LONDON (THE THURSDAY TIMES) — The Oxford Union was preparing for a rare, high-octane confrontation on 27 November 2025 when the story shifted from the debate inside the chamber to the no-show outside it. Three high-profile Indian speakers, billed for months as the intellectual spearhead of New Delhi’s case on Pakistan, withdrew at the last minute from a marquee debate on whether India’s policy towards Pakistan is “a populist strategy sold as security policy.” Their withdrawal has been greeted in Pakistani circles as a symbolic walkover, a tame surrender at one of the world’s most prestigious debating forums.
The debate was not an improvised student event but the product of long planning and careful choreography. Invitations went out as far back as June 2025, with the Oxford Union presidency setting out a detailed itinerary that underscored the prestige attached to the evening. Briefings at a central Oxford hotel, a black tie dinner in the MacMillan Room, and a debate filmed for the Union’s historic archives were all part of a schedule designed to place this India–Pakistan clash alongside past appearances by Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon and Benazir Bhutto in the Union’s institutional memory.
At the heart of the planning was a heavyweight lineup that lent the debate an air of cabinet level confrontation. On the Pakistani side, the Union confirmed former Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, former Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee General Zubair Mahmood Hayat, and Pakistan’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Dr Mohammad Faisal. Facing them, India was to be represented by Congress leader Sachin Pilot, BJP veteran Subramaniam Swamy, and former army chief General M. N. Naravane, a trio combining political, ideological and military authority.
That is the context that makes the eleventh hour pullout so politically charged. On the morning of the debate, the Union presidency informed correspondents that “our original list of speakers from the Indian side” had dropped out and would be replaced. In internal correspondence, these withdrawals were described as not entirely unusual in contentious debates where “one side has a much stronger case than the other.” Yet the fact that all three senior Indian figures walked away from a motion that questioned the core of New Delhi’s Pakistan doctrine was interpreted in Islamabad as something more than a routine diary clash.
In their place, the Union hurriedly assembled a different Indian team. The revised lineup featured Supreme Court advocate Jai Sai Deepak, known for his arguments on civilisational questions and Hindu institutional rights, British based Hindu theologian Pandit Satish K. Sharma, a prominent voice in the diaspora’s Dharmic and decolonisation debates, and Devarchan Banerjee, a DPhil candidate at Oxford’s Saïd Business School working on state capacity and governance. The replacement team was intellectually credentialed, but it did not carry the same ministerial or military gravitas as a former chief of army staff or a former union minister.
For Pakistan, which flew in a full bench of former officials and diplomats to stand at the despatch box, the optics were stark. A delegation of senior Pakistani figures, backed by Islamabad’s High Commission in London, arrived ready to argue that Indian policy is driven more by domestic populism than sober security calculation. Across the aisle, the original Indian political and military heavyweights had quietly exited the stage. In the theatre of soft power, that was enough for many in Pakistan to declare that the argument had already been half won before a single Point of Information was raised on the chamber floor.
The student arithmetic adds another layer to this story. By most informal counts, Indian students and alumni at the Oxford Union comfortably outnumber their Pakistani counterparts. That demographic reality would normally be expected to provide India with a sympathetic or at least familiar audience in a debate where the result is determined by the votes of members present. Instead, New Delhi’s senior representatives stepped aside from a motion that directly questioned their Pakistan policy, leaving a reshaped delegation to cope with a motion crafted in the language of populism, propaganda and security.
This is precisely why Pakistani commentators are linking the Oxford episode to a broader critique of the ruling BJP’s political method. The motion’s wording, which described India’s Pakistan policy as a “populist strategy sold as security policy,” speaks to a long standing argument in Islamabad: that New Delhi has learned to externalise domestic tensions by inflating the Pakistani threat, and to internalise regional disputes as talking points for the home audience. In that reading, the refusal of senior Indian figures to test their narrative in a neutral arena, under the gaze of international media and an Oxford student electorate, becomes part of a pattern rather than an isolated act of caution.
Inside Pakistan, the withdrawal is already being folded into a narrative of momentum that stretches back to the spring. Commentators talk of “victory on the ground in May, and in the Oxford halls in November,” a line that deliberately blurs the boundary between hard and soft power. If May was presented domestically as a moment when Pakistan held its nerve in the face of Indian pressure, November is being painted as the moment when India blinked in a purely argumentative setting. Churchill’s line that “jaw jaw is better than war war” is being quoted with a twist: India, critics say, appears increasingly reluctant to risk either when the terrain is not stage managed.
For the Oxford Union itself, this episode is a reminder of how often its seemingly internal rituals become proxy stages for larger geopolitical contests. The president’s briefing notes talked of “incredible” interest from global media outlets and promised that images from the evening would adorn the Union’s walls for decades. The motion, the star power of the Pakistani side and the careful outreach to channels such as Al Jazeera, the BBC and leading Pakistani broadcasters turned what might have been a niche student debate into a set piece in the information war between two nuclear armed neighbours.
Indian officials and sympathisers might argue that any speculation about fear of defeat is unfair, and that scheduling, domestic constraints or security considerations may explain the withdrawals. The Union’s own correspondence notes that speaker dropouts are “common” in high profile debates. Yet politics is as much about symbolism as about logistics. When three marquee names vanish from the bill on the day of a debate whose motion challenges the heart of their government’s Pakistan narrative, the impression left behind is one of reluctance rather than routine reorganisation.
For Pakistan, the evening offers both an immediate propaganda gain and a longer term lesson. On the immediate level, Islamabad can point to an Oxford stage where its former foreign minister, a retired four star general and its serving high commissioner were ready to argue their case, while their original Indian counterparts walked away. On the longer horizon, it underscores the importance of taking the battle of narratives into Western campuses, think tanks and media ecosystems where public opinion on South Asia is still being formed and reformed.
As the cameras roll in the Union chamber and the reconstituted Indian side faces the motion under the rules of British Parliamentary debate, the original question lingers above the procedural details. Did India’s senior political and military leadership stand aside because they believed their case was already made elsewhere, or because they doubted their ability to persuade a mixed, international audience that their Pakistan policy is more than a populist script? In the court of global public opinion, that hesitation may prove as consequential as anything said on the floor of the House.
