Originally published in The Friday Times on December 23, 2025. Read the original.
On 14 December 2025, Bondi Beach in Sydney became a crime scene. A public space associated with leisure and sunlight was punctured by gunfire. Within hours, before Australian police had released confirmed identities, a familiar script began circulating across social media and partisan news outlets. They claimed that the attackers were Pakistanis. Some accounts went further. They hinted at links to Kashmir, to Islamism, to the usual geography of blame.
This narrative did not originate organically. It was amplified by coordinated social media ecosystems linked to Indian and Afghan nationalist networks, many of which have become adept at flooding the information space during moments of uncertainty. Screenshots circulated. Headlines were framed ambiguously. The insinuation was enough.
Within days, the facts dismantled the story. Authorities in the Philippines and later India identified the attackers as Indian nationals. Subsequent reporting revealed that Naveed Akram, one of the attackers, had travelled to Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, for training. There was no Pakistani connection. No Kashmiri trail. No cross-border conspiracy.
The correction travelled quietly. The accusation had already done its work.
Bondi Beach matters not only because of what happened there, but because of how quickly the old narrative reflex misfired. For decades, India benefited from a near-automatic presumption of victimhood in matters of terrorism. That presumption is now eroding. Not because Pakistan has become virtuous, but because the world has become more attentive to evidence.
To understand why, one must look beyond individual attacks and examine the political and ideological shifts of the past two decades. Pakistan’s internal transformation did not begin with the Financial Action Task Force, nor was it a sudden moral awakening. It began amid exhaustion. Between 2007 and 2014, Pakistan absorbed a level of internal violence that made ideological justifications untenable. Markets were bombed. Schools were attacked. Military installations were breached. The victims were overwhelmingly Pakistani civilians.
The civilian government that took office in 2008 was the first in Pakistan’s history to complete a full constitutional term. This fact is not celebratory. It is structural. The Eighteenth Amendment, passed in 2010, decentralised power and curtailed the presidency after decades of military dominance. The following government went further by prosecuting a former military ruler in 2013, an act previously unthinkable.
These developments unfolded after decades of coups and fragile democratic experiments in the 1990s. They coincided with a gradual retreat from the logic of militant proxies. This retreat was uneven, reluctant, and often forced. Pressure following Pakistan’s grey listing in 2018 accelerated the process, but it did not initiate it.
By the late 2010s, terrorism inside Pakistan had declined markedly. Religious conservatism, however, did not. What changed was contestation. Journalists, lawyers, students, and activists increasingly challenged clerical authority, mob violence, and blasphemy vigilantism. Pakistan did not become liberal. It became internally conflicted.
During this same period, India moved in the opposite ideological direction. Narendra Modi’s ascent in 2014 marked not just a change in government but the consolidation of Hindutva as state ideology. The Bharatiya Janata Party and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, reframed Indian nationalism around religious majoritarianism. Muslims, the country’s largest minority, increasingly found themselves positioned as internal adversaries.
Nowhere was this shift more violent than in Kashmir. Long before spectacular attacks captured headlines, Indian security forces deployed pellet guns against civilian protesters, blinding thousands. Children were among the victims. Human rights organisations documented these injuries extensively after 2016. This was not counterterrorism. It was social control.
In August 2019, India revoked Article 370, stripping Jammu and Kashmir of its semi-autonomous status. The move was accompanied by mass detentions, a communications blackout, and the entrenchment of what analysts routinely describe as one of the most heavily militarised regions in the world.
When violence erupted in Pahalgam in April 2025, killing civilians in a tourist area, the political response followed a predictable pattern. Pakistan was blamed swiftly. Groups were named. The narrative was exported before investigations matured. What followed was equally telling. Thousands were detained. Homes were demolished. Entire communities were subjected to collective punishment. This was framed as counterterrorism, but it functioned as intimidation.
Yet the international response was no longer automatic assent. The demand for evidence was louder. Scepticism had grown. That scepticism had already been primed by events elsewhere.
In September 2023, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly stated that his government was investigating credible allegations linking Indian agents to the killing of Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil. Diplomatic relations deteriorated sharply. India denied the accusations. Canada persisted.
In the United States, federal prosecutors later charged individuals accused of participating in plots allegedly connected to Indian intelligence interests. These were not rhetorical accusations. They were legal proceedings in open courts. If such actions are labelled terrorism when attributed to Pakistan, intellectual consistency requires the same standard here. The distinction lies not in the act, but in who is permitted to commit it without reputational cost.
Meanwhile, India deepened engagement with the Taliban government in Afghanistan after its return to power in August 2021. This regime enforces gender apartheid, suppresses dissent, and harbours militant networks. India framed engagement as pragmatism. Pakistan’s similar engagement was framed as complicity. This asymmetry reveals how consent is manufactured.
Propaganda works best when it does not appear as propaganda, and cultural hegemony normalises power by making certain assumptions invisible. India’s global narrative has operated precisely in this space. Its claims have long been treated as common sense rather than argument. But common sense fractures when facts accumulate.
The Delhi car bombing in November 2025 accelerated this fracture. The suspects arrested were not foreign infiltrators. They were educated professionals, including doctors. Their radicalisation could not be outsourced to Pakistan. It pointed inward, towards communal polarisation, shrinking civic space, and the normalisation of hate.
The same pattern appeared in Bondi Beach. Initial claims aligned with expectations. Corrections aligned with reality. Only one travelled widely. This is not accidental. It is structural. Accusation spreads faster than verification because it serves power. Corrections threaten it.
What emerges from this landscape is not an export model of terrorism, but a feedback loop. Oppression generates resistance. Resistance is labelled terrorism. The label legitimises further oppression. Over time, violence becomes homegrown. This is visible in Kashmir. It is visible in India’s heartland. It is visible in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. And it was visible in Pakistan before its violence curve bent downwards.
The old narrative assumed permanence. Pakistan would always be the exporter. India would always be the victim. That narrative no longer maps onto reality. This does not absolve Pakistan of its past. It simply renders the past insufficient as an explanation for the present.
When Bondi Beach happened, the reflex failed. When Delhi suspects turned out to be local professionals, the reflex stalled. When pellet-blinded children stared back from hospital beds, the reflex faltered. The world did not suddenly side with Pakistan. It began asking questions. That is the real shift. Not allegiance, but inquiry.
And for a state accustomed to moral certainty without scrutiny, inquiry is destabilising. It exposes ideology where evidence was promised. It reveals power where innocence was claimed. History has moved. The narrative has not. That lag is where disbelief now lives.
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