Hua Bin
What leads people to celebrate defeat as victory?
Since I wrote “the DeepSeek moment of moder air combat”, more details have come out about the battlefield outcome from the May 7 and 8 Pakistan India clash.
In addition to the 3 Rafales, 1 Su-30, 1 Mig-29 and 1 Heron UAV covered in my essay, Pakistan also shot down an Indian French-made Mirage 2000. Pakistan Air Force destroyed 2 batteries of the Russia-made S400 air defense system (the command center and one radar unit) with China-made CM400akg hypersonic land-attack missiles launched from JF-17, a fighter jet produced jointly with China.
Since this is the first truly high-tech large scale air combat in the 21st century and the first beyond-visual-range (BVR) air war, military experts and commentators are studying the battle in minute detail. I plan to write another short piece on the tech behind the Pakistan victory soon.
However, another aspect of the war has come to the forefront immediately after the war. That is the mass delusion indulged by the Indian government and press about the conflict. Rather than acknowledging its setback and reviewing its strategy, tactics and battlefield lessons, the Indians are trying to mask their defeat through outright fabrications and lies on a massive scale. It is going so far as to claim the clash an unqualified victory.
Indian government, its TV media (400+ channels), and social media are filled with made-up battlefield successes, destruction in Pakistan, and superiority of the Indian military. The wild claims include –
– No Indian aircrafts were lost and no damage to S400 (though wreckage of a Rafale jet was filmed with its tail number and two burial ceremonies were held for Indian soldiers operating S400 systems. Indian report said they were shot during border skirmishes, which defies any common sense)
– Indian air force shot down 8 Pakistan F-16 jets and 4 JF-17 fighters (no US-made F-16 even took off during the conflict as the US forbid Pakistan to use F-16 in conflicts with India)
– Karachi, the largest port city in Pakistan, was firebombed by Indian navy and one third of the city was destroyed (the footage shown on Indian TVs was later fact-checked to be Israeli’s bombing campaigns in Palestine)
– A coup d’etat happened in Pakistan and the army chief was arrested
– A retired Indian air force marshal claims the Chinese air force cannot use the China-made weapons as well as Pakistan so India has nothing to worry about a conflict with China
Right after the air war, the Indian government called in diplomatic staff from 70+ countries to announce its heroic victories; Modi went on a tour of the frontline and announced a 10-day national celebration. The Indian military was tasked to go on a national tour to share their battlefield successes with patriotic citizens.
When American and French officials confirmed some of the battlefield losses suffered by India, the Indian media, led by the famous BJP promoter and TV personality Palki Sharma, went into a frenzied attack on the inferiorities of US and European weaponry. They bombasted Trump for claiming to broach a ceasefire between the two belligerents. Their argument is India would have dealt an even bigger defeat to Pakistan without the ceasefire meddling.
To this day, most Indians are under the delusion that the Indian military has dealt Pakistan a deathly blow and emerged totally victorious and unscathed.
While shrill and high octane “news” reporting is par for the course in India, and BJP, under Modi, has long shaped and exploited wide-spread jingoistic Hindu nationalist fervour, the Bollywood-like mass delusion is over the top and probably without a parallel in military history.
It is interesting to explore what lies behind such mass hysteria that is completely divorced from reality and what this means for India and its population.
A quick AI search tells you the medical or psychological term for “self-fooling” is self-deception.
Self-deception refers to the process of misleading oneself to accept as true or valid what is false or invalid. It involves cognitive biases, denial, or rationalization to maintain certain beliefs or avoid uncomfortable truths.
While not a formal medical diagnosis, self-deception is studied in psychology and psychiatry as part of defense mechanisms (e.g., denial or repression) that protect the ego from anxiety or distress.
I think this perfectly captures the psychological reasons behind the wildly delusional Indian national mood and character.
Since BJP took power, Modi and his cronies have intentionally fostered a ultra-nationalistic narrative about India’s greatness and Hindu superiority.
– India has launched unprecedented repressions of Muslims and deprived the Kashmir region (a Muslim majority region) its long-held autonomous status.
– India has embraced the fantasy to replace China as the world’s manufacturing center and top economic growth engine by opportunistically aligning with the US and the west. At the same time, it is exploring the Russia Ukraine war to enrich itself by selling Russian oil at inflated price to the west.
– India has boasted its economy has surpassed UK and France and will join the US and China in no time as the largest economies in the world while it is still behind Japan and Germany. To inflate its GDP, India has changed its GDP accounting method twice in the last 10 years and started to count cow dung as part of GDP as agricultural inputs. Grok estimates Indian GDP calculation included the value of cow dung and other manure at $4.7 billion in 2023.
– India has attempted to bolster its military by purchasing a hodge podge suite of brand-name weaponries from France, Russia, the US and Israel. India spent 7.8 billion Euros in 2015 to purchase 36 Rafale fighters, or 220 million Euros per jet, making it the most expensive fighter jet ever sold by that time. There was so much corruption by Modi’s cronies in the deal that Wikipedia has an entire entry dedicated to the controversy. Even after the corruption case was exposed, India decided to double down and spent anther $7.4 billion to buy 26 Rafale jets for its navy just this past April. That is a staggering price tag of $285 million per Rafale, a new world record.
This Pakistan India air war was initially intended by India to show off its new found muscle until it has its ass handed back by Pakistan.
Similarly, the Modi regime announced with big fanfare its Make In India campaign in 2015 to replace China as the world’s manufacturing powerhouse. It targeted manufacturing to reach 25% GDP by 2025. Instead, Indian manufacturing GDP was 13% by 2024, down from 17% in 2010. In contrast, according to CSIS, value-added industrial output accounted for nearly 40% China’s GDP (vs. 18% in the US). Given China’s GDP is 5 times of India, that means China’s manufacturing GDP alone is 2 times as big as India’s total GDP or 16 times India’s manufacturing output.
Another interesting statistic – in Paris 2024 Olympics, India won a grand total of 6 medals – 1 silver and 5 bronze, ranking 71st among the 84 countries with medal count. This is India’s third best medal haul after 2020 and 2012, according to Wikipedia. The world’s most populous country ranks between Lithuania (70th, population 2.8 million) and Moldova (72nd population 2.4 million). India’s Gold medal haul (0) was lower than Hong Kong (2). The US and China (ex. Hong Kong) each won 40 Gold medals, and 126 and 91 total medals respectively.
This wild gap between India’s self-perception (or should we say self-delusion) as a great power and the cold reality of its economic and social backwardness is the reason behind the mass delusion.
It’s a sad combination of inferiority complex and unfounded sense of grandeur.
There was a famous character called Ah Q in an early 20th century literature work in China. Ah Q is a loser but cannot accept his lowly station in life. So he goes around telling himself he is better than the other people around him, often saying “I was beaten by my bastard son” after losing a fight. In the end, he was framed for a robbery and sentenced to death. When he was signing his death warrant by drawing a circle (since he couldn’t write), he was more upset about the circle not drawn perfectly than the death sentence.
Indians didn’t succeed in copying China’s economic success. Instead, the Indians have fully adopted Ah Q’s delusional “spiritual victory” method of coping with failures and humiliations.
The Indian celebration of their imagined success perfectly reflects Ah Q’s delusional defiance when he tried to sing a heroic song on the road to his execution. He couldn’t sing with his wobbly voice at that point, instead weakly uttered a phrase commonly used by criminals before execution, ”In another 20 years, I shall be another stout young fellow”.
The Indian media obsession with spectacles mirror Ah Q’s morbid disappointment at the crowd at his execution – they were bored because he didn’t sing properly and lamented that he was shot instead of beheaded, denying them the “entertainment” of a decapitation .
India’s celebration of its defeat at the hand of Pakistan encapsulates Ah Q’s entire existence – a blend of farce and tragedy, where self-deception persists until the bullet ends his life.
On a higher level, the dishonest propaganda by the Indian government and media is an information war against its own population. Few foreigners believe the Indian official narrative. The Indian government and media has completely lost any credibility at this point. So the real target of the disinformation campaign is the Indian population itself.
A nation without basic intellectual honesty and suffering from cognitive dissonance will not rise. Instead it will be the butt of jokes by late night comedians.
In the so-called “largest democracy in the world” where the rule is one Rupiah one vote, Modi is resorting to the lowest level of “democratic” playbook – keep the population dumb and get their votes through lies.
Source: https://huabinoliver.substack.com/p/indian-mass-delusion-syndrome-on
