Speaking at tri-service seminar, Major General SP Vishwasrao also said farmers’ protest, anti-CAA agitation & situation in Manipur was part of ‘larger ploy’ to destabilise India

The recent remarks by Major General S.P. Vishwasrao, Additional Director General (Recruitment) in the Western sector of the Indian Army, have sparked significant debate within strategic and military circles.

Speaking at Ran Samvad—India’s first tri-service military affairs seminar modelled after the Shangri-La Dialogue—he suggested that the Pahalgam terror attack may have been orchestrated as a deliberate trap by Pakistan to lure India into a calculated military conflict.

Drawing from his experience, including a stint as India’s Defence Attaché in Islamabad, Maj Gen Vishwasrao emphasised that the nature of the attack—in particular, the targeting of Hindus while sparing others with a message to be conveyed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi—carried a strong element of psychological warfare.

By consciously creating communal and political shock waves, he argued, the perpetrators sought to provoke India into a retaliatory response such as a surgical strike, for which Pakistan, in his assessment, might have been tactically prepared in advance.

He refrained, however, from elaborating upon this suggestion when specifically asked if Pakistan’s trap was officially assessed by the Army, clarifying that such matters were outside his purview since he was not stationed at Army Headquarters (South Block) at the time.

Nonetheless, his analysis echoed broader Indian defence and security assessments reported days after the massacre: that Pakistan Army Chief General Asim Munir had green-lit the operation to internationalise the Kashmir issue once again.

In contrast to his predecessor, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, who pursued limited engagement and rapprochement with India, Munir is perceived as an ideological hardliner with Islamist leanings.

Experts believe Munir is attempting to recalibrate Pakistan’s Kashmir policy by reigniting militancy and political instability, gambling on the assumption that India’s responses remain predictable and manageable for Rawalpindi. His background as former ISI chief during the Pulwama attack further reinforces apprehensions in New Delhi that he is consciously reviving aggressive, high-risk strategies.

Maj Gen Vishwasrao also emphasised how this terror incident dovetailed into a wider canvas of information warfare (IW) and hybrid destabilisation tactics being deployed against India. Using visual slides of the Anti-CAA protests, the long-running farmers’ agitation, and the unrest in Manipur, Vishwasrao drew parallels with so-called "colour revolutions" witnessed in Bangladesh and elsewhere.

He described these movements as outcomes of weaponised narratives intended to erode public trust, polarise society, and weaken the Indian state from within. He contextualised past waves of unrest in Kashmir during 2008–2010 and again in 2016 as part of the same strategy, whereby adversaries attempted to manufacture internal instability to undermine India’s eventual trajectory toward becoming a "Viksit Bharat" (developed nation) by 2047.

By framing protests and socio-political unrest as externally influenced or exploited, he underscored the multi-domain nature of contemporary conflict, where conventional warfare is combined with psychological influence, propaganda, and subversion.

The seminar as a whole stressed the growing importance of understanding modern hybrid threats, where adversaries use kinetic attacks, disinformation campaigns, and socio-political agitation in tandem for cumulative effect. The Pahalgam massacre, in that sense, is viewed not just as a stand alone terror atrocity but as part of a larger Pakistani strategy to provoke India militarily while simultaneously destabilising it internally.

This approach, according to Indian military thought leaders, requires not merely a hard-power response but also sophisticated tools of narrative-building, information dominance, and resilience against psychological warfare.

Major General Vishwasrao’s intervention thus offered both a warning and a strategic insight: India must recognise that conventional terrorism is increasingly embedded in a larger fabric of battles for perception and legitimacy, orchestrated by adversarial powers to fracture internal cohesion while baiting military escalation.

Based On ThePrint Report