Will India have struck at Pakistan -- struck back at Pakistan, seen from India’s perspective -- even as you read this? How far, and how quickly, will matters be allowed escalate? How much is too much in the perverse India-Pakistan playbook?
The short answer: Thus far, short of nuclear war, but never short of “conventional” war; and an endless, sapping distraction that military parlance terms “low-intensity conflict.”
The terror attack in Pahalgam, in Indian-administered Kashmir, on April 22 that killed more than two dozen tourists, including vacationing military personnel, is the latest in a long series of such detonations. It is a part of a grotesque subcontinental circus. There is a subsequent scramble for political leverage, usually over the lives of the citizens of both India and Pakistan.
The playbook was greatly updated in 1989 -- the year Pakistan implemented its export of terrorism to Kashmir as a part of statecraft. Benazir Bhutto was prime minister of Pakistan at the time; at the time India had entered a period of political chaos on account of coalition politics.
Indeed, Bhutto admitted it several years later, in December 2003 in New Delhi, in a roomful of diplomats, officials, and CEOs at a global conference I blueprinted. During a marquee conversation with her friend, the journalist Karan Thapar -- Bhutto was at Oxford when Thapar was at Cambridge -- she described her country’s deadly export as a “joint politico-military decision” to help “focus attention on Kashmir.”
While disruptive violence in Kashmir has since served as the cynical go-to mantra to bolster Pakistan’s political and military leadership, that early intervention of course spiralled, leading to the death or displacement of Hindu Kashmiris or “Pandits,” the targeted killing of Kashmiris across religions if they opposed “azadi,” and the escalation of terror strikes into northern India and Delhi. Reciprocally, it drove India to be more militarily aggressive in Kashmir, which incensed the civilian population and firmly inserted the wedge of nationalistic and religious animosity. It altogether fed the vicious cycle.
Pahalgam showed that the vicious cycle endures.
India has vowed retribution in the face of Pakistan’s denial. India’s prime minister has given the country’s military free reign to select a response at a time and place of its choosing. Meanwhile, as a response, India has decided to keep in “abeyance” the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty that governs sharing of river waters of the Indus -- Pakistan’s lifeline -- and five other key rivers of the Indus Basin. (The World Bank monitors the Indus Treaty -- that is bizarre, but more on that in another column.)
India’s military response will decide the next stage of play.
In mid-September 2016, militants attacked a major Indian army base near Kashmir’s Uri and killed 16 soldiers. Later that month, Indian army commandos crossed several points along the so-called Line of Control that demarcates Indian- and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, for a kilometre or so, to attack pre-determined targets.
On February 14, 2019, a Kashmiri suicide bomber attacked a convoy of paramilitary personnel in Pulwama, along the Jammu-Srinagar highway. It killed 40 and injured several dozen. Later that month, India claimed that its air force had attacked a terrorist camp near Pakistan’s Balakot.
The outcome remains mysterious. India’s leadership incoherently claimed that modern combat aircraft used the deception of cloud cover to fool Pakistan’s modern radar tracking system along one of the world’s most monitored and militarised borders -- but that is another story. Meanwhile, major policy and operational snafus did not dilute the political capital from the initial attack and the deaths; and “Pulwama” featured prominently as a vote-catcher in the campaign for India’s parliamentary elections over April and May that year.
Indeed, “Pahalgam” is already being used in political rhetoric and election-prep speeches, particularly in India’s Bihar state, where provincial elections are due later this year.
The provocations of Pakistan are legion in South Asia. It brazens an operational, politico-military free rein, as it were, often coddled by the United States -- ironically, for its purported role in the global war against terror; and it is perennially supported by China, where lie Pakistan’s geo-political headwaters. But the danger of escalation, as ironically, lies with India: How much reaction to an action is appropriate?
It is now a toss-up if India’s armed forces and key policy-makers in government will plan their responses to sustain a media and social media hysteria assiduously fed by a machinery that has turned into an art form a structured, dictated nationalism. Indeed, when it comes to Pakistan the hysteria arrives primed. The approach has been steadily amped up in the years since the Uri attack of 2016, right after which Bharatiya Janata Party general secretary Ram Madhav railed, “for one tooth, the complete jaw” -- a battle-cry made popular by the party’s one-time ideologue Arun Shourie.
This exaggeration of lex talionis or the law of retaliation rooted in the Hammurabic Code was later adopted into the Biblical credo of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” and so on: A suggestion for Israelites to pursue proportionate justice; not quite Israel’s approach in Gaza, for instance.
Anyhow, as I have written earlier, the matter of breaking Pakistan’s jaw for causing India’s persistent toothache has been around for a while.
The 2009 Task Force Report on National Security and Terrorism, by lobby group Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci), offered an early, public blueprint to stem Pakistan’s use of terror as foreign policy. The report, in the wake of jihadist attacks in November 2008 in Mumbai by Pakistani proxies, also had India’s current National Security Adviser Ajit Doval as a key author. It mapped several “hard” and “soft” options -- some of which have been actioned by the government, particularly since 2016.
The hard options that carry the potential of retaliation by Pakistan and its free-range jihadi proxies began with “Inflict Economic Pain”: Ban imports from Pakistan, stop over-flights, restrict travel (what Pakistan has imposed because of India’s reaction after Pahalgam).
“Covert retaliation” called for “immediate” and “deniable covert actions inside Pakistan.” Another option listed surgical strikes, particularly against “PoK (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir) terror camps.”
The report claimed such action was “feasible” and “even legitimate” according to the charter of the United Nations, by employing the justification of India being attacked by Pakistan or its proxies, or the imminent threat of an attack. The report urged India’s forces to be suitably equipped and trained and be ready to manage any “international disapproval.” Indeed, India should be “prepared for escalation of war with Pakistan.”
If another Mumbai-like attack occurred, the suggestion was to “launch an intense and limited attack on PoK” -- but with specific “geographical objectives,” and all calibrated to “avoid escalation.”
Significantly, the final point in “hard options” was to squeeze Pakistan by leveraging the Indus Waters Treaty, which continues to be skewed in Pakistan’s favour, with the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab flowing into Pakistan from Indian territory; and with India receiving only a fifth of the water from the Indus system.
Several Indian security analysts backed the suggestion. Indeed, days after the Uri attack in 2016, the security analyst Brahma Chellaney suggested India turn the screws on Pakistan by jettisoning the treaty; for him it was hardly a matter of conscience as Pakistan reneged on all bilateral treaties with India that sought to de-escalate or end conflict. (Chellaney has approved India’s current stance of keeping the treaty in “abeyance” by virtue of which India could, in practice, play fast and loose with hydrological data and announcements of increase or decrease in the flow of river waters.)
But none of this would have the impact, suggested the report, of isolating jihadis, causing “fissure within the jihadi groups”, destroying jihadi infrastructure, to “neutralize fundamentalist and terrorist leadership”, and to “disallow Pakistan to gain foothold in Afghanistan as it this will ultimately consume Central Asia in jihadi fervour”.
All of it, as I wrote at the time, assumed that India would need to factor in the veto power of China in favour of Pakistan at UN forums, and the “double standards” of the US that, on the one hand, criticized terrorism but fed Pakistan through military aid, and that in turn fed terror strikes and militarily deterrence against India.
“So far India’s reactions have been reactive and defensive,” concluded the Ficci document that showed glimpses of what is sometimes termed the “Doval doctrine.” “India must make Pakistan realize that the use of terrorism against her will hurt itself more than India.”
That so-called doctrine is now home and dry, live, and continually refined, prompted by Pakistan’s death grip on Kashmir and its own interpretation of destiny since Partition.
If that breeds a certain fatalistic recklessness and hubris -- and it does -- India has often aided that project by its own display of arrogance and hubris, creating in India-administered Kashmir all the tinder Pakistan and its proxies might need. Repeated announcements of “normalcy” in Kashmir by India’s leadership team, especially since the bifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir state into the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh, in 2019; and abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A of India’s Constitution that preserved its special political and judicial status and job opportunities and land ownership, among other things, are factors. For better and worse, the moves erased Kashmir’s “temporary” special status and federal identity through a homogenizing New Delhi’s direct administrative control.
Pahalgam, and a series of attacks and incidents since 2019, have destroyed claims of normalcy. In an interview earlier this week, the astute and plain-talking New Delhi-based security analyst Ajai Sahni described the terror attack in Pahalgam as “a policy failure, propaganda failure, and a political failure” for India’s government.
With Kashmir, and India and Pakistan’s decades-long scramble over territorial control and regional one-upmanship with the aid and abetment of superpower allies, all this will remain “normal” -- such as it is.
Sudeep Chakravarti works in the policy-and-practice space in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region.