When the Oxford Union scheduled its November 27, 2025, debate, “This House Believes That India’s Response to Pakistan is a Populist Strategy Sold as Security Policy", it was framed as another earnest attempt by one of the world’s oldest debating societies to probe a difficult geopolitical question. What happened instead exposed something more telling of how India’s intellectual class repeatedly enters forums structurally predisposed against them, and how Pakistan continues to set the terms of conversation within Western academia while the Indian diaspora remains largely reactive and disorganised.

The controversy unfolded with a familiar sense of déjà vu. Senior advocate J Sai Deepak, invited months earlier, travelled to Oxford prepared to speak. Yet the Pakistani delegation, though physically present in Oxford, simply did not attend. They later claimed a walkover, asserting that Indian speakers like General MM Naravane, Subramanian Swamy, and Sachin Pilot had backed out. Sai Deepak publicly challenged this version with documented evidence, emails, call logs, and internal communications clearly showing that he was present and ready, and that Pakistani representatives had disengaged without explanation. Instead of meaningful debate, the event became a study in how narrative manipulation thrives when intellectual oversight collapses.

The episode may appear trivial compared to the larger security issues India confronts, but it illuminates a recurring pattern, that of India’s intellectual elite continuing to walk into debates where the ground has already been prepared to disadvantage or discredit them.

What stands out most starkly is the contradictory behaviour of India’s intellectual establishment. Many among them regularly argue at home that “terror and talks cannot coexist," particularly after every violent terror incident that Pakistan perpetrates against India. They often advocate an uncompromising national security posture and often criticise attempts at engagement as naïve or politically motivated. Yet the same intelligentsia are remarkably eager to debate Pakistan in Western academic settings.

This inconsistency reveals more than just a tactical misstep; it reflects a deeper psychological dynamic. For decades, India’s intellectual class has attached disproportionate value to recognition by Western institutions like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, or the LSE. This post-colonial reflex still casts Western platforms as global arbiters of legitimacy, though in today’s date and age, any of them are far from it. In the past decade, most of these institutions have become a bulwark for radical Islamist ideologues to legitimise acts of global terrorism and also provide intellectual heft to the most regressive societal issues that currently plague a large part of the globe. In this pursuit, Indian speakers overlook the structural constraints of these debates. The choice of topics, moderators, framing of questions, and selection of panellists almost always aligns with entrenched academic biases against........

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