Early on Wednesday, Indian missiles sailed into Pakistan and destroyed nine sites housing what New Delhi called “terrorist infrastructure”. With two nuclear-armed powers squaring up, the potential for war is obviously making the world nervous, with France and the US just two of the Western countries urging restraint. In truth, though, India’s military action is hardly surprising. After 26 tourists were savagely gunned down in Kashmir last month, the Indian government had to act. The objective of that gruesome assault — Hindus and Christians were singled out for slaughter on the basis of their faith and shot in the head in front of their wives — was to sow sectarian discord in India, paralyse Kashmir’s slow stride towards stability, and subject India to territorial mutilation in the name of faith.
Luckily, Indians did not take the bait. Tourists have continued to visit Kashmir, and there was no inter-religious violence in India. But New Delhi could scarcely be expected to tolerate what was the worst terror strike against its civilians since 2008, when Pakistani terrorists butchered their way through Mumbai for several days. The masterminds behind that atrocity remain free citizens in Pakistan, protected by its armed forces and intelligence agencies. “How much will India endure?” the Washington Post asked, almost two decades ago, in response to a series of Pakistan-backed terrorist assaults against India. At the time, India’s patience seemed Himalayan. The secular government that then ruled India, deeply invested in forging lasting peace with Pakistan through uninterrupted dialogue, withstood every act of aggression that sought to derail its economic progress and social cohesion.
India’s habits changed once Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist who campaigned on the promise to punish Pakistan for its sponsorship of terror, was elected prime minister in 2014. Modi agreed with those who believed that possession of nuclear weapons should not grant Pakistan impunity to bleed India through its jihadist proxies. Still, Modi at first went out of his way to improve relations with Islamabad, making an unscheduled stop in Lahore in 2015 to deepen ties with its civilian leadership. Within days of his return to India, however, an airbase was hit by a terrorist raid. India’s effort to launch a joint investigation with Pakistan went nowhere. When another terrorist strike targeted an Indian army outpost later that year, Modi ordered military action against terrorist installations across the Line of Control that divides Kashmir between Pakistan and India. Three years later, in 2019, he authorised a second cross-frontier operation in response to another terrorist provocation.
The magnitude of last month’s horror, however, meant that New Delhi had failed to establish deterrence and had to step up its response and heighten the costs for Pakistan. It therefore selected and struck targets not only inside Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, but also in the province of Punjab, the nucleus of power in Pakistan. Yet, despite this being the largest aerial assault suffered by Pakistan since the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War, none of the country’s military installations were affected. Indeed, India consciously spared them, hoping to avoid escalating the crisis into a full-blown conflict. If this was the off-ramp embedded in India’s operation, Pakistan seems unwilling to take it. Islamabad has already vowed retaliation, and there has been severe shelling of civilian areas on the Indian side of the LOC in Kashmir. India, for its part, has ordered nationwide drills in preparation for incursions from across the border. Today, a swarm of Indian drones appeared in the skies above major Pakistani cities; one destroyed an air defence battery in Lahore, the capital of Punjab; another crashed in Rawalpindi, the headquarters of the Pakistani army. While reiterating that it is committed to “non-escalation”, New Delhi is also emphasising that the ball is in Pakistan’s court: if Islamabad refuses to back down, India is willing to intensify its operations.
Will there be a war? India and Pakistan have pulled back from the brink in the past, most notably in 2001 when Pakistan-backed terrorists attempted to storm the Indian parliament. There is, moreover, an unspoken conviction on both sides that the other will honour this tradition. Such confidence, alas, is misplaced — as is the belief that nuclear weapons will never enter the equation. In 1999, the Pakistani army deployed atomic weapons against India but withdrew them under intense pressure from the United States. At the same time, Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is dangerously vulnerable to seizure by rogue elements: at least half a dozen Pakistani nuclear facilities have weathered attacks by jihadis bred by its own armed forces to bleed India. AQ Khan, the metallurgist who built Pakistan’s nuclear bomb using blueprints he stole from civilian nuclear facilities in the West that once employed him, tried to sell nuclear technology on the black market to a long list of customers that included Iran and North Korea.
India’s conventional superiority may tempt Pakistan to deploy its weapon of last resort. For the event of war, Pakistan has produced tactical nuclear warheads to hurl at columns of Indian soldiers punching into its territory. Even without the use of nuclear weapons, a full-scale war, while devastating Pakistan, would leave India worse off. Islamabad would lose relatively less because it has so little to lose. Its politics are riven by corruption; its economy has imploded; and the country effectively survives on the benevolence of foreign lenders.
India, with all its problems, is marching ahead economically. Between 2012 and 2022, the country lifted 170 million people out of poverty. A war with Pakistan would squander the energies and resources it needs to improve the lives of its citizens. The journalist Fareed Zakaria once described Pakistan as a burglar who enters your house and threatens to blow his brains out on your most precious carpet if you don’t give him what he wants. Pakistan’s greatest weapon against India is its ability to frustrate its rival’s progress by bogging it down in a war it can ill afford.
“Pakistan’s greatest weapon against India is its ability to frustrate its rival’s progress by bogging it down in a war it can ill afford.”
India must therefore de-escalate this crisis — and not merely for its short-term prosperity. Avoiding further entanglement with Pakistan is equally vital for its future stability. The animosity between the two countries is a product of national ideologies that are irreconcilable: one regards itself as the authentic home of the subcontinent’s Muslims; the other sees itself, at least in theory, as the practitioner of a pluralistic secular nationalism that transcends religion. One nullifies the other, and the two can coexist only if they exist in isolation. This explains why the longest bouts of peace between the two nations occurred when they spurned each other. Like a divorced couple, both countries — especially Pakistan — need time apart to develop independent cultural identities. Sadly, to the detriment of their peoples, both countries have been in each other’s faces ever since the British left the subcontinent.
Invented to serve as a haven for India’s Muslim faithful, Pakistan has sought to legitimise its existence by remaking itself into a guardian of the faith. The people who make up Pakistan were, only a few generations ago, mostly lower-caste Hindus who converted — or were forced to convert — to Islam. But the state suppressed the pre-Islamic culture of the territories upon which it was grafted, and it glorified Arab Muslim figures from the past who had once pillaged, molested and murdered the forebears of modern-day Pakistanis.
Pakistan’s rulers invoked religion to unite its people against “Hindu India” almost from the moment of the state’s birth, dispatching “irregular” jihadists in 1947 — within weeks of India’s Partition — to annex Kashmir, which was then a sovereign kingdom. The Kashmiris, rather than surrender, fought back and sought India’s help to repel the invaders. After Kashmir’s accession to India, the state’s first democratically elected leader, Sheikh Abdullah, a wildly popular socialist, laid out the choices before Kashmiris. India’s commitment to “secular democracy based upon justice, freedom and equality,” he explained, negated the “argument that the Muslims of Kashmir cannot have security in India.” India’s constitution, Abdullah said, “has amply and finally repudiated the concept of a religious state, which is a throwback to medievalism.” Abdullah denounced Pakistan, a quasi-theocracy that had just waged a war to seize Kashmir, as “a feudal state” where “the appeal to religion constitutes a sentimental and a wrong approach.” But his rejection of Pakistan was also a reminder to New Delhi that secularism was the non-negotiable condition of Kashmir’s allegiance to India. Kashmiris, he said, “will never accept a principle which seeks to favour the interests of one religion or social group against another”.
Over the past decade, India has come close to becoming what Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, most feared: a Hindu Pakistan. The ongoing conflict with Pakistan appears to have reminded India’s current rulers of the value of Indian pluralism. New Delhi has gone out of its way to emphasise its composite nature. It even delegated the job of briefing the world about India’s military action to a female colonel who happens to be Muslim. If this confrontation with an explicitly ethno-religious state reminds Indians — and the Indian government — of the value of the religious, linguistic and cultural multiplicity at home, it will have been worth it.
But an India that is successful at holding together its diversity is regarded as a threat by Pakistan because it debunks its foundational logic that Muslims and Hindus are two immiscible nations that cannot live together. And so Pakistan perpetuates the harrowing memory of India’s Partition by keeping alive the conflict in Kashmir. Pakistan’s khaki-clad rulers do not care about the people of Kashmir — a fact they have demonstrated over and over by luring young Kashmiri men into terror training camps and returning them as human bombs. Neither does it care about Kashmir’s territory: in 1963, it ceded a portion of the state under its occupation to China. Its proclamations of Islamic solidarity, too, have its limits: for a state that endlessly denounces India, Israel and France for their treatment of Muslims, Pakistan is always happy to defend China’s treatment of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.
India cannot fix any of this. The best it can hope to do is isolate itself from Pakistan. New Delhi must clearly prepare itself for Pakistan’s counter-reaction. But if and when Pakistan retaliates, rather than responding, India should be prepared to move on, pursuing the diplomatic isolation of Pakistan and enhancing domestic security. Complete detachment from Pakistan, combined with strengthened defence at home, is what India owes its people.
