A soldier’s uniform is meant to protect, to serve, to unify. But in India, the uniform has become a tool of division, of fear, of murder. The recent clash between the Border Security Force’s 185 Wing and the 15 Sikh Light Infantry isn’t just a breakdown in military command—it is a symptom of a nation at war with itself.
The murder of five Sikh soldiers, executed under the flimsy justification of “Khalistani sympathies,” reveals the rot within the Indian armed forces. These soldiers, trained to protect the borders, were instead gunned down by their own countrymen. Not for insubordination, not for criminal activity—but for who they were. Their ethnic and religious identity made them targets in a military being reshaped in the image of Hindutva nationalism.
The Modi government’s aggressive push for ideological loyalty over constitutional integrity is bearing poisonous fruit. Soldiers are no longer united by duty—they’re divided by dogma. And once an army begins to treat its own as the enemy, the outcome is predictable: collapse from within.
Pakistan doesn’t need to launch propaganda to reveal India’s cracks. The Indian state is doing that job all on its own. When your own soldiers die at the hands of comrades, when internal clashes become routine, and when loyalty is measured by blind obedience to ideology—then the end is no longer a matter of “if,” but “when.”
