In the long and blood-smeared corridors of history, nations have mourned. Some weep quietly. Others raise statues. Many — far too many — transform mourning into myth, and myth into manipulation. From the funerary rites of Roman emperors to the orchestrated grief of Soviet parades, public sorrow has always carried within it the dangerous potential for political theatre.
And now, in 2025, India — the self-proclaimed "mother of democracy" — has entered the stage with a new prop: artificial intelligence.
Pahalgam, and the Day the Tears Were Real
April 22. A terrorist attack in the verdant stillness of Pahalgam leaves twenty-six tourists dead. The air, once crisp with Himalayan silence, thickens with gunfire, panic, and the unmistakable stench of grief. The valley, known for its soul-steadying beauty, becomes a wound in the heart of the nation.
For a moment — just a moment — India stood still. Mourning was real. Families collapsed. Neighbors lit candles. Journalists whispered into their microphones.
But by the time the sun dipped behind the hills, mourning had a new director.
The Algorithm Takes the Stage
From grief to glitch, it took only hours.
The digital space erupted, not in sympathy, but in choreography. Videos emerged. A couple dancing in the hills — supposedly their last moments. AI-generated images of grieving mothers and bloodied tourists flooded feeds. The faces were sculpted, symmetrical, haunting — because AI has mastered tragedy’s aesthetic, if not its soul.
But none of it was true.
France 24’s “Truth or Fake” segment would later unravel the performance. The couple, Ashish and Yashika Sherawat, were alive. The photos bore Meta AI watermarks. The grieving figures? Pieced together from pixels and propaganda.
The machine had taken over the mourning.
A History of Convenient Outrage
India is no stranger to emotional sleight-of-hand.
In 2002, Godhra became a rallying cry.
In 2019, Pulwama turned into an election slogan.
Each time, grief was harvested, sorted, and repackaged into a moral alibi for rage. But this time, something changed. The instrument wasn’t rumor or hearsay. It was code. It was synthetic. It was programmable.
AI became the new scriptwriter of public emotion.
And like every good tragedy, this one needed a villain.
Scene IV: The Blame Game Begins
Even before forensics teams could process the blast site, the hashtags were trending.
PakistanDidIt.
KashmirAttack.
StrikeBack.
It didn’t matter that no group claimed responsibility.
It didn’t matter that no investigation had concluded.
It didn’t matter that the digital proof was fabricated.
What mattered was that rage had found a direction. And the myth of the enemy — so carefully cultivated over years of electoral campaigns and media complicity — had a fresh grave to lean on.
The Grief Machine
In Simon Schama’s world, history isn’t just facts — it’s the emotion embedded in how we remember. And India, in this moment, chose to remember Pahalgam not with truth, but with theatre.
The media didn’t just fail to fact-check. It chose not to. National anchors aired the AI-generated dancing couple with weeping commentary. Editors added patriotic music. Footage looped. Nothing was real, except the outrage it summoned.
Mourning became performance.
Performance became policy.
And justice was nowhere to be found.
The Technological Coup of Empathy
Empathy used to be spontaneous. Organic. Now it is algorithmically designed.
The AI grief campaign after Pahalgam wasn’t an accident. It was a prototype. A successful trial in how to script national emotion. With enough pixels and patriotic overlays, you can get an entire nation to cry on cue — and demand retribution before truth can speak.
This isn’t misinformation.
It’s emotional engineering.
The danger isn’t that people were lied to.
It’s that they felt more moved by the lies than they would’ve by the truth.
The Ghost of the Republic
In the India of Nehru, journalism was resistance.
In the India of Modi, journalism is ritual.
A priesthood of microphones. A liturgy of outrage. A funeral for facts.
And yet, outside this performative temple, real families grieve. Real bodies are buried. Real questions remain unanswered.
But the headlines have moved on.
The algorithms have shifted focus.
And justice — slow, inconvenient, unprofitable — is exiled.
The International Reckoning
France 24 showed the world what India would not.
That a democracy is only as strong as the truth it dares to hold sacred.
That AI, unregulated and weaponized by media complicity, is not the future — it is the funeral of honest journalism.
The global community now faces a choice:
Will it call out India’s digital propaganda?
Will it demand accountability for AI-generated warfare?
Will it protect truth from extinction in the age of algorithmic grief?
Scene IX: The Ethical Abyss
What does it say of a society where the dead must compete with the artificial to be believed?
What happens when mourning itself is manufactured?
When the authenticity of loss is replaced with template-based tears?
When entire nations cry, not for justice, but for vengeance, fueled by a fiction no one wants to fact-check?
The answer is chilling: history repeats not as tragedy or farce — but as a viral post.
Coda for a Dying Conscience
This isn’t about India alone. It’s about what happens when power learns to cry on demand.
When politics wears the mask of grief.
When technology becomes a puppeteer, and citizens the audience, applauding a performance they don’t realize is scripted.
Simon Schama would remind us: history is not just what happens, but what we choose to remember.
In April 2025, India chose to remember a massacre not with truth, but with pixels.
And if it continues down this path — trading fact for fiction, memory for myth, and mourning for manipulation — then it’s not just democracy that dies.
It’s the very idea of grief.
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