashmiri women whose homes were demolished, and the women family members of at least 1,500 more Kashmiris who were detained after the Pahalgam attack. What doesn’t go viral are the images of Kashmiris on both sides of the border who have been exposed to more violence since May 6.

All this shows that feminising wars does not make wars feminist; women’s wars remain different than men’s wars even when it is Operation Sindoor — or especially when it is Operation Sindoor.

Clarification: Vaishna Roy, editor of Frontline, did not delete her tweet, she made her account private.