Pakistan has claimed that the Indian side backed out of the Oxford Union debate, but a closer look at the sequence of events points to something very different: the debate was never intended to take place. It appears to have been choreographed to create the impression that Indians were unwilling to engage publicly. The key figure at the centre of the controversy is Oxford Union President Moosa Harraj, who is also the son of Pakistan’s federal defence production minister. The allegation is that Harraj used his position to stage-manage a situation where Pakistan could claim victory without the debate ever happening — a tactic critics say mirrors Pakistan’s old strategy of manufacturing narratives rather than confronting facts.
The motion for the so-called debate — “This House believes that India’s policy towards Pakistan is a populist strategy sold as security policy” — was advertised as an open academic forum. But Indian participants, after revealing their timelines and communication from the Union, have argued that the entire event was engineered to collapse. Repeated attempts to contact Harraj over more than 15 hours — through calls, WhatsApp messages and texts — yielded no response.
The manner in which invitations and confirmations were handled has raised almost every conceivable red flag. The invitation to Shiv Sena (UBT) MP Priyanka Chaturvedi first arrived in June, followed by months of silence. A second invitation came just two days before the event, impossible for any MP to accommodate. Advocate-author J Sai Deepak said he had been confirmed months in advance along with General MM Naravane (Retd) and Subramanian Swamy, but by the time he landed in the UK — after rescheduling court hearings — he was told that Chaturvedi and Suhel Seth had “backed out.” Meanwhile, the Pakistan High Commission had already posted publicly that Indian speakers had “withdrawn,” generating the desired perception before the debating chamber had even opened.
At 3:13 pm (UK time) on the day of the debate, Deepak was informed that the Pakistani speakers — including former minister Hina Rabbani Khar and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Zubair Hayat — had not arrived in London. A little over an hour later, Harraj called Deepak personally to apologise and admitted that he had known since 10 a.m. that the Pakistani side would not be attending but deliberately withheld that information. The narrative that India “walked out” had already been circulated on social media by the time these facts surfaced. Later, Deepak discovered that the Pakistani delegation had indeed arrived at Oxford but was present only after the “withdrawal” narrative had taken hold.
The motive becomes clearer when one considers who was expected to represent India. Chaturvedi is a seasoned politician with spokesperson experience, Deepak is known for his sharp courtroom and policy arguments, and the originally listed speakers — Naravane and Swamy — are known for their analytical approach to Pakistan. A full debate would likely have forced Pakistan to explain decades of terror financing, safe havens for extremist groups and the documented links of organisations tied to attacks like Pahalgam. Pakistan would have been hard-pressed to defend itself with facts.
Instead of risking a public intellectual rout at a global, archival platform such as the Oxford Union — where Indian speakers have historically dominated, as demonstrated by Shashi Tharoor’s 2015 speech on British reparations — critics argue Pakistan chose the easier route: staging a controversy, manipulating scheduling communication, and then declaring “victory” without a contest. This pattern is reminiscent of the post-Operation Sindoor narrative, where Pakistan publicly claimed triumph while privately pleading for a ceasefire after Indian strikes disabled its bases and terror infrastructure.
In this case, all Pakistan needed was a tactical “no” — an inability of Indian speakers to accept invitations issued at impossible notice — to spin a story of “India refusing to debate.” The world’s diplomats and academic community, however, are increasingly familiar with such staged optics, and the fallout is expected to affect Pakistan’s credibility rather than India’s. What Pakistan calls a victory may be little more than another demonstration of its preference for narratives over facts — something the global audience is increasingly quick to recognise.
