Operation Sindoor has imposed clear limits on Pakistan’s sovereignty – Firstpost

On Wednesday, security forces chalked up an important victory in India’s ongoing fight against Naxalism, neutralizing Nambala Keshava Rao, alias Basavaraju, the general secretary and supreme commander of the CPI (Maoist). Union home minister Amit Shah called him the “topmost leader, and the backbone of the Naxal movement” carrying 1.5 crore bounty on his head.

During Operation Black Forest (also called Operation Kagar), 27 dreaded Maoists were eliminated, 54 arrested while 84 more surrendered in Chhattisgarh, Telangana, and Maharashtra. According to reports, in the first five months of this year, India’s security forces in an intelligence-driven anti-Naxal operation neutralized close to 300 Naxalites, marking the fastest annual pace of elimination of left-wing extremists since 2009.

As the minister said, India is on way to entirely eliminate the menace of this bloody insurgency by March next year, one which has over several decades bled India dry, killing tens of thousands, holding back development in some of India’s poorest pockets and spawning the toxic, left-wing extremist ideology that has taken deep roots in India’s politics, popular culture, media, and academia supporting violent insurrection against the Indian state. This has been a protracted, difficult battle but we are finally tasting sustained success.

Readers, I have started my assessment of Operation Sindoor with a report on India’s remarkable achievement against violent Maoist ideology because I want you to understand that while India has always been a hard state, it is only now that its capacities to deal with both external and internal threats are growing. These successes are linked to India’s rise.

The same resolve that was witnessed in decapitating the Naxal movement is evident in India’s dealing with the Pakistan problem, except now, as Operation Sindoor conclusively proved, India has more options in its arsenal in forcing Pakistan to accept painful conditions as a penalty for Islamabad’s persistent bad behaviour while avoiding major losses of its own.

What’s more, India has decisively shifted the Overton window of state response to terror perpetrated by Pakistan military trained, armed and sponsored proxies in such a way that kinetic retaliation against the Pakistani state is now ‘assured’.

Unlike Uri in 2016 or even Balakot in 2019 when India’s strategic restraint was the expectation and punitive action was the exception, resulting in constricted diplomatic space for conventional retaliation, the world has now come to accept that India will use military force under the nuclear threshold against Pakistan for instances of cross-border terror. As the diplomatic manoeuvres and statements from world leaders leading to Operation Sindoor showed, there’s even a
tacit approval for India’s reprisal. This is the ‘new normal’.

To lay down such a doctrinal framework, as the prime minister did in his address to the nation, against a nuclear-armed state is an incredible achievement in itself but an even more incredible, if under-analysed, achievement is that Pakistan itself has come to accept the price it has to pay for carrying out sub-conventional warfare against India.

Despite suffering crippling damage on its
military infrastructure and the military-terrorist complex through which India demonstrated its clear military superiority, escalation dominance and redrew its red lines, Pakistan focused its entire narrative on yet unproven claims of downing a few Indian fighter jets.

As RUSI’s Walter Ladwig, senior Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London, writes, “That misleading narrative obscures a more consequential truth: despite Pakistani tactical successes, India appears to have largely achieved its stated objectives. On the opening day of strikes, the Indian Air Force (IAF) demonstrated a credible capacity to identify and destroy what New Delhi characterised as terrorist-linked infrastructure in Pakistani territory, employing stand-off weapons to deliver precision strikes at speed. In the following days, operations expanded in scope, penetrating Pakistan’s Chinese-supplied air defence network to target select forward airbases for the first time since the 1971 war.”

By declaring a ‘win’ despite this painful lesson and demonstrable
battlefield reverses during which Pakistan was forced to accept that it cannot protect its prized air bases, or even its nuclear assets and the command and control apparatus from Indian drone and missile attacks, Pakistan has agreed to clear limits on its sovereignty.

Here, Pakistan’s ‘triumphalism’ is a twisted admission of reality to manage audience costs and an implicit acceptance that it cannot harm India in return without going nuclear. This is, quite simply, India’s biggest achievement from Operation Sindoor.

The impact of India’s actions against Pakistan falls in roughly three domains.

Geopolitical

In the geopolitical sphere, India now has a greater latitude to launch a military operation against Pakistan’s repeated perfidies. Pakistan’s core argument, that it will go nuclear if attacked by India, has been comprehensively defeated. Pakistan used the nuclear threat as a blackmail to stave off Indian retaliation after each act of cross-border terror, using international community’s insecurity over nuclear Holocaust as a deterrence. This tactic is no longer valid.

However, India has achieved more than just proven space for limited military engagement and calibrated force. It has framed future terror attack as ‘act of war’, thereby adopting the doctrinal approach of an assured reaction. The apprehension over such a doctrine generating “commitment trap” is overblown. If we follow the letter and spirit of the prime minister’s multiple addresses closely (both the
address to the nation and his
speech at the Adampur Air Force base) there is enough space for discretion and tactical manoeuvring without letting opportunistic actors seize the initiative.

The alternative to a doctrinal approach is an ennui that India can no longer afford. Even if Modi were not to spell out the policy shift, public perception, political pressure and weight of precedence have already shifted in favour of a more robust approach as the mean.

On the contrary, India’s ‘assured military response’ is now taken for granted, and there is widespread recognition of India’s status as a responsible power that engages in calibrated punitive action with clearly defined strategic objectives.

Lakhvinder Singh, director of peace and security studies at the Asia Institute in Seoul, writes in Asia Times, “The operation fits squarely within India’s long-standing doctrine of ‘active but restrained’ military engagement – an approach that seeks to diminish non-state militant capacities without destabilizing the broader regional order. This strategic calculus reflects not only India’s military capabilities but also its broader commitment to responsible international behavior.”

Two more points on this issue are worth noting. One, the fact that India didn’t bother to furnish evidence of Pakistan’s complicity in the Pahalgam massacre, knowing well enough that expecting admission of guilt from Pakistan is a fool’s errand, and didn’t bother convincing the international community of the moral justification behind its actions speaks of greater self-confidence as a rising power that uses sovereign means to settle its disputes.

Second, by its willingness to take risks against Pakistan despite the costs involved, India has turned the international community’s (read America’s) strategic calculus on its head. India’s escalation matrix, that culminated in a series of undefended precision missile strikes against key Pakistani Air Force (PAF) bases, including the Nur Khan base (close to Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division that manages the country’s nuclear and missile programs), forced Islamabad to sue for peace through American mediation.

This was crucial because India’s structural reticence was underpinned by its unwillingness to trigger nuclear war while punishing Pakistan. If India had to call for de-escalation, Pakistan would have been handed a strategic victory. It is a measure of the success of India’s limited-spectrum tactical operation that it was Pakistan that called for cessation of hostilities by its own volition, thereby handing India the chance to shape the outcome.

Military

In the military sphere India scored a clear, unambiguous victory, to the extent a triumph is possible over an adversary who has a high tolerance for pain and generates alternate realities. India’s biggest achievement in this domain is making Pakistan realise that it cannot export terror across the border at a discount. The asymmetric war will now attract asymmetric response.

The logic behind Operation Sindoor wasn’t deterrence. Pakistan is an irrational rational actor that while using nuclear weapons as a shield to carry out sub-conventional attacks against India – a feint to weaponize western insecurities – during a limited-spectrum kinetic conflict sticks to mutually understood escalation spirals.

The flip side of this behaviour is that Pakistan is never going to give up its grey zone tactics of using terror against India – a move that has proven repeatedly beneficial for the Pakistani military’s standing at home – and therefore New Delhi cannot hope to use punishment as a deterrent.

For Pakistan, punitive action or threat of action does not trigger a change in behavior because anti-Indianness is the raison-d’etre of Pakistan’s survival as a state. It defines itself as ‘non-India’. This means that to change Pakistani behaviour, India must resort to such disproportionate force that it triggers an existential crisis for Pakistan in which case it may go nuclear.

From an assessment that Pakistan can be prevailed upon to act as a ‘normal’ state that has rational cost-benefit ratio, Indian policymakers are now increasingly partial to the view that Pakistan will never be a normal state, will not respond to conventional paradigm of deterrence and India’s strategy must therefore shift to imposing increasing costs so that Pakistan pays a heavy price for exporting terror, spend resources also on defensive strategies, or take evasive action.

In terms of these objectives, India’s military campaign has been a spectacular success. Fake narratives notwithstanding, Pakistan’s military knows well enough what awaits if it engineers another terror attack on India.

India has suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, impacting
water flows inside Pakistan and has exposed the vulnerabilities of Pakistan’s vaunted airbases, airframes and nuclear assets. Not only must the Pakistan military atone for these failures, it must also come to terms with the fact that in a conventional war, India’s military will enjoy increasing and disproportionate superiority.

While the IAF could strike heavily defended targets within Pakistan at ease, and that too with pinpoint precision displaying high-end capability, Pakistan’s projectiles were nearly all thwarted by India’s layered air defence network. Indian Navy didn’t have to step in. Its menacing presence on the North Arabian Sea was enough. India had advanced air and space surveillance, controlled the escalation spiral and forced Pakistan to settle for a pause in hostilities.

Psychological

The trauma of Indian missiles striking the heart of Punjab, igniting airbases that sent waves of smoke spiralling into the sky for hours until the next day, more than 50 military personnel and over
100 terrorists getting killed not to speak of the loss of several fighter jets including
20% of PAF infrastructure was so deep that Pakistan’s army chief had to promote himself to the topmost military rank of Field Marshal, only the second one in Pakistan’s history, to create the narrative of a ‘win’.

This ties with the penchant for alternate realities that a revisionist Pakistan excels in. The signifier for the make-believe triumphalism had to be outlandish enough to convince the delusional populace that has been fed a steady diet of Pakistan military’s ‘invincibility’.

The maze of domestic narratives, carefully built and reinforced by the security state and a pliant media will never allow a shred of reality to sneak in. That said, India’s coercive operations targeting Pakistan’s sensitive installations, Islamabad’s completer failure in thwarting those strikes, and the demolition of terror infrastructure deep into Pakistan’s Punjab heartland will have created discontentment within the ranks of Pakistani military. Munir’s ‘promotion’ amid the ashes of Pakistan military’s reputational damage is its surest signal.

The writer is Deputy Executive Editor, Firstpost. He tweets as @sreemoytalukdar. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.