Pakistan has, since its inception, operated as a state deeply invested in psychological warfare, strategic brainwashing, and the deliberate spread of misinformation and disinformation. Its approach to education, nation-building, and regional politics has been shaped by a systematic cultivation of hostility towards India. In Pakistani schools, the purpose of textbooks has never been to broaden the intellectual horizons of young minds; rather, they have been carefully designed to embed animosity, suspicion, and a siege mentality. A simple review of their curriculum reveals how history is distorted to manufacture a perpetual sense of victimhood and hostility.

Multiple independent studies — including from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and Pakistan’s own National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP) — document how Pakistani public-school textbooks embed deeply biased narratives. According to these analyses, textbooks frequently portray Hindus as aligned with India and as perennial enemies, while omitting or distorting Hindu civilization in history. The NCJP’s review found more than a hundred instances of explicitly anti-India or anti-minority content in schoolbooks, and academic research shows a pattern of erasing or rewriting Hindu/Sanskrit heritage to build a narrative of perpetual conflict. A simple review of their curriculum thus reveals how history is weaponized, not to enlighten, but to manufacture hostility across generations.

From very early on, Pakistan institutionalized psychological operations. The establishment of the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) in 1949 was not merely for communication—it was a structured mechanism for shaping public perception, conducting propaganda, and crafting narratives targeted primarily against India. Even today, ISPR functions as a propaganda arm, controlling national discourse, producing dramas, songs, and media campaigns to glorify the extremism and sustain its ideological supremacy.

This psychological strategy extends to symbolic politics as well. In India, even minor name changes provoke extensive debate. Pakistan, however, has been altering names since independence to overwrite its pre-Islamic history. Many places that originally had Hindu names were renamed to erase cultural memory. Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) was called “Azad Kashmir” to create an illusion of freedom, despite being tightly controlled by the Pakistani state.

Here, Pakistan’s renaming practices are part of a much broader pattern of symbolic re-labelling that began at Partition and continued thereafter. Across Pakistan — from major cities such as Lyallpur (renamed Faisalabad) to smaller towns — colonial, Sikh, or Hindu-derived names were replaced or Islamized to reshape identity. In Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK/Azad Kashmir), too, older Hindu or Sanskrit-origin toponyms have been replaced or gradually pushed out of public memory, a trend noted in various local historical accounts even if not centrally documented. This narrative manipulation intersects with Kashmir’s own contested naming: in the Indian Valley, the town historically known as Anantnag is also widely referred to as........

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