I have had enough of watching the world pretend it does not see what is happening. Enough of the diplomatic language, the carefully worded non-statements, the calculated silences that give cover to a country that has been running a covert terror network inside Pakistan. And we know this not because Pakistan said so. We know this because India’s own media voices said so. I am not dealing in hypotheticals here. I am not stitching together a theory from fragments and suspicion. The confession came freely, almost casually, with the kind of arrogance that only grows in people who have never once been held to account. It came from a man who moves through the corridors of Indian media power as if consequences are something that exist for everyone else but him.
Aditya Raj Kaul, executive editor at NDTV and one of the most reliable amplifiers of Bharatiya Janata Party narratives in India’s media landscape, sat down for a podcast and did what overconfident propagandists sometimes do. He talked too much. What came out of that conversation was not analysis or journalism. It was a window, cracked open by ego, into how India’s deep state operates inside Pakistan. He and others on that podcast displayed photographs of men who were pro-Kashmir voices, civilians with no militant record, no criminal case, nothing but a political position, and spoke about their deaths inside Pakistan as though that was simply the natural order of things. They then went further and described how their people, their assets on the ground in Pakistan, were behind the Lahore blast. Not as an allegation. As a matter they were comfortable discussing in front of a camera.
Let that settle for a moment. A senior Indian journalist and de facto BJP mouthpiece sat on a public platform and confirmed what Pakistan has been saying for years. India is running terror operations on Pakistani soil through proxies it controls, directs and deploys. And the world’s response? Silence dressed up as neutrality.
I want to be clear about what Aditya Raj Kaul is. He does not hold any official position in the BJP. He does not need to. When a journalist spends his days on television and social media promoting one party’s worldview so faithfully that the party itself does not need to speak, the title becomes irrelevant. He is, functionally, what he is. And what was revealed on that podcast is not just a personal opinion or a boast. It is a glimpse into how the Indian state thinks about Pakistani lives and how it uses proxies like the TTP and the BLA as instruments of a foreign policy built on destabilization, targeting not soldiers but civilians, not combatants but voices.
This is not new information for those of us who have been paying attention. India’s fingerprints have appeared repeatedly at the scene. The TTP, operating out of Afghan territory, has carried out attacks across Pakistan’s northwest. The BLA has bombed civilians in Balochistan. For years, Pakistan presented evidence to international forums, only to be dismissed or given the diplomatic equivalent of a polite nod and an empty promise to look into it. Meanwhile, India was simultaneously lobbying to have Pakistan placed on the FATF grey list while running its own terror financing network across the border. The hypocrisy would be funny if people were not dying because of it.
And it does not stop at Pakistan. The Bondi Beach attack in Australia has drawn attention. The targeted killings of Sikh leaders in Canada and the United States, operations that American and Canadian intelligence agencies have themselves linked to Indian government actors, have pulled back the curtain on what kind of state India has become under its current political direction. This is not a country merely protecting its national interest. This is a country that has decided assassination and proxy terror are legitimate tools of statecraft, to be used against its own diaspora abroad and its neighbors at home.
I notice something else that tells me everything I need to know about where certain Indian commentators stand. When Pakistan was announced as a mediator for the ongoing US-Iran talks, the reaction from people like Aditya and his circle was not congratulations for a regional player stepping up. It was barely concealed fury. They want those talks to fail. They want Pakistan to fail on every stage, diplomatic or otherwise. The reason is not complicated. Pakistan’s growing role as a constructive regional interlocutor directly contradicts the narrative that has been built over decades, the narrative that Pakistan is only capable of producing chaos, never stability. Every time Pakistan delivers on the world stage, that narrative takes a hit. So they root against peace. They root against diplomacy. They root against a world where Pakistan is taken seriously.
That tells you something important about the psychology driving this. It is not security policy anymore. It is obsession. It is a political class and its media allies so consumed by anti-Pakistan sentiment that opposing Pakistani success has become an end in itself, regardless of the consequences for regional stability or human lives.
But here is what I also know. The era of Indian proxies operating freely inside Pakistan is ending. Under the current military and civilian leadership, Pakistan has moved with greater precision and resolve against these networks than it has in years. The intelligence picture is clearer. The will is firmer. The confession that spilled out so casually on that podcast is now part of a documented record that Pakistan and its allies can use, are using, and will continue to use.
The world cannot keep treating India as an untouchable partner while it runs operations that would make any other country a pariah. Evidence has been gathered. Admissions have been made, not by Pakistani officials, not by adversaries, but by India’s own media class, proud of what they helped engineer. The only question now is whether the international community has the courage to finally read the script India wrote for itself.
Asma Bangash
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