There’s a sense of déjà-vu about one more round of military clashes between India and Pakistan, but the conflict is entering a particularly inflammable phase. When ceasefire was announced under pressure from the United States over the weekend of May 10-11 between troubled South Asian nuclear weapon-wielding neighbours, India and Pakistan, scores of missiles had been fired, towns and air bases bombed, and many killed. It was one more chapter in a nearly 80-year history of periodic bloodletting between the countries which were once one. Pakistan was created when the subcontinent split as British colonial rule came to an end in 1947.
Only it was not. The ceasefire this time was announced abruptly after three days even as both countries were readying for a stretched-out skirmish involving escalating daily bombardment through drones, missiles and fighter jets. The full story might never be revealed but it seems like Pakistan panicked after India bombed airbases close to its nuclear weapons command and control centres and rumors of a preemptive strike grew. While India with a defense budget six times that of Pakistan and a GDP 11 times larger has a written nuclear doctrine with the promise of ‘no first use’, Pakistan which had to raise its 26th IMF loan in the middle of the war to stabilize its economy has no such ready reckoner.
The fighting started after Islamist terrorists killed 26 people (on April 22), mostly Hindu tourists, in the Kashmir region of India after checking their faith on the basis of circumcision. An Islamist terror group called The Resistance Front affiliated to the Jaish-e Mohammed (JeM), globally recognized as a terrorist outfit, quickly took credit through a social media post, and then two days later denied responsibility after what it claimed had been an ‘internal audit’. India is convinced that this is part of a familiar script, while Pakistan insists that it no hand in the matter. This region is controlled in part by both countries but each claim the full Himalayan region as their own. India calls it an ‘indivisible part’, while Pakistan refers to it as its ‘jugular vein’. In the Pakistani-side lie several known training camps of Islamist terror groups including the JeM, and some of these were bombed by India after the attack in Pahalgam.
While the nuclear shadow is ever present in this conflict since both countries conducted nuclear tests in 1998, it has rarely been more palpable. A complex set of reasons explain this.
Leggi anche: India and Pakistan, nuclear rivals
Pakistan has had a long history of using Islamist militants in proxy wars not only in India but also in Afghanistan, and it provided refuge to Osama bin Laden after 9/11. As long as there was a certain parity between the countries, there was a certain predictable pattern to these cycles of terror incidents and skirmishes but as the economic and capacity gap between the two countries have ballooned (India is now the fourth largest economy; Pakistan at 42nd place), things have become more unpredictable. A rising India with a buoyant population of 1.5 billion which is vigorously nationalistic takes a zero-sum attitude towards such attacks after having faced this for more than three decades. On its part Pakistan, for all practical purposes governed by its military, believes that India’s growing power represents an existential threat to it, and has always managed to acquire strategic weapons, first from America, and now mainly from China, (its ‘iron-clad brother’) to balance the power equation with India. But with each passing year, as the economic gap grows bigger, Pakistan’s dependence on nuclear deterrence is becoming stronger as conventional parity weakens.
If Pakistan was once valuable to America as its partner in fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and then as a frontline state in the war against terror, it is now important to China as a regional balancer to India and also host to a critical part of its Belt and Road Initiative, the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). But the CPEC passes through territory India considers its own, and through Pakistan’s mineral-rich Balochistan province which is seeing an intense separatist movement that has led to significant losses not only for the Pakistani armed forces but also deaths of Chinese workers. Having spent an estimated $50 billion on the project, the Chinese are keen to salvage this land route from Xinjiang to Gwadar port. But the promise of making Gwadar the next Dubai is yet to take off.
The conflict between India and Pakistan now lies at this intersection. A few things can happen next. The Pakistani military believes it won this round because it most likely (Indian institutional clarification is awaited) downed one or two French-made advanced fighter jet, the Rafale, used by India. Pakistan’s effective use of Chinese jets and missiles even gave a share price boost to Chinese manufacturers of these weapons. But India’s attack on terror camps in Pakistan has been validated – JeM leader Masood Azhar has officially announced that ten members of his clan were killed in the bombing. Also, India’s air defense against swarm drone attacks from Pakistan air-to-surface missiles, and its bombing of Pakistani air bases, were conducted through long-range cruise missiles, both developed indigenously. This tit-for-that demonstration of power could bring a kind of state-mate, at least for a few years. A similar terror attack followed by aerial bombing incident in 2019 kept things quiet till 2025.
But many would consider this too optimistic. There was clear sense that the two countries were readying for a relatively prolonged conflict when US President Donald Trump announced a brokered ceasefire. Pakistan has been emboldened by the relative success of its China-made fighter jets and missiles which, in all probability, brought down the advanced French-made Rafale jet used by India. Even though confirmation of this is awaited from the Indian side, there is considerable gloating about this among the Pakistani establishment where Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has even declared ‘victory’ upon the announcement of the ceasefire.
On India’s part, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has emphasized that there will be no discussions with Pakistan until terrorism ends, and that military operations are merely paused and had not ceased. India has also refused to re-normalize the Indus Water Treaty of 1960 which provides most of the water needs of lower riparian Pakistan which India ‘kept in abeyance’ after the terror attack. The treaty is considered a rare example between an upper and a lower riparian state – certainly India’s upper riparian China has no such treaty with any country – but its future is uncertain.
Pakistan claims that disruption of water would be considered an act of war, while India has announced a shift of its doctrine as part of the ceasefire deal – from now every act of terrorism on its territory would be considered an act of war. There is considerable apprehension that jihadi groups including Al Qaeda which is again active in the region could use this volatility to trigger a catastrophic conflict.
While all out nuclear war is still unlikely – after all, following severe terror attacks in 2016 and 2019, India has crossed most of the erstwhile red lines that Pakistan had projected for them to use nuclear weapons but the conflict has still remained well under the nuclear threshold – more frequent and aggravated conventional faceoffs are likely which would have an impact on regional and global economic activity and keep geopolitics on the boil. There is a distinct sense that both parties are prepped for a long, drawn-out battle.
This conflict made camps emerge more distinctly than in recent times. Chinese media and social media ran a full-fledged campaign in support of Pakistan, and Turkey and Azerbaijan offered unconditional support. Israel proved to be a resilient all-weather partner for India. These positions are expected to harden, and adversarial narratives are working to connect and exacerbate various global flashpoints.
For instance, in Pakistan, Islamist radical groups have long sought to equate India with Israel, while in India positions on China, already tense due to India’s longstanding contestation with the Middle Kingdom, are sharpening due to China’s Pakistan push. These are now three countries with nuclear weapons which have extremely adversarial relationships with each other and any wider conflict could drag in the rest of the world.