Abstract
The 1965 India-Pakistan War, also known as the Second Kashmir War or the ‘Seventeen-Day War’, is usually understood through the lens of military history, regional geopolitics and the long-standing ‘Kashmir question’. This article looks instead to the construction of social and political meaning around the conflict through an examination of the war’s mediatisation in Pakistan. An analysis of different media forms—including radio broadcasts, news dailies, press photography and popular poetry—reveals how a war imaginary was shaped by both domestic crises and global ideological dissension, extending beyond the notion of a timeless Indo-Pak enmity. Taking place at a pivotal moment in the global Cold War, public narratives were built upon not only state agendas but also popular concerns regarding militarism, sovereignty and the politics of aid. These framings ultimately illustrate the deeper entanglements that exist between war, media and mass publics—extending beyond the goals of wartime propaganda alone to produce new national imaginaries and collective subjectivities.
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