On April 22, 2025, gunfire shattered the stillness of the scenic Pahalgam valley in India's Jammu & Kashmir. In what was one of the deadliest peacetime attacks in recent years, 26 tourists—ordinary civilians—were killed. The Resistance Front (TRF), a well-known militant group, took responsibility. But for India, it didn’t matter who pulled the trigger. In the eyes of New Delhi, the real culprit sat across the border in Islamabad.

The Indian State, almost as if working from a pre-written script, at once launched into a sequence of retaliatory actions. Within days, India took sweeping steps against Pakistan that echoed past escalations. The Indus Waters Treaty, one of the few remaining bilateral agreements still intact, was suspended. The Wagah-Attari crossing, a rare lifeline between the two countries, was closed. Pakistani military advisers in Delhi were asked to leave, SAARC visa exemptions were revoked, and the air was thick with statements soaked in nationalism and threat. It was an all-too-familiar escalation—one that seems to play out every few years on the subcontinent’s political stage. But this time, something curious happened on the Pakistani side: the streets remained calm, but the internet exploded—in laughter and memes.

Internet lit up with memes, not outrage

In Islamabad, the Foreign Office issued the usual denials and retaliatory steps, including closing airspace and banning Indian diplomatic movement. But one might have also expected a heated response from Pakistan’s public—angry rebuttals, solidarity marches, perhaps nationalistic fervor pouring into the streets. Instead, something else happened. Something uniquely 21st-century, uniquely Pakistani, and oddly disarming.

The internet lit up not with grief or protest, but with memes.

Pakistanis didn’t rush to defend themselves with emotional nationalism or moral superiority. Instead, they rolled their eyes at yet another accusation. To many, it felt like déjà vu — the same old script, playing out again. The exhaustion from decades of being blamed for every regional mishap had numbed the population. So instead of engaging, people choose to laugh. Not because they didn’t care, but because they cared too little about India’s narrative anymore. It was not a nation in denial—it was a nation in exhaustion, one that had learned over decades that every flare-up across the border ends in noise, not consequence.

Humor as a National Armor

Within hours of India announcing it would “review” the Indus Waters Treaty—a move that carries heavy symbolism in a region already obsessed with historical grievances—Pakistani netizens launched their counterattack. Pakistanis had transformed the hashtag #PaniDedo into a national inside joke. The internet was flooded with edits of Modi as a water mafia don, Twitter threads mocking India’s obsession with the Indus Waters Treaty, and parodies of Indian news anchors turning every discussion into a war cry. It was digital warfare—but with jokes instead of jingoism. It was refreshing, in a way, to see people so comfortable laughing at themselves while rejecting the politics of fear.

But while humor was flowing like a river, something else was noticeably absent. The humor was sharp, witty, and relentless—but it was also one-sided. While India’s reaction was under fire, the tragedy itself—the cold-blooded murder of 26 civilians—barely made it into the conversation. The jokes were loud. The mourning was quiet, if it existed at all.

Silence Around the Dead

Twenty-six people died. Civilians. Tourists. Possibly women, children, families. Innocents. Their stories never reached us. Not because of censorship, but because no one cared enough to look for them. In Pakistan, people were too busy winning the meme war to ask who the victims were—or what their lives meant. That absence of empathy wasn’t just insensitive, it was inhumane.

It doesn’t matter who planned the attack. It may very well not be Pakistan. TRF is an actor with unclear affiliations. It could be a false-flag operation. It could be the work of an entirely rogue group with regional agendas. But even if Pakistan had no role, even if the attack was staged to create pressure—none of it changes one chilling fact: innocent people were killed. And terrorism, in any form, from any direction, against any population, should be condemned without hesitation or conditions.

Yet in Pakistan, the reflex to reject India’s narrative completely overtook the human need to grieve for the dead. It wasn’t even about whether they were Indian or not—it was as if their lives simply didn’t matter enough to acknowledge simply because they exist on the “other side” of the border. And that’s a dangerous moral failure. This isn’t about agreeing with India’s narrative or endorsing its policies. This is about asking ourselves a brutally honest question: have we become emotionally blind to human suffering if it’s not happening on our soil?

Nationalism Over Humanity

Here’s the harsh truth: both India and Pakistan responded not as human societies, but as nation-states infected by the same virus: nationalism that eclipses empathy.

In India, mourning quickly mutated into militarism. Instead of grieving the dead first, the country turned to assigning blame, flexing diplomatic muscle, and wrapping tragedy in tricolor outrage. Emotions were outsourced to TV anchors, and nuance was drowned in slogans.

In Pakistan, the opposite happened but the outcome was just as hollow. Laughter drowned out lament. Not because the dead didn’t matter, but because acknowledging their humanity would risk seeing them as more than just "Indians." And that makes us uncomfortable.

When both nations react to civilian death by either weaponizing it or mocking it, it shows they are not opposites—but reflections of the same wound. This is not about moral relativism—it’s about moral realism. Because if our response to human loss is shaped by where the body falls on a map, then we are no longer protecting our nations—we’re abandoning our humanity.

Selective Empathy and Outrage

This reaction exposes something deeper and more uncomfortable: the growing culture of selective empathy. This selective silence is not just an oversight—it’s a symptom. Pakistanis are not unfeeling. Time and again, we have seen this nation rally passionately for Gaza, for Rohingya Muslims, for Sudan, for every global cause that fits within our framework of righteous suffering. We donate, we protest, we post. But when 26 tourists are gunned down in Kashmir, our instinct isn’t grief—it’s parody.

It forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: our empathy is highly political. We extend it when it aligns with our worldview but withdraw it when it risks making “the enemy” look human. The same hearts that bleed for humanity abroad seem to harden when the dead are across the eastern border. And this kind of selective compassion isn’t just morally troubling, it’s dangerous. Because once we start filtering human tragedy through the lens of nationalism, we slowly erode the very idea of shared humanity.

Of course, some might argue: “But Indians don’t grieve for our dead either.” Maybe not. But if our morality depends on theirs, what does that say about us? Must we copy their silence with our own? Is this tit-for-tat outrage really the standard we want to set? Compassion, when it becomes selective, ceases to be compassion—it becomes calculation.

When Laughter Becomes a Blindfold

To be fair, humor has long been Pakistan’s coping mechanism. In a country constantly grappling with inflation, load-shedding, and geopolitical uncertainty, jokes are often the only thing keeping people sane. Memes become a way to reclaim power in a world where citizens have little control. They offer a kind of psychological resistance—proof that, despite everything, we can still laugh. But when that humor completely eclipses any recognition of grief or loss, it stops being a shield and becomes a blindfold. 

The meme war against India was clever, no doubt. But was it also a way for us to avoid confronting a tragedy we didn’t want to feel complicit in? Was it easier to laugh than to sit with the discomfort of how our state’s policies—directly or through negligence—feed into a region trapped in perpetual hostility?

What we saw wasn’t just a clash between two governments or a diplomatic fallout, it was a glimpse into how deeply polarized and psychologically fatigued South Asians have become. For many young Pakistanis, born after Kargil and raised on an internet diet of sarcasm and skepticism, the idea of war is not frightening—it’s funny. Nuclear threats? Meme it. Water wars? Make a TikTok. This isn’t just desensitization. It’s a collective trauma response. But it also signals how far we’ve drifted from even trying to understand each other. And in that drift, we’ve started losing not just empathy for “the other,” but even our own ability to feel.

Beyond Memes, Back to Humanity

Pakistan’s meme response was undeniably clever. It dominated the digital discourse. We showed the world that we could out-joke the crisis, but we also showed that we were unwilling to pause and mourn. We mocked the rhetoric, but we missed the chance to be bigger than it. We lost the opportunity to say: "We may not accept your accusation—but we do grieve for your loss."

Because in the end, whether those tourists were Indian, American, or Martian, they were human. And when we choose memes over mourning, ridicule over reflection, we risk becoming what we once despised—a nation that lets ideology bury empathy.

The meme war was won. But the moral silence? That was our defeat.

(The writer is a student of International Relations at Recep Tayyip Erdoğan University, Türkiye. Views expressed are personal. He can be reached at assadabbas094@gmail.com. )