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“I tell the world,” said Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in an official address on Monday, “if we talk to Pakistan, we will talk only about terror” and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir,
Who was Modi actually speaking to, in his first official remarks following the nerve-wracking hostilities between India and Pakistan beginning May 7 until a ceasefire was declared on May 10?
One answer is US President Donald Trump and his administration. After all, it was Trump who ended up announcing the “full and immediate ceasefire”, which, according to him, came after “a long night of talks mediated by the United States.” Later that day, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that, in addition to ceasing military attacks, the two South Asian states had agreed to “start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site”.
Trump went even further on May 11, insisting, in a TruthSocial post, that he is “very proud of the strong and unwaveringly powerful leadership of India and Pakistan” and adding this kicker: “Additionally, I will work with you both to see if, after a ‘thousand years’, a solution can be arrived at concerning Kashmir. God Bless the leadership of India and Pakistan on a job well done!!!” And then on May 12, the US president claimed that he was able to prevent a nuclear war by threatening to cut off trade with both countries.
India has a longstanding policy of treating Kashmir as a bilateral issue, in part because it believes external mediation would end up blunting its power differential with Pakistan. It has been particularly sensitive to American involvement in the past, not least due to Washington’s historical relationship with not just Pakistan, but specifically the Pakistan Army.
So it was no surprise that, despite Trump and Rubio’s comments, Indian government sources sought to downplay a US role in the ceasefire, also saying off the record that New Delhi will “never accept” mediation on the Kashmir issue.
Yet, for all of the government’s “savage”, “brutal” and laser-eyed clapbacks against Western countries over the past few years, this time there has only been vague posturing to counter Trump and Rubio’s comments – none of which have actually named the US. Remember, this wasn’t Trump offering to mediate as he did in his first term. This was Rubio announcing that, following US intervention, the two countries had already agreed to start talks. India’s Ministry of External Affairs has yet to offer an official response.
The reluctance to directly critique the US is unsurprising, given that New Delhi is well aware of how personally Trump takes even a perceived snub. Still, that hasn’t stopped the Opposition from jumping on the issue. And criticism has also come from the Right, and from Modi’s own base, which as news kept emerging of Indian attacks on Pakistani territory, appeared to fall for delusional claims of the Karachi Port having been destroyed, prompting even more unhinged calls for the job to be “finished”. With that being the baseline expectation, the announcement of a ceasefire came as a huge shock – made worse by the fact that it was delivered by Trump, and appeared to involve no concession per se by Pakistan.
As if to underline the argument that it has poorly communicated its efforts over the last few days, the government’s first attempt at placating the base involved… semantics:
It has since relied on more substantive briefings from military officials (see here and here) who insisted that India achieved its goals for Operation Sindoor – claiming that the strikes had killed more than 100 terrorists, hit key terror training camps, demonstrated Indian ability to hit Pakistani air bases and air defence systems, taken down “several” Pakistani aircraft, and prevented drones and missiles from the other side from doing significant damage in India, thanks to a layer of air defences.
The officials refused to comment on whether India had lost any aircraft – in the face of Pakistani claims of having shot down as many as five – although they did assert that “all our pilots are back home”.
It will presumably take some time before the fog of war lifts and analysts are able to fully make conclusions about the clashes between May 7 and May 10, given the unrelenting misinformation from either side and the heavy use of drones. Crucially, we are still to understand the scale of the damage on either side, including how many civilians have been killed and what was hit; the impact of various platforms (since this has already become a rare opportunity to see Chinese hardware in action); what prompted the Americans to intervene after initially staying aloof (reporting suggested it was nuclear fears, but the specific trigger remains unclear); and what was agreed upon (or ‘understood’) before a ceasefire could be declared.
Sometimes having an echo chamber actually helps in the short run because it allows both sides to declare victory, no matter the facts on the ground. Or, as Shoaib Daniyal put it, “large-scale, media driven, Rashomon effect is the greatest guarantor of South Asian peace”. Naturally, the Bharatiya Janata Party has, after some confusion, decided to hold Tiranga yatras over the next 11 days to drive home the scale of the declared victory.
But if the on-ground assessments don’t matter at the political level, on the military front they will have a bearing on what is supposed to be, for India, the larger takeaway of Operation Sindoor.
“We have set a new normal,” Modi said, in his Monday address. “Operation Sindoor is our policy against terror. If there is a terror attack on India, we will hit back. We will take stern action at every place from where the roots of terror spring forth. India will not accept any nuclear blackmail… We won’t see the government that sponsors terror and terror outfits as different.”
Can that really be India’s new doctrine? “The emerging Indian strategy appears to be ‘deterrence by punishment plus’, which I term ‘deterrence by exhaustion’,” writes Happymon Jacob. “The Indian objective is to carve out a distinct space above the sub-conventional domain and below the nuclear domain where it can undertake punitive actions in order to respond to terror attacks.”
Obviously, the difficulty with such an approach was summed up pithily here:
Or as Harsh V Pant and Yogesh Joshi put it, “instead of merely accepting Pakistan’s risk-driven strategies, India now actively manipulates risk through escalation. However, each failure of deterrence forces India higher up the escalation ladder.”
C Raja Mohan makes the same point: “While overall national power vis a vis Pakistan has grown in favour of India, the military gap remains too small for Delhi to impose its will on Rawalpindi or deter it from supporting cross border terror.”
As does Praveen Swami: “Vowing that every future terrorist attack will be treated as an act of war and treated thus is polemic. No nation-state in the world, not America, Russia, or China, has done this because it is unaffordable and impossible to execute. Polemic will not be taken seriously by adversaries and thus cannot be deterred. India needs a longer-term strategy.”
More defence/national-security focused observers will be examining and debating this new doctrine and the impact of Operation Sindoor for some time, not least because – given the subcontinent’s history – it is likely to be tested at some point. (For more discussion see Christopher Clary, Rajeswari Pillai, Aditya Ramanathan, Shashank Joshi, Fabian Hoffman, Vasabjit Banerjee).
But in the immediate future, Modi faces a different concern, both domestically and internationally: The hyphen.
Despite Howdy Modi and Namaste Trump, despite the prime minister’s “magic” in Washington earlier this year, despite US Vice President JD Vance saying “the future of the 21st century is going to be determined by the strength of the United States-India partnership”, despite all of that, in responding to the current conflict, the Americans have at least rhetorically put India and Pakistan in the same bucket. Crucially, US statements so far have not made any reference to how India sees the sequence of events – beginning with the terror attack in Pahalgam, not New Delhi’s strikes on May 7.
“By casting both nations in an identical light – promising enhanced trade and venturing to address the perennial Kashmir conundrum – Mr Trump’s words appear to equate India, a strategic partner pivotal in countering China’s ascent, with Pakistan, whose role in the region carries different weight,” wrote Nirupama Menon Rao.
Perhaps, as some have suggested, the American Cabinet – fighting multiple fires around the world, operating under a President who wants to be seen as having prevented nuclear war – has had little time (or insufficient expertise) to attend to Indian sensitivies. If that were the case, as seems likely given the intensity in institutional contact between India and the US under their current leaderships, then the current equivocation will eventually come out in the wash.
But until that happens, Modi’s domestic Vishwaguru positioning and his argument that Pakistan has been “internationally isolated” faces a test, one that he tacitly acknowledged in his speech on Monday, by laying out what India would talk about if it were to talk to Pakistan – implying that such an eventuality may not be far off.
Five years ago, S Jaishankar questioned any effort to place India and Pakistan at the same table. “How do you hyphenate a country, which is one-eighth of your economic size? Which is reputationally your exact opposite?”
In some ways, the fallout of the Pahalgam attack has meant that the hyphen is once again hovering over India. If Operation Sindoor does indeed establish the deterrence India has long sought, then it may well be shot down. But the risk remains that last week’s skirmishes revive Western muscle memories of treating the subcontinent as one large nuclear tinder-box that needs containing above all else. That this has come just as the US and China announced a significant thaw in ties only makes the moment even more delicate.
This article was first published on India Inside Out.
This article first appeared on Scroll.in
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