“Don’t talk about politics in public”

Navigating discourse on the India-Pakistan conflict

On 7 May, Prisha Jain and Tara Nair were revising for the last of their second-year exams and preparing to go back home to India for the summer. That afternoon, visuals of a military strike started popping up on their Instagram feeds. 

This military strike marked the beginning of a four-day military conflict between India and Pakistan. A dynamic marked by decades of tensions — this escalation was the closest the two nuclear powers had gotten to war in years. Triggered by a terror attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir that killed 26 people on 22 April 2025, India launched a military strike on Pakistan, attributing the attack to the Pakistani government, a claim denied by Islamabad. 

For some international students, going back home for the summer can be a change in setting, but also a shift in media and discourse landscapes. I spoke to Jain and Nair to understand how they engaged with the conflict from miles away, and how they felt about going back home to a politically charged climate.

Jain described an “information delay” while at university. “When you’re here, news reaches you so late.” For Nair, this delay produced a more “objective and fact-checked view of the situation”. 

Across the four days of conflict, misinformation clouded the media landscapes in India and Pakistan — false claims of victories, defeats, shootings, captures, and arrests emerged on social media, amplified by major news outlets. Both sides saw misinformation on a scale like never before, with claims of military might and domination paired with a wide range of doctored news footage. 

Jain and Nair described their distance as allowing them to evade the brunt of this misinformation. Yet, “we aren’t seeing it firsthand or seeing the real impact of it,” Nair added, “which we will now.” 

In St Andrews, “you don’t really have the opportunity to spend a lot of time thinking about or focusing on the conflict,” Nair said. “There isn’t much discourse about it.”

Occasionally, someone will ask you if you’re alright, if your family is ok, and Student Services will email saying they are available to help with “a range of support and advice”, Nair explained. But there aren’t a lot of people who are “aware of the context or even what’s going on”. Going back, Nair expects the opposite — “I’d imagine it’s mostly what people are talking about.”

What sort of discourse are they anticipating back home? Jain was not optimistic. She described polarisation dominating conversations. “When you have differing political opinions with people, it becomes a conversation about those opinions rather than about what actually matters.” 

Discussions on the catastrophes of war and its fallout are overshadowed by rhetoric framing the other side as the enemy. “Anytime someone says, ‘No, we cannot have a war,’ then you’re anti-nationalist or you’re against India, pro-Pakistan,” Nair explained. 

Jain plans to avoid such conversations with her family. “I know it’s not going to be a productive conversation.” She said it feels “fruitless” and will “drain me of my energy”. 

Beyond her family, Jain described a sense of caution. “Don’t talk about politics in public, don’t talk about politics around someone who is not your immediate family,” she said.

“If someone randomly starts talking to you about [the conflict] — don’t let it come to your ego, don’t think that you’re going to change somebody’s mind.” Why? “It’s not going to happen — it’s going to put you in danger,” Jain explained. She expressed frustration at having to “go home and agree with people I disagree with” — just because she has to “play it safe”. 

Jain’s caution is shaped by past experiences but also the state of news media in India. She anticipates being “bombarded with so much news, so many opinions”. News channels back home are “outwardly obnoxious and absurd”. “I feel like people watch it for the sensationalization, to validate their extremist ideologies,” she said. Rather than isolate herself from national media altogether, Jain faces these concerns by taking “every piece of news with a grain of salt”.

It is difficult to rationalise the intense animosity being peddled by both the Indian and the Pakistani national media in a place like St Andrews. At the university, Indian and Pakistani students have shared cultural spaces — “a collective sense”. It’s “because we’re in such a minority just as Desi [South Asian] people,” Nair explained. “We have to work together to have even somewhat of a voice here.” 

“Of course, there are nuances to it, but there is such integration that you can’t really separate the two at all,” added Jain. “Even when we have joint events, I can never tell who is from the Pakistani Soc or who is from the Indian Soc.” With students of both nationalities finding themselves in the minority, Jain described identical experiences of “this is how you’re being perceived, this is how you’re being looked at.” 

Back home, Jain anticipates a very different atmosphere. She worries about “the propaganda and violent rhetoric” that the Indian public appears to have adopted: “Everyone has an opinion, everyone has something to say, everyone is sort of just making posts and videos about it.” 

For Jain this violent rhetoric only reinforces her existing political views. She describes hearing the word patriotism consistently used to further nationalist justifications of the war. “It just makes you feel like, yeah, I was right — war is super super sh**ty. We don’t want that.”

To keep track of the conflict, Jain described a sense of vigilance when engaging with the news. “It’s kind of like doing your own fact checking — which is really strange.” 

She described a process of research, understanding various arguments and then consolidating that information. “I’ve found that I need to do it in particular for news about home.”

It isn’t just news outlets but also social circles, social media, family group chats, and text chains they have to contend with. “I get WhatsApp forwards primarily from my grandfather with news site screenshots,” Jain said. “Some of it is reliable, some of it not so much — the facts are often correct but the narrative being woven around them is really extra.”

How do they feel now that they are home? “This is the part after the worst is over. It feels calmer,” Jain said. She describes a slowing down, a sense that it’s finally “news you can absorb at your own pace”. 

Despite infuriating conversations and blaring news channels, Jain felt “a little more relief on the personal level”. It helped to see that she doesn’t “need to worry about the people that are here”. 

Image from Wikimedia Commons