Key Points
- Modi’s rhetoric echoed his 2019 response to the Pulwama bombing, leading to military strikes.
- Diplomatic intervention in 2019 prevented full-scale war between India and Pakistan.
- The int’l community is less willing to intervene in Kashmir’s escalating crisis.
- Modi’s revocation of Article 370 in 2019 worsened distrust and alienation in Kashmir.
- Past military strikes in 2016 and 2019 lacked confirmed militant casualties, raising doubts.
- Modi faces pressure to retaliate, but military action risks escalating tensions with Pakistan.
- Pakistan’s doctrine ensures a forceful response to any Indian military action, risking escalation.
- China’s growing influence in the region complicates any potential India-Pakistan conflict.
- The risk of nuclear escalation remains high in any confrontation between India and Pakistan.
ISLAMABAD: On April 24, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a rare switch from Hindi to English before a crowd in Bihar: “India will identify and punish every terrorist and their backers… We will pursue them to the ends of the earth.”
The unusually pointed rhetoric, delivered just days after the Pahalgam stratagem in Indian Illegally Occupied Kashmir in over two decades, was not just for local audiences or even Pakistan—it was, as Foreign Affairs observes, a signal to the international community that India was preparing to retaliate.
A volatile flashpoint
The April 22 incident in Pahalgam, a popular tourist destination in Kashmir, left 26 civilians dead. Though the perpetrators remain unknown, New Delhi has implicitly pointed the finger at Pakistan. The episode marks a familiar turning point in the region’s troubled history.
As Foreign Affairs—a leading American journal on international relations—notes Indian responses to such violence often escalate into military action against Pakistan, which it accuses of backing cross-border militancy. Modi’s language this time strongly echoed that of 2019, when a suicide bombing in Pulwama killed 40 Indian paramilitary personnel.
That incident triggered airstrikes by India and a dramatic military standoff that nearly spiraled into open war between two nuclear powers.
A narrow escape from war
Back then, diplomatic intervention and a dose of good fortune helped cool tensions. Indian bombs missed their targets. A captured Indian pilot was swiftly returned by Pakistan, and foreign powers, especially the United States, helped mediate. “We worked through a plan to de-escalate,” Lisa Curtis, a Trump administration official, recalled in Affairs.
But today, the international climate is far less conducive to restraint. As Foreign Affairs underscores, the conditions that prevented disaster in 2019 no longer hold.
Kashmir remains volatile, with Modi’s government enforcing direct central rule and hardline policies that have deepened alienation among the region’s Muslim-majority population.
The political mood in both India and Pakistan has grown more brittle and belligerent. And the world, preoccupied with crises elsewhere, has little appetite to mediate.
A nationalist gamble
The Modi government, driven by a muscular Hindu nationalist ideology, has consistently treated Kashmir not as a political question but a test of strength
In 2019, New Delhi unilaterally revoked Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, stripping Jammu and Kashmir of its semi-autonomous status. That move, which Foreign Affairs has described as driven by ideology rather than strategy, was intended to more tightly integrate the region with India. But it has had the opposite effect—further isolating local populations and intensifying distrust.
Despite government claims of normalcy and a surge in tourism, Kashmir remains under heavy security, with draconian laws, regular crackdowns, and stifled dissent.
The Pahalgam attack is a grim reminder of the region’s instability. Intelligence gathering has become harder as local cooperation has declined, and anti-India sentiment has deepened in the face of repression and demographic anxieties triggered by new property laws.
In Foreign Affairs, Sushant Singh argues that Modi’s Kashmir policy is intertwined with his broader political project: projecting himself as a decisive leader unafraid to act. This image has been bolstered by strikes in 2016 and 2019, both widely portrayed in Indian media as triumphs against terrorism. Yet, independent analysis, including reporting cited by Foreign Affairs, has cast doubt on their strategic effectiveness.
The 2019 airstrikes yielded no confirmed militant casualties, while Pakistan’s retaliation shot down an Indian jet and captured its pilot. The confrontation ended peacefully, largely due to external mediation, not Indian deterrence.
Modi’s dilemma
Now, Modi finds himself boxed in by his own rhetoric. Having repeatedly promised to punish Pakistan, he faces intense public and political pressure to deliver a response—regardless of the risks. According to Foreign Affairs, the Indian government’s focus on vengeance has narrowed its strategic options. Any overt military action risks triggering a Pakistani reprisal and an unpredictable spiral of escalation.
Pakistan’s position
Pakistan, meanwhile, is in no position to back down. Beset by political instability, economic crisis, and widespread disillusionment with its military leadership, Islamabad is equally inclined toward confrontation. Army Chief Asim Munir, facing pressure to restore the army’s prestige, has been vocal about India’s policies in Kashmir.
Pakistan’s military doctrine of quid pro quo plus commits it to respond to Indian strikes with even greater force.
This means that even limited Indian actions—such as artillery or missile strikes across the Line of Control (LoC), or air raids on alleged militant camps—could invite Pakistani escalation. The result could be a rapid chain reaction, fuelled by nationalism, political incentives, and miscalculation.
China’s role
There is also a new wild card: China. Beijing’s growing assertiveness and interests in the region—particularly its investments in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which runs through Pakistan-administered Kashmir—have added another layer of complexity.
China opposed India’s 2019 move to revoke Kashmir’s special status and has since engaged in its own standoff with India in Ladakh, only a few hundred miles east of Kashmir.
The nuclear threat
As Foreign Affairs warns, any Indian-Pakistani confrontation now carries the risk of entangling China, either diplomatically or militarily.
Covert operations—such as assassinations of militant leaders or intelligence operatives—might offer India plausible deniability. But such actions are unlikely to satisfy domestic demands for vengeance, especially in the run-up to India’s general elections.
The Indian armed forces, despite their size, face logistical and modernisation challenges and are already stretched thin on the border with China.
But Pakistan, too, is under pressure. Its economy is in tatters, and its western borders with Iran and Afghanistan remain volatile. Any prolonged conflict would be costly—and potentially catastrophic.
As Foreign Affairs highlights, the spectre of nuclear weapons looms over every India-Pakistan confrontation. In 2019, according to former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s memoir, both sides prepared for nuclear escalation before Washington intervened. Modi, at the time, invoked nuclear themes in campaign speeches, declaring that India had “called Pakistan’s nuclear bluff.” But the risk that such brinkmanship could spiral out of control remains dangerously high.
The international community, which played a key role in de-escalating the 2019 crisis, seems largely disengaged this time.
The US attention is elsewhere, and its influence in South Asia has waned since the withdrawal from Afghanistan. As Foreign Affairs notes, the Trump administration has yet to appoint ambassadors to either country, and key diplomatic positions remain vacant. In the absence of sustained pressure, the region’s two rivals are left to their own devices.
The 2021 cease-fire agreement on the LoC, while still technically in place, is fragile. Neither India nor Pakistan has used it as a foundation for broader dialogue. Instead, each has doubled down on nationalistic narratives, hardened military postures, and public rhetoric. The space for compromise is shrinking, while the incentives for confrontation—both political and strategic—are growing.
In his Bihar speech, Modi told the world that terrorism would not go unpunished. But in doing so, he may have set in motion a dangerous sequence of events. Pakistan’s military, looking to reassert itself, is unlikely to remain passive. With China watching closely and a distracted world unlikely to intervene, the Kashmir conflict is more combustible than at any time since 2019.
