India’s latest display of cross-border bravado — most dramatically the so-called Operation Sindoor, advertised as a “decisive strike” on terror infrastructure across the Line of Control in May — is not just another spike in South Asia’s long history of flare-ups. It marks something deeper and far more unsettling: the steady “saffronization” of India’s armed forces.
What was long considered one of the region’s most secular, disciplined and politically insulated institutions is now being tugged — symbol by symbol and ritual by ritual — into a majoritarian ideological project. And in a region where one misread signal can trigger catastrophe, an ideologized military is not merely a domestic concern but a regional hazard.
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