Brigadier Dr Zahir Kazmi (Retd) – views are personal, not state policy.
Language as Strategic Signal
In April 2011, when Pakistan tested its short-range ballistic missile Hatf-IX Nasr—Nasr meaning “victory” in Arabic—the announcement used the Romanized “NASR.” This led to some queries by Western circles over its supposed acronymic meaning, which did not exist. The episode foreshadowed a broader reality: in a time of strategic competition, the semantics of military actions are anything but incidental.
Names given to military operations are rarely arbitrary. They encode messages, shape perceptions, and often signal strategic intent. In South Asia, where religious, historical, and civilizational legacies intersect with geopolitics, military nomenclature acquires layered meaning, frequently misunderstood by external observers unfamiliar with the regional idiom.
The recent episode between India and Pakistan illustrates this vividly. India initiated a premeditated strike under the title Operation Sindoor, invoking a culturally rich term from Hindu tradition. Pakistan’s response, Operation Bunyanum Marsoos (an Arabic phrase meaning “fortified structure sealed with lead”), was later accompanied by the term Marka-e-Haq, or “Battle of Truth.” Both titles were culturally anchored and rhetorically significant but can be received in different ways outside the region in a manner that one set of symbols is interpreted as cultural pride while the other is perceived as ideological assertion. More importantly, what are the strategic risks when military communication is misread through selective cultural lenses?
Power of Naming in Military Signaling
Military operations aim not just for successful outcomes but for narrative dominance. Their titles are chosen to resonate with diverse audiences like domestic publics, adversaries, allies, and international media. Western military history provides familiar examples: Operation Enduring Freedom, Desert Storm, Inherent Resolve. These names seek to convey moral clarity, legitimacy, and resolve.
In South Asia, the cultural depth behind operational naming is equally significant. India’s Operation Sindoor drew on a term with layered mythological meaning. Sindoor (literally, “vermillion”) is a red powder traditionally worn by Hindu married women, symbolizing protection, sacredness, and marital status. Transposed into a military context, it evokes ideas of righteous power, self-sacrifice, and even divine sanction, particularly within the Shakti and Hanuman traditions of Hindu mythology. The phonetic similarity to Sindhu (Indus River) also alludes to territorial symbolism, linking the name to ancient geographical claims.
Pakistan’s Operation Bunyanum Marsoos, from Quranic verse (Surah As-Saff, 61:4), describes a body of people as firmly united as a wall of molten lead. It evokes strength, cohesion, and moral purpose in the face of aggression. The auxiliary use of Marka-e-Haq (Battle of Truth) anchors the operation in the universal ethic of resisting injustice—a motif prevailing across Abrahamic traditions, from David and Goliath to Abel and Cain.
These titles are not religious proclamations. They are strategic metaphors, rooted in civilizational memory and meant to frame the legitimacy and proportionality of state response. But when viewed through an uneven interpretive lens, one is cast as cultural, the other as ideological.
The Perception Gap—and Its Strategic Consequences
Despite their metaphorical parity, Sindoor and Marka-e-Haq can be interpreted very differently. The former is largely accepted or ignored in global commentary as cultural or poetic, while the latter, due to post-9/11 Islamophobia, can be perceived with religious overtones. This could also incorrectly prompt whispers of ideological militarization within Pakistan’s leadership.
This asymmetry is not incidental; it reveals deep biases in how geopolitical narratives are filtered. Symbolism from one side is romanticized, while from the other, it’s pathologized. Such framing can affect more than academic discourse, as it shapes perceptions of rationality, escalation control, and even threat assessments in real time.
More dangerously, such misinterpretations can enter the deterrence calculus. If the response to an adversary’s aggression is seen as ideologically driven rather than legally justified, despite being anchored in Article 51 of the UN Charter, the responding side is boxed into a miscast role of an irrational actor, regardless of how measured its actual conduct may be.
If the strategic vocabulary becomes weaponized, the risk will no longer be just about missiles, but metaphors where narrative asymmetry would undermine the clarity needed for stability between nuclear peers.
Restraint, Not Rhetoric
Amidst all the symbolism, what has often been missed is Pakistan’s restraint, both operational and rhetorical. Its military response during the crisis targeted military assets, avoided civilian areas, and demonstrated proportionality. Pakistan issued no exaggerated claims. There was no bombast in official narratives, only a deliberate reliance on fact-based communication and adherence to legal norms.
Even the naming of Operation Bunyanum Marsoos and its framing as Marka-e-Haq reflected a defensive ethos i.e. the notion of moral resistance, not theological assertion. These names borrow from the Abrahamic lexicon of justice and resilience, familiar not only to Muslims but to Christians and Jews alike. They signify self-defense in the face of unprovoked aggression, not crusading zeal.
Compare this to the Indian narrative, which downplayed Pakistan’s response, promoted disinformation, and employed terms like Sindoor with layered historical and religious connotations, yet drew no concern. This dissonance points to a broader issue of asymmetrical treatment of cultural references in strategic signaling, shaped by deep-seated biases and power alignments.
Global Parallels
Cultural and historical metaphors in military operations are not unique to South Asia. The U.S. coined Operation Inherent Resolve, Israel launched Operation Guardian of the Walls, and the UK has employed terms like Shader. These names carry spiritual, moral, and symbolic weight reflecting not just strategic aims, but also national narratives of identity and purpose.
Should the Islamic or Arabic-rooted terms be uniquely scrutinized? Marka-e-Haq cannot be cast as ideological and Sindoor accepted as civilizational. A disparity would reveal an analytical blind spot, one that risks pathologizing one cultural expression while normalizing another, a tendency that not only distorts perception but could damage efforts at stability.
The key difference lies not in the use of culture per se, but in how it is received. Pakistan’s terminology, grounded in defensive legitimacy and civilizational memory, should not be misconstrued as ideological theatre. It is no more religious than India’s invocation of Vedic, Dharmic, or epic symbols in its military nomenclature.
Equitable Strategic Discourse
In South Asia, names are signals, encoded with meaning, meant to communicate resolve, restraint, and rationale. Interpreting such symbols evenly would prevent strategic signaling from becoming a casualty of bias.
This essay is neither a defense nor an attack. It is a preemptive call for nuance, fair interpretation, cultural literacy, and responsible commentary. Military terminology, like doctrine, must be judged not by its diction alone but by its direction, the purpose it serves, and the conduct it reflects. If stability in South Asia is to hold, then global observers must look beyond vocabulary and toward verifiable behavior. Pakistan’s restraint, doctrine, and naming conventions are expressions of its enduring pursuit of credible minimum deterrence. What’s in a name is less important than what’s behind it.
Brig (R) Dr Zahir Kazmi is the Arms Control Advisor at the Strategic Plans Division.
