On October 15, a report released by the Indian Defence Research Wing pulled back the curtain on a covert and growing campaign of digital manipulation aimed at India. According to the report, more than five thousand social media accounts were created in just a fortnight, not by random mischief-makers but as part of a coordinated effort that Indian intelligence officials have linked to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. The battlefield is not a disputed mountain or a border outpost; it is the online feed of millions of ordinary Indians, many of them young, many of them already anxious about issues that affect their daily lives. The trigger being exploited is the ongoing protest against the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, commonly abbreviated as SIR. For those unfamiliar with the term, this is a routine yet sensitive administrative exercise tied to updating voter lists. But in the hands of an external adversary, such a process becomes an opportunity to spread confusion, provoke unrest and turn democratic anxiety into violent confrontation. The campaign, which intelligence officials describe as Pakistan’s expanding “digital jihad,” has one central aim: to make Indians distrust their institutions, fear their police and turn against each other. It is not enough to say this is disinformation. It is more precise to say that the ISI has built a machine that takes real political anger and pumps falsehoods into it until the pressure becomes impossible to contain.
What makes this campaign especially dangerous is the way it has targeted the emotional core of the protests. The SIR demonstrations are, at their heart, about a deeply legitimate concern: who gets to vote and whether their voice will count in a democracy. People who took to the streets may have real grievances, real fears and real hopes. The digital operation described in the intelligence report seeks to hijack those feelings. It does so by flooding social media with fabricated claims about police firing, lathi charges and tear gas shells during demonstrations. These are not neutral words. In the Indian context, they carry vivid memories of state violence and injustice, and they are chosen deliberately to provoke an instant reaction. Intelligence officials cited in the report say the objective is to push young protesters into confrontation with law enforcement, to create incidents that can then be filmed, shared and twisted into new rounds of misinformation. It is a cruel and clever loop: false information encourages real violence, and real violence then makes the original lie seem plausible. The ISI understands that when emotions are high, people rarely pause to fact-check. A young person in the middle of a crowd, or at home watching a live stream, may already feel angry and scared. A message saying police have opened fire, even if completely false, can feel true in the moment. The intention is not simply to influence opinions; it is to shape behaviour, to push people toward action they might never have taken if they had been given time to think clearly.
The mechanics of the operation have also changed, and that is another reason for concern. In the past, intelligence officials say, the ISI relied largely on hubs in Rawalpindi and Islamabad to create fake accounts and generate misleading content. That made tracing relatively easier because the source was concentrated in a few known places. The latest campaign is different. The report identifies a far wider network spanning Bhimber, Rawalakot, Tarakhal, Sialkot, Kolti, Mendhar and Peshawar, among other locations. In these places, individuals are reportedly recruited to create accounts and circulate the content supplied to them. The ISI directs participants to publish specific claims, allowing the same narrative to appear across dozens or hundreds of accounts at the same time. This decentralised structure has serious consequences for investigators. Tracking thousands of profiles scattered across many cities is far more difficult than shutting down a handful of hubs. It also creates the appearance of organic grassroots support for a message when in reality the message has been manufactured and distributed by a state intelligence agency. The participants may not all be masterminds; some may be ordinary people paid small sums to perform a task they do not fully understand. That is part of the tragedy of modern disinformation: it turns human beings, in Pakistan and sometimes even in India, into instruments of a conflict they may not even know they are serving. The network also instructs participants to tag users in foreign countries, so the falsehoods do not remain confined to South Asia. They travel to international audiences, who may not understand the context and are therefore even more likely to accept the claims at face value.
Perhaps the most disturbing layer of the operation is what intelligence officials describe as Operation Ground Wire. Under this programme, the campaign is not limited to Pakistan-based accounts. Indian individuals have been targeted and paid to create content against the Indian state, specifically to shift public narratives and damage the reputation of Indian institutions. The inclusion of domestic accounts is a major escalation. When a post appears to come from a local user, someone who seems to be living in the same city or sharing the same concerns, it carries an authenticity that foreign propaganda usually lacks. People are naturally more willing to trust a neighbour than a stranger. The ISI knows this, and Operation Ground Wire is designed to blur the line between genuine local sentiment and manufactured antagonism. The report gives a striking example of how this works. Some social media handles reportedly claimed that Delhi Police had opened fire and injured Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha. The claim was false, but the intent was clear: to provoke Congress supporters across India into taking to the streets, perhaps even into violence. By attaching the lie to a high-profile political figure, the campaign could spread far faster than any correction issued later. It only takes a few seconds for a shocking headline to be shared, but it can take days for a fact-check to reach the same audience. By then, the impression has already been formed. The use of Indian accounts also makes it harder for agencies to prove foreign interference, because the content appears to come from within the country. It complicates investigations, sows doubt about who is responsible and gives the entire operation a layer of deniability.
The scale of the campaign matters as much as its methods. Intelligence officials say this is not a matter of a few dozen troll accounts; it involves thousands of handles operating in a coordinated manner. That numerical weight changes the way information travels online. During the SIR protests, when thousands of real users are already posting, sharing and commenting, fake accounts can hide in the crowd and amplify particular themes. They can make a lie appear to be a trend. They can make it seem as though police violence has occurred in cities where it never did. In smaller towns and villages, where access to reliable news sources is often limited, the danger is even greater. A young person who sees a viral message claiming that police have attacked protesters in another state may feel a genuine surge of anger and decide to act in solidarity. The report suggests this is exactly what the ISI wants. It wants rumours to move faster than facts. It wants people in different regions to react to events that never happened. This is how disinformation becomes unrest. The people who come out on the streets in response to a lie are not actors; they are real citizens with real frustrations. That is why the human cost of such campaigns is so difficult to measure. Every false story that reaches a smartphone has the potential to shape a decision, to change a mood, to tip a moment of hesitation into an act of aggression. Correcting the record later is not enough because memory does not work that way. The first version of a story often feels more truthful to people, especially when it confirms what they already fear.
Yet the picture is not entirely hopeless. The report also highlights the work of the Intelligence Bureau and state police agencies, which are monitoring suspicious accounts and reporting them as they are identified. Tell-tale patterns, such as sudden account creation, repeated phrasing and unusual geographical spread, can be detected and links can be traced, even if the process is slow. But institutional action alone will never be enough. The real defence against digital manipulation lies in the hands of ordinary users. Every time someone receives a shocking message, the most powerful thing they can do is pause. Ask who created the account. Ask whether the information appears anywhere else. Ask whether the post is designed to make you afraid or angry. Most of all, ask whether you would share it if you had to verify every word. The people behind this campaign depend on speed. They depend on emotional reaction. They depend on the willingness of good people to spread bad information without thinking. When individuals choose not to share an unverified claim, the chain is broken. When communities learn to recognise the language of manipulation, the lie loses its power. The report from the Indian Defence Research Wing is a warning about the scale of the threat, but it is also a reminder that modern warfare is no longer fought only with missiles and soldiers. It is fought with words, images and algorithms. The SIR protests are a real political event, and the concerns behind them deserve a real hearing. They must not be hijacked by outside forces whose only interest is chaos. In a democracy, the decision of what to believe is not just a personal act; it is a public responsibility. The human voice, used honestly and carefully, is still the best answer to the machinery of deceit.