EDITORIAL: In a recklessly escalatory and provocative act, India’s strikes inside Pakistan — tragically martyring 26 civilians, including children — mark a perilous shift that could open the door to a disastrous aftermath previously deemed unthinkable. The assault, which targeted mosques in Bahawalpur, Muzaffarabad, Kotli and Muridke laid bare the brazen falsehood of India’s claim that it struck only “terrorist infrastructure”.
Equally, indefensible was its targeting of the Nauseri Dam structure of the Neelum-Jhelum Hydropower Project, which shattered any pretence that this action was “non-escalatory”. In an already water-stressed region, targeting water infrastructure cannot reasonably be dismissed as anything less than an act veering dangerously close to an all-out war.
By every objective standard, Pakistan’s response has been measured and proportionate — a legitimate exercise of its inherent right to self-defence against an unprovoked assault, one it had repeatedly warned was on the horizon. India’s much-vaunted Rafale fighter jets, hailed as game-changers, faltered under a calibrated response, with three downed alongside a MiG-29, an SU-series fighter, two combat drones and numerous quadcopters, exposing the limits of its aerial prowess.
The grim reality is that in the wake of the Pahalgam incident, bellicose voices across the border swiftly drummed up mindless war hysteria. India’s hyper-nationalistic media descended into a clamour for vengeance, shamelessly politicising the tragedy and fuelling a toxic surge of anti-Muslim, anti-Kashmiri and anti-Pakistan sentiment, driven largely by the ideological foot soldiers of Hindutva.
The Modi government’s decade-long hostility towards Pakistan, fortified by a steady stream of incendiary rhetoric, performative nationalism and refusal to pursue meaningful dialogue had laid the groundwork for precisely the kind of reaction witnessed in the aftermath of Pahalgam, with Indian intelligentsia largely echoing a narrative steeped in belligerence.
This had two grave consequences. First, there were virtually no calls within the Indian polity for its government to provide cogent evidence of Pakistani involvement in the Pahalgam incident. The Indian state, for its part, failed to produce even a shred of proof to substantiate such claims.
Second, the national discourse remained devoid of any serious introspection into what was clearly a glaring security failure and an indictment of India’s post-Article 370 removal Kashmir policy. India’s inability to safeguard its citizens elicited no demands for accountability.
Instead, the airwaves were saturated with unthinking repetition of the official narrative, amplified by inflammatory warmongering that bayed for military action. The cumulative effect was to box New Delhi into a corner of its own making: having inflamed public sentiment with vitriolic anti-Pakistan rhetoric, it felt compelled to act on its own militant posturing, pushing ahead with reckless adventurism despite the grave risks of escalation in a heavily nuclearised region.
De-escalation is now an absolute necessity. We cannot allow a dangerous pattern to calcify: a terrorist attack in India — often timed suspiciously close to elections, as with Pulwama before the 2019 general elections or Pahalgam ahead of Behar state elections — is swiftly blamed on Pakistan without evidence; India launches cross-border strikes, and Pakistan inevitably retaliates. This cycle of provocation and response carries the ever-present risk of a catastrophic miscalculation in a nuclear-armed neighbourhood.
India must answer this basic question: what is its endgame? It cannot subjugate Pakistan through conventional war, and the nuclear alternative is – and must always remain – unthinkable for both nations. The fact of the matter is that there is no other rational alternative but for India and Pakistan to step back from the brink, and the international community must act swiftly to defuse tensions before there is further escalation.
However, deep Pakistan’s outrage over the loss of innocent lives, we cannot escape the reality of shared geography. While India, as the aggressor, bears greater responsibility, the only viable path ahead — no matter how distant it appears right now — is dialogue. Sustaining peace may be difficult, but war is always devastating.
Last but not least, Pakistan, for its part, must draw a sharp line between peace as a posture and peace as policy. Being the reasonable actor in the room does not mean being the unprepared one. Water security must now be treated as national security.
And strategic restraint must not become a political excuse for institutional paralysis. We are not facing a single threat. We are facing a cluster of them: war rhetoric, economic coercion, diplomatic isolation, and environmental sabotage. All are pressing. Any one of them could explode into a full-scale crisis. That is why the moment demands both calm and clarity. There may still be room for de-escalation — but there is no room for naïveté.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
Comments
Comments are closed.