In many a Kashmir crisis, a frequent invocation has been: “aar ya paar” — or the decisive final battle — between the two nations. Yet, each time, India and Pakistan have walked back from the brink.
All Indian Prime Ministers, in the last four decades, have been frequently tested by a military crisis with Pakistan. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has faced more than one. But the current crisis could be far more demanding.
To be sure, Delhi’s overall national power has grown in relation to Islamabad—India’s GDP at $4 trillion, for example, is 10 times larger than Pakistan’s. Delhi’s global diplomatic influence now overshadows Islamabad’s—many traditional friends of Pakistan are now neutral if not tilted towards India. Pakistan is more internally divided than ever and its western borders with Afghanistan restive.
Yet, there are many imponderables that Modi must deal with, including the significant capabilities of the Pakistan Army. But given the horrific nature of the attack and the outrage that has convulsed the nation, the PM may have no option but to explore some major risks.
The border shutdowns, suspension of trade, the closing of air space, and the downgrading of the two high commissions are all reversible at some point.
But Islamabad’s framing of the possibility of India blocking the flow of river waters into Pakistan as an “act of war,” and its decision to reserve the right to suspend all previous agreements, including the 1972 Shimla Agreement, is entering uncharted territory.
Every round of conflict between India and Pakistan inevitably changed some things on the ground. Yet some elements of the relationship, such as the Indus Water Treaty, endured. Although Pakistan has long given up on the Shimla agreement, it has never formally discarded it. In other words, the slate of accumulated agreements and understandings between the two nations could well be erased as this crisis escalates.
In a world, where the territorial status quo is no longer considered sacrosanct—see what is happening in Gaza and Ukraine—the prospect of a redisposition of boundaries and a comprehensive overhaul of the terms of engagement between India and Pakistan is no longer impossible to imagine if the current crisis continues to escalate.
The NDA government has done well not to rush in with a military response.
India’s use of force must be carefully planned and executed at a time and place of its choice to produce maximum effects on the Pakistan army. It will come sooner than later. The question is only about its quality and purpose.
In his speech today in Bihar, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared India’s determination to raze the terrorist infrastructure to the ground in Pakistan. In the past, India held itself back, given the concerns in Delhi about the dangers of escalation, the nuclear element, and, of course, the well-worn wisdom of a war being easy to start but hard to end. This was certainly one element that induced restraint in the UPA government’s response to the 26/11 attack on Mumbai in 2008.
Since he took charge in 2014, Modi and his advisers have sought to break out of this constraint. The surgical strikes in 2016 after the terror attack on Uri and the bombing of a terrorist camp in Pakistan after the Pulwama attack in 2019 were part of this effort to end Rawalpindi’s pursuit of terrorism under the shadow of nuclear weapons.
Whatever the form of Indian use of force this time, there will be a Pakistani military response (as in 2019). The question, then is what India might do next. If the events of 2019 are any guide, unanticipated developments on the ground and the reaction of the international system complicate the escalation ladder.
The downing of an Indian Mig-21 by Pakistan Air Force and the capture of its pilot Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman across the border dramatically raised tensions. When India threatened to rain missiles on Pakistan if it did not release Abhinandan, the Trump Administration intervened to defuse the issue. It was also a moment when President Donald Trump mused about mediating between India and Pakistan on Kashmir but did not pursue that track.
For more than two decades, Western involvement in the Kashmir dispute may have steadily diminished but it has not disappeared. Instead, China’s has unmistakably risen.
Delhi has seen Beijing step in vigorously in favour of Pakistan in the wake of India’s 2019 constitutional amendments on Kashmir. China not only sought to put the issue on the agenda of the United Nations Security Council but also moved to unilaterally change the line of actual control in Ladakh in the spring of 2020. What might be its reaction this time around? Especially when it’s navigating its own global equations, all upended by Trump’s tariff wars.
For India, managing the military escalation ladder, knowing when and how to terminate the escalation, leveraging the international community, sharpening the internal contradictions in Pakistan will be the key to its effective use of force against the entrenched terror infrastructure across the border.
(C. Raja Mohan is a distinguished fellow at the Council for Strategic and Defence Research and Contributing Editor, international affairs, for The Indian Express)
