The hyphen stays between India, Pak

PRIME Minister Narendra Modi has kept his promise to the country and demonstrated resolve by carrying out a muscular retaliation against Pakistan, striking terrorist targets at nine places, three of them in the Punjab province, and the remaining in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. This is the first time that India has carried out attacks in the Pakistani heartland since the 1971 war. Unlike that conflict, or the Kargil war of 1999, which produced a clear winner and loser, the outcomes of this near-war are not as unambiguous, and have to be extricated from the fog of disinformation and the silences on both sides. The best that can be said about it is that it was a stalemate.

A ceasefire was declared on

May 10. The government has said that 100 terrorists were killed. It appears that the most ambitious target, Jaish-e-Mohammed’s Markaz Subhanallah in Bahawalpur, has been substantially destroyed; similarly, the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Muridke headquarters. The Pakistan Army’s attendance at the funerals in Bahawalpur and Muridke is confirmation that there is little daylight between these groups and the Pakistani state.

However, the damage caused to these organisations is not permanent. Nor will the strikes have caused a rethink in the Pakistani establishment about its policy of using terrorist proxies to bleed India in Kashmir and elsewhere. Thus, it cannot be said with certainty that these strikes have ensured there will never be another terror attack from Pakistani soil on India. This uncertainty is implicit in the government’s declaration that any future act of terror will be treated as an act of war. The May 7 response was bigger in scale and more ambitious in terms of targets than the 2016 “surgical strike” or the 2019 Balakot response, but its deterrence value will remain in the category of “known unknowns” for as long as terrorist groups with a special focus on India continue to operate on Pakistani territory.

On the military front, gains and losses will acquire more clarity with the passage of time. As the conflict escalated, India’s ability to fend off the waves of drones unleashed by Pakistan on May 7, 8 and 9 and protect both civilian areas and military installations came to the fore in a dramatic fashion on television screens. India also hit the strategically important Chaklala airbase, located in Rawalpindi, and other bases. Pakistan’s military headquarters and the Strategic Plans Division are also in Rawalpindi.

For now, the statement by Air Marshal AK Bharti, Director General of Operations of the Indian Air Force, that “losses are part of combat” appears to be a veiled acknowledgement of the reported loss of an undetermined number of Indian fighter jets — in response to the sighting of wreckage at Bathinda in Punjab and Pampore in the Kashmir valley in the early hours of May 7, and claims by the Pakistani side that its air force had downed five aircraft.

This claim has been made in several credible international media outlets, some quoting Western officials. For the West, this combat was as much about India-Pakistan and its nuclear risks as it was about France’s Dassault vs China’s Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group. The IAF has the Dassault-manufactured Rafale fighters, and the Pakistan Air Force has the Chinese-made J10 fighters. In one indication, Dassault’s share prices have crashed since the morning of May 7. Other indications may come from how India’s relationship with Dassault evolves.

India’s reported losses may also have potentially far-reaching consequences for its regional and international diplomacy. China’s assistance helped Pakistan on the battlefield, how this impacts Delhi’s moves to normalise its relationship with Beijing over the last few months has to be seen. India’s neighbours, ever playing India against China, would have taken away their own messages from the four days.

In the larger diplomatic arena, one of the factors underpinning the India-US relationship, and India’s importance as a member of the Quad, is its perceived role as a counterweight to China in the Indian Ocean Region. From Taiwan to Tokyo, Canberra to Washington, this India-Pakistan encounter is being studied for its wider implications in the Asia-Pacific domain.

Many of India’s friends in the West counselled restraint and dialogue with Pakistan; there was no condemnation of Pakistan for enabling terrorism. India’s efforts to turn the IMF into the UN Security Council failed to prevent approval of another tranche of its bailout package to Pakistan. The US statement of solidarity with India after the terrorist attack changed to equivocation on India and Pakistan. As the conflict began, the US’s initial hands-off “this is none of our business” approach turned within hours to outright “mediation”. According to some reports, the turning point was India’s hit on Chaklala. Other reports speak of Pakistan signalling that it was preparing to bring out its nuclear arsenal.

In his book India’s Pakistan Conundrum, Managing a Complex Relationship, Sharat Sabharwal, who was the High Commissioner to Pakistan in the difficult post-26/11 years, made an observation about the future of the relationship from the experiences of the past: “Being neighbours, India and Pakistan cannot wish each other away. When they have not been talking across the table, they have often done so through guns. Each time guns become too loud, it has brought the intervention of influential countries to defuse the situation”.

This is how the Kargil war ended, how the standoff in 2019 was resolved. And it is how the rapidly escalating conflict between the two neighbours was called off in the afternoon of May 10. In a final flourish, Trump, who is yet to taste success in his effort to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, was the first to announce the ceasefire with a post on his Truth Social and his role in it, not officials of the two sides. For good measure, he also threw in an offer to help bring about a resolution to the Kashmir issue.

If Pakistan’s intention was to draw international attention to Kashmir, last week’s conflict has achieved that. It has also reversed years of diplomatic efforts by Delhi to de-hyphenate itself from Pakistan, especially after making constitutional changes in Jammu & Kashmir and abolishing its “special status”. India has denied that US President Trump mediated the ceasefire, but Pakistan has hailed him for his efforts.

Delhi’s declaration that every terrorist attack will be henceforth treated as an act of war is being described as the “new normal”. This may assuage the fury in Modi’s core constituencies at India “agreeing” to the ceasefire — snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, as one commentator put it. The government has sought to address these constituencies with the assurance that no peace talks will follow the ceasefire, and that the Indus Waters Treaty remains suspended. But the so-called “new normal” is unsustainable in practice.

Next time, Delhi’s friends, alarmed by India’s inability to control the escalation in this episode, will want to see concrete evidence of Pakistan’s involvement before an Indian retaliation. But the real danger of making “act of war” pronouncements is that it hands over the levers to trigger an India-Pakistan conflict to the adversary.

Nirupama Subramanian is a senior journalist.