For Pakistan’s small Sikh community, long associated with sacred shrines and historical memory, but seldom with state authority, it marked a rare breakthrough.

Pakistan is often described as an Army with a state rather than a state with an army. In such a system, even seemingly routine decisions, such as military promotions, can carry deep political meaning. One such case was the promotion of Lt Col Harcharan Singh in February this year, as the first Sikh officer in Pakistan’s history to attain this rank. Months later, it still merits attention, not because it was merely unusual, but because it revealed how identity, military power, and regional politics continue to intersect in Pakistan.

At one level, the promotion was politically noteworthy and institutionally revealing. For Pakistan’s small Sikh community, long associated with sacred shrines and historical memory, but seldom with state authority, it marked a rare breakthrough. Yet in Pakistan, where the military remains the country’s most powerful institution, promotions are seldom read only as personnel decisions. They can also be instruments of strategic messaging.

Advancement within Pakistan’s armed forces carries prestige, influence, and political meaning beyond what most civilian institutions can confer. For a minority officer to rise in that structure is therefore no minor development.

Harcharan Singh’s own journey helps explain why the event resonated so widely. 

Born in 1987 in Nankana Sahib: the birthplace of Guru Nanak and one of Sikhism’s holiest centres, he came from a town central to Sikh religious consciousness worldwide. He later studied at the prestigious Forman Christian College in Lahore, one of Pakistan’s oldest and most respected institutions, historically known for producing political leaders, diplomats, academics, and public figures across communities.

Afterward, he reportedly cleared Pakistan’s Inter Services Selection Board and entered the Pakistan Military Academy, Kakul, through the 116^th Long Course. When commissioned in 2007, he was widely described as the first publicly known Sikh officer to receive a regular commission in the Pakistan Army since Partition.

He was initially inducted into the Army Ordnance Corps, a technical branch responsible for logistics, stores etc. Subsequently he joined the 12^th battalion of Baloch Regiment, indicating movement into a more operational environment linked to field command structures. In professional militaries, such trajectories matter. They reveal whether representation remains ceremonial or extends into the institution’s core functions.

By that measure, Singh’s promotion is meaningful. But it is placed within a broader strategic context.

Pakistan’s Sikh population is small, commonly estimated to be no more than 15,000. Yet its political value exceeds its demographic size. Unlike other minority communities, Sikhs occupy a space where faith, geography, memory, and India-Pakistan rivalry converge. Pakistan hosts some of Sikhism’s most sacred sites: Nankana Sahib, Kartarpur, Panja Sahib. Few states possess custodianship over the sacred geography of a community whose largest population lives elsewhere.

Islamabad has increasingly recognised the utility of that reality.

The Kartarpur Corridor, opened by former PM Imran Khan in 2019, was welcomed by pilgrims as a humanitarian and religious breakthrough. It was also an exercise in modern soft power. It allowed Pakistan to project tolerance, engage Sikh sentiment directly, and shape international perceptions at relatively low strategic cost. 

That same logic helps explain why Sikh inclusion carries a different strategic weight from the inclusion of other minorities. Sikhs constitute roughly 1.7 to 2 percent of India’s population, but their national influence exceeds numbers alone. They are economically prominent, politically mobilised, globally networked through a substantial diaspora, and historically overrepresented in India’s armed forces relative to population share. Their presence in Punjab, India’s border state adjoining Pakistan, adds another layer of geopolitical relevance.

Unlike Christians or Hindus, Sikhs offer Pakistan something rare in geopolitics: a minority constituency with emotional relevance inside India, religious relevance globally, and sacred geography inside Pakistan. 

This is why Pakistan’s engagement with Sikh politics has never been merely domestic.

During the militancy years of the 1980s, Pakistan’s security establishment was widely understood to have provided sanctuary, training, financing, and logistical support to Khalistani militant networks operating against India. Over time, the methods evolved from covert infrastructure and cross-border facilitation to diaspora outreach, information campaigns, and symbolic religious diplomacy. The objective, however, has often appeared consistent: keep Punjab politically sensitive and India strategically vulnerable. 

Seen in that light, Harcharan Singh’s promotion is about more than minority advancement. It reinforces outreach to Sikh communities abroad, complements Pakistan’s custodianship narrative over Sikh heritage sites, and projects institutional openness at a time when the country continues to face scrutiny over blasphemy laws, discrimination against Christians, insecurity among Hindus, and the constitutional exclusion of Ahmadis.

That leads to a more difficult question. If this promotion is evidence of broad-based inclusion, why has no Christian, Hindu, or other minority officer publicly emerged with comparable prominence in the Army’s visible hierarchy? Are others less capable, less deserving, or simply less useful to the state’s strategic narrative?

This is where representation shades into selective inclusion.

Institutions sometimes elevate a few exceptional individuals not only to reward merit, but also to project an image of systemic openness and institutional inclusivity. One success story can be amplified as proof of reform. Yet symbolic mobility for a handful does not necessarily amount to structural equality and inclusion of minorities. 

None of this diminishes Harcharan Singh’s personal achievement. Rising through a rigid military hierarchy requires discipline and competence. But in Pakistan’s case, it would be simplistic to read the episode solely through the language of diversity and one individual’s calibre.

As with many political gestures in Pakistan, the significance of this promotion lies not only in what it reveals, but in what it may conceal. The deeper story is about how states convert identity into influence. Pakistan’s handling of Sikh symbolism: from Kartarpur diplomacy to selective representation in the army, suggests a maturing soft-power strategy in which minority visibility serves not only domestic optics, but wider geopolitical aims vis-à-vis India. 

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

and CNSS

On 18 November 2025, while presenting the 2026 budget in Ankara’s parliament, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan once again raised the Kashmir issue, urging international intervention and dialogue under global oversight. The statement sparked little surprise not because it was benign, but because it fits a familiar pattern.

Over the past decade, Turkey has consistently used major global platforms, from the UN General Assembly to the OIC to national parliamentary debates, to position itself as a defender of Muslim causes worldwide, with Kashmir serving as a recurring rhetorical centerpiece.

Fidan’s remark was not an impulsive comment on a routine parliamentary day. It was another installment in Ankara’s long game of narrative diplomacy; a strategic campaign to shape how conflicts are perceived worldwide through emotional, identity-based framing rather than balanced geopolitical reasoning.

Soft Power and Narrative Warfare: A defining feature of Turkey’s foreign policy under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been the deployment of soft power instruments: universities, think-tanks, diaspora groups, cultural bodies, and civil-society platforms, to construct and amplify narratives sympathetic to Ankara’s ideological and geopolitical positions.

These platforms allow Turkey to frame complex conflicts such as through simplified moral binaries: oppressed versus oppressor, victim versus aggressor, without any reference to state-sponsored terrorism.

Indeed, reports by independent fact-checkers such as DFRAC identified media organisations based in Turkey (and in Gulf-region media-ecosystems including Qatar) as active participants in anti-India disinformation efforts: suggesting that this campaign extends well beyond South Asia and aims to shape perceptions among Muslim audiences globally.

Turkey is now being described as ‘the new Dubai’ for anti-India influence operations, indicating that as Gulf states tightened their cooperation with India, Ankara repositioned itself as a hub for media, NGO-sponsored, and diaspora-led narrative outreach targeting Indian Muslims and the broader Muslim world.

This narrative strategy has been particularly visible in Turkey’s activism on Kashmir. Conferences, public lectures, solidarity campaigns, and academic delegations in events hosted by Istanbul university, Institute for Strategic Thinking (SDE) and Ankara-based thinktank ESAM have frequently depicted Kashmir not as a multifaceted political and security challenge but as a humanitarian catastrophe demanding global intervention.

Such narratives often mirror Pakistan’s long-standing line, while omitting crucial realities: cross-border terrorism, Pakistan-sponsored insurgency, and decades of targeted violence against civilians and security forces.

A Narrative Vacuum Waiting to Be Filled: A core factor enabling the spread of these narratives is the limited global understanding of India’s internal security landscape including Kashmir and left-wing extremism. In the absence of nuanced knowledge, simplified and emotive accounts travel faster and take deeper root.

Soft-power messaging thrives on precisely this gap; as American political scientist (late) Joseph Nye observed, “power is the ability to get others to want what you want.” In today’s world, what others believe is often more consequential than what is objectively verifiable.

By mobilizing academic and civil-society voices as independent moral arbiters, Turkey gains plausible deniability, allowing state-aligned narratives to be projected through apparently neutral channels. When repeated across respected international platforms, these positions accumulate what political scientists call normative legitimacy; the power to define what is seen as “just,” “acceptable,” or “morally right.”

Once embedded, such perceptions can influence diplomatic decisions, resolutions in multilateral bodies, and broader public opinion.

Why does It Matter for India and India’s Options?

India cannot afford complacency. External narratives have domestic consequences when they shape expectations, policy environments, and diplomatic costs. Allowing another state to repeatedly frame Kashmir as an international dispute rather than an internal constitutional question risks legitimizing external interference in India’s sovereign domain.

Moreover, narrative asymmetry creates a structural disadvantage when one side dominates the language of morality and human rights, the other risks being cast defensively, forced to justify rather than articulate. Emotional rhetoric consistently outpaces empirical analysis, and global politics increasingly rewards speed, sentiment, and symbolism.

This is not about silencing criticism; democracies must welcome scrutiny. But critique must be grounded in full context, not curated fragments that erase terrorism, glorify violence, or recast insurgents as liberators. A debate divorced from reality becomes political theatre rather than principled engagement.

The answer is not reactionary counter-propaganda. It is strategic narrative engagement: building credible visibility in global academic and diplomatic spaces, fostering research partnerships, investing in international outreach, and supporting evidence-based scholarship. India must tell its story with clarity, not defensively, but assertively, through transparent, well-structured public diplomacy.

India must also insist on transparency regarding funding and affiliations in international think tanks and civil-society organizations participating in discourse on South Asian conflicts. Legitimacy cannot be built upon undisclosed interests.

Conclusion

In an age where perception competes with reality, narrative power has become a strategic asset. Words can move resolutions, shift alliances, and determine how conflicts are judged before facts are even examined. When a budget-session remark in Ankara becomes global talking-point ammunition, it signals that narrative warfare is no longer peripheral: it is geopolitical statecraft.

India cannot allow others to define its story. If we do not articulate our truth with coherence, evidence, and confidence, we risk being defined by those whose agendas are anything but impartial. The choice before India is clear: shape the narrative or be shaped by it.

Centre for National Security Studies (CNSS) is a well-known thinktank in the area of National Security Studies, under Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences, Bangalore (India).

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.