India-Pakistan Relations (PSIR Optional)

India and Pakistan were created by the same act, on the same day, out of the same state, and have fought four wars since. The rivalry is therefore not a border dispute that acquired an ideological colouring but an argument about two founding ideas that keeps generating territorial and military expressions of itself. That is why functional cooperation — trade, water, transit, pilgrimage — has never carried it, and why every instrument that survived did so by being quarantined from the politics around it.

Why the Rivalry Resists Ordinary Explanation

The realist account — a large state and a small one, an unresolved territory, an arms race — describes the symptoms accurately and explains very little about why the conflict has outlasted every condition that supposedly produced it.

• The causes conventionally listed are real but insufficient on their own.
  • The British failure to supervise a politically acceptable Partition, which left the boundary award and the princely states unsettled at the moment of transfer.
  • The rivalry between the subcontinent’s religious communities — Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs — which Partition converted from a domestic contest into an inter-state one.
  • The struggle for control of Jammu and Kashmir, and, more importantly, Kashmir’s significance to both national identities rather than its material value.
  • The shortsightedness of leaders on both sides, an explanation that flatters whichever side offers it.
• What these leave unexplained is durability. Wars normally settle something; this one has produced four military decisions and no political settlement, which suggests the conflict is not about what the fighting is nominally over.

Walt’s balance of threat

• Stephen Walt rejected the claim that states balance against power and argued in The Origins of Alliances that they balance against perceived threat.
  • Threat is a compound of four factors: aggregate power, geographic proximity, offensive capability, and perceived aggressive intentions.
  • All four run the same way from Pakistan’s vantage point — India is far larger, adjacent, conventionally superior, and, in Pakistani strategic writing, revisionist about 1947 itself.
  • This explains Pakistan’s continuous external balancing: the American alliances of the 1950s, the Chinese alignment after 1963, and the Saudi mutual-defence agreement of 17 September 2025.
• The analytical value is that threat perception is not a function of the balance sheet. India’s economy is roughly ten times Pakistan’s and the gap widens each decade, yet Pakistani threat perception has not fallen with it.

Cohen’s paired minority conflict

• Stephen P. Cohen classified the dyad in Shooting for a Century as a “paired minority conflict” — the hardest category of dispute there is.
  • Such conflicts arise where significant numbers on both sides believe themselves the weaker and threatened party, even when one or both are objectively majorities.
  • Pakistan sees itself as a threatened minority because of its smaller size, conventional inferiority, and the founding fact that it was carved out of India rather than the reverse.
  • India carries a minority self-image too, in Cohen’s reading: no single unified Hindu culture actually constitutes its majority, and its strategic community perceives encirclement — sharpened when the Cold War’s end removed the Soviet guarantee.
  • His only comparators are Israelis and Arabs, Tamils and Sinhalese, and Shia and Sunni — identity conflicts in which both parties feel besieged.
• The mutually hurting stalemate is the second half of the argument: neither party can win and neither can be made to lose, so costs accumulate without generating the pressure that produces settlement.

Zaidi’s post-national condition

• Akbar Zaidi describes Pakistan’s insecurity as a “post-national condition” — a state that defines its identity by opposition to and difference from India.
  • The consequence is that normalisation is itself threatening: a Pakistan at ease with India would have to answer what, other than not-India, it is.
  • This is why economic logic has consistently lost to identity logic — most-favoured-nation status was promised from 1996 onward and never granted.
• The mirror-image Indian problem is real but less acute: a secular federation containing a Muslim-majority region is the demonstration of India’s own premise, which makes Kashmir non-negotiable for reasons unrelated to territory.

Mohan on domestic politics, and Ganguly’s objection

• Surinder Mohan, in Complex Rivalry: The Dynamics of India-Pakistan Conflict, rejects realism’s emphasis on material strength and locates the rivalry in a distinct confluence of causes.
  • The shock of Partition comes first — over a million killed and some ten million displaced, an event that reshaped domestic politics in both states before either had a foreign policy.
  • Ideology, a shared contested border and disputed territory then compounded it.
  • His central claim is that domestic politics both sparked and sustained the rivalry: leaders invested in the territorial conflict because it paid domestically, not because asymmetry compelled it.
• Sumit Ganguly objects that the account under-weights the Pakistani military establishment’s political hegemony.
  • If the army is the permanent principal rather than one domestic actor among many, “domestic politics” is doing less explanatory work than claimed.
  • The objection matters practically — it is the difference between believing a changed electorate could change the policy and believing only a changed civil–military balance could.
• T.V. Paul’s enduring-rivalry framework supplies a third position: rivalries persist through self-reinforcing mechanisms — entrenched threat perceptions, institutional constituencies for conflict, and great-power attention that never quite forces a settlement.

Frame	Core claim	Explains well	Misses
Power asymmetry	The weaker balances the stronger	Alignments, the arms race	Why threat perception ignores the widening gap
Walt	States balance perceived threat	Pakistan’s continuous external balancing	Why Indian reassurance never lowered it
Cohen	Both sides feel besieged	Intractability; failure of functional fixes	Offers diagnosis, not a route out
Zaidi	Identity defined against India	Why normalisation itself threatens	Understates Indian domestic politics
Mohan	Domestic politics sustains it	Why leaders keep choosing conflict	Under-weights the army (Ganguly)
Paul	Self-reinforcing mechanisms	Why third-party pressure fails	Weak on when rivalries end

The Nuclear Ceiling and the Stability–Instability Paradox

The single most useful concept in the subject is the stability–instability paradox: mutual nuclear deterrence makes full-scale war improbable, and that very improbability makes lower-level violence safer to conduct.

• The mechanism is straightforward and perverse. If both sides are confident the other will not go nuclear, the space beneath the ceiling opens up for infiltration, proxy war and limited incursions.
  • Pakistan’s proxy war is therefore a form of nuclear coercion — the arsenal shields it from Indian conventional retaliation while militants impose costs.
  • It also works as a catalytic device, compelling the international community to restrain India in every crisis, converting escalation risk into diplomatic protection.
  • This is what permits a strategy of inflicting a thousand cuts without bearing proportionate cost.
• Kargil in 1999 was the paradox’s first demonstration — an incursion attempted within months of the Lahore Declaration and of both states’ nuclear tests, precisely because the ceiling was assumed to hold.
• Pakistan’s declared answer to India’s conventional advantage is full-spectrum deterrence, including short-range battlefield systems meant to deny India any usable space below the threshold.
• India’s response has been to keep contesting that space — the Cold Start debate, the 2016 surgical strikes, Balakot in 2019 and Operation Sindoor in 2025 are successive attempts to make sub-conventional attacks draw conventional punishment.

Nuclear command after Pakistan’s 27th Amendment

• Pakistan’s 27th Constitutional Amendment was passed by the National Assembly on 12 November 2025 and assented to the next day.
  • It created the post of Chief of Defence Forces, held by the army chief, with command over the Strategic Plans Division and primacy over the air and naval chiefs.
  • It replaced the National Command Authority with a National Strategic Command, thinning the civilian layer in nuclear decision-making.
• Farzana Shaikh reads it as the formalisation of a hybrid arrangement operating informally since 2018, empowering a “hard state” posture just as Pakistan faces insurgencies on two internal fronts.
• For India the consequence is that the crisis-management interlocutor is now constitutionally, not merely practically, the army.

The nuclear ceiling did not end the conflict; it relocated it downward into terrorism, and every Indian doctrine since 1999 has tried to make that space expensive again.

The Wars and the Crises

1947–48: accession, the UN reference and the ceasefire line

• The Radcliffe Line divided Punjab and Bengal on 17 August 1947, two days after transfer, and Jammu and Kashmir was still undecided, as were Junagadh and Hyderabad; Maharaja Hari Singh initially sought independence.
  • The tribal invasion of October 1947 forced his hand; he signed the Instrument of Accession on 26 October 1947 and Indian troops were airlifted to Srinagar the next day.
  • India referred the matter to the Security Council on 1 January 1948 — a decision that internationalised a dispute India has since spent seventy years re-bilateralising.
• The UN Commission’s resolutions of 13 August 1948 and 5 January 1949 set a three-stage sequence — Pakistani withdrawal, Indian reduction, then a plebiscite — and the first stage was never performed, which remains India’s legal answer on the plebiscite.
• The ceasefire took effect on 1 January 1949 and the Karachi Agreement of 27 July 1949 delineated the Cease-Fire Line under UN observation.
  • The line ran only to map reference NJ9842, beyond which terrain was assumed unusable — an omission that produced the Siachen conflict thirty-five years later.
• It settled the territorial division roughly as it stands; it settled neither sovereignty, nor the plebiscite question, nor the status of the northern areas.

1965 and Tashkent

• Operation Gibraltar sent Pakistani irregulars into Kashmir on the assumption the population would rise. It did not, and the operation escalated into full war.
• The Tashkent Declaration of 10 January 1966, brokered by the Soviet Union with Alexei Kosygin mediating between Lal Bahadur Shastri and Ayub Khan, restored pre-war positions.
  • Both undertook not to alter the ceasefire line unilaterally and to restore diplomatic relations.
  • It settled the war and nothing beneath it; Shastri died in Tashkent hours after signing, and in Pakistan the declaration was received as a defeat that helped end Ayub’s rule.

1971: military victory, diplomatic underachievement

• The war that created Bangladesh was India’s most complete military success — the eastern command surrendered in a fortnight and roughly 93,000 prisoners were taken.
  • In Jaishankar’s periodisation of Indian foreign policy it is the moment that dismantled India–Pakistan equivalence, ending the parity that had structured the subcontinent since 1947.
• The Simla Agreement of 2 July 1972, between Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, converted the Cease-Fire Line into the Line of Control and committed both states to settling differences bilaterally without altering it unilaterally.
  • Bilateralism is the agreement’s most durable Indian gain — the legal basis on which India has refused third-party mediation for half a century.
• Rajesh Basrur reads 1971 as a military victory and one of India’s largest diplomatic underachievements.
  • India returned the prisoners and the captured territory and obtained an undertaking to discuss Kashmir bilaterally — an assurance with no enforcement behind it.
  • Indira Gandhi’s method was realist where Nehru’s had been idealist, but realism at the table required converting battlefield leverage into a settlement, and that conversion was not made.

Kargil 1999

• The Lahore Declaration of 21 February 1999 followed Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s bus journey and his meeting with Nawaz Sharif, and included a memorandum of understanding on nuclear risk reduction.
• Within three months Pakistani regulars and irregulars had occupied heights on the Indian side of the Line of Control in the Kargil sector.
  • The operation was conceived and executed largely by the army under Pervez Musharraf — the standard case for the argument that civilian assurances in Pakistan do not bind the institution that matters.
  • India confined its response to its own side of the Line of Control, restraint that earned decisive American pressure on Pakistan to withdraw, with Chinese non-support compounding it.
• Kargil demonstrated the failure of deterrence at two levels — nuclear weapons did not deter the incursion, and the Lahore process did not deter the army.

2001–02: Operation Parakram and coercive diplomacy

• The attack on Parliament of 13 December 2001 triggered Operation Parakram, the largest Indian mobilisation since 1971 — roughly half a million troops for ten months.
  • The declared objective was compellence: forcing Pakistan to dismantle terrorist infrastructure under threat of war.
• The results are the standard case study in coercive diplomacy’s limits.
  • Pakistan banned Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed in January 2002 and Musharraf pledged that Pakistani territory would not be used for terrorism — a genuine but reversible concession.
  • The mobilisation could not be sustained, the Kaluchak attack of May 2002 occurred while it was under way, and India stood down without a settlement.
  • It exposed the mobilisation gap — three weeks to concentrate strike corps gave the international community time to intervene — which is the origin of the doctrinal search for rapid, limited options.

Mumbai 2008

• The attacks of 26 November 2008 were executed by ten Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives who arrived by sea, killed over 160 people, and were controlled in real time by handlers in Pakistan.
  • The surviving attacker’s capture and the electronic record made Pakistani state-linked involvement documentable in a way earlier attacks were not.
• India’s response was deliberate restraint — a diplomatic and legal campaign instead of force — which bought international credit but produced no prosecutions of consequence.
• The composite dialogue was suspended and the operative Indian formulation became that talks and terror cannot go together, closing off Manmohan Singh’s economic track.

Uri 2016 and the surgical strikes

• Militants attacked an army base at Uri on 18 September 2016, killing nineteen soldiers — the heaviest such loss in decades — in an attack attributed to Jaish-e-Mohammed and, behind it, the Inter-Services Intelligence.
• On 29 September India announced “surgical strikes” against launch pads across the Line of Control; Pakistan denied any operation had occurred.
  • The material effect was limited; the declaratory effect was the point — a covert practice became declared policy.
• The diplomatic arm was isolation. India withdrew from the 19th SAARC summit due at Islamabad, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan followed, and India then promoted BIMSTEC, inviting its leaders to the BRICS outreach at Goa in October 2016.
• The two years that followed were the most violent on the Line of Control in a decade — over 3,000 recorded ceasefire violations in 2017, close to a thousand in the first half of 2018, and attacks on a paramilitary camp near Srinagar and an army base in Jammu.

Pulwama and Balakot 2019

• A suicide vehicle bombing at Pulwama on 14 February 2019 killed forty CRPF personnel; Jaish-e-Mohammed claimed it.
• India struck a Jaish facility at Balakot on 26 February, described officially as a “non-military pre-emptive action” — the first use of air power across the international boundary since 1971.
  • Pakistan’s counter-strike led to an aerial engagement and the capture and return of an Indian pilot.
  • The purpose was to reinterpret the deterrence equation by showing Indian retaliation would no longer be confined to Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
• The diplomatic campaign then succeeded where it had failed for a decade: Masood Azhar was listed by the Security Council in May 2019 after China lifted its technical hold.
• India withdrew most-favoured-nation status and imposed 200 per cent duties; after the constitutional changes of August 2019, Pakistan downgraded relations and suspended trade.

Pahalgam and Operation Sindoor, 2025

• On 22 April 2025 armed men attacked tourists at Baisaran near Pahalgam, killing 26 civilians; The Resistance Front, a Lashkar-e-Taiba front, claimed responsibility.
  • Victims were reportedly selected by religion, making it the deadliest attack on Indian civilians since 2008.
• India’s immediate non-military response was unprecedented in scope: the Indus Waters Treaty held in abeyance from 23 April, the Attari crossing closed, visas suspended, defence advisers expelled and both missions downsized.
• Operation Sindoor was launched on 7 May 2025 against nine sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, executed within about twenty-two minutes, targeting infrastructure of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Hizbul Mujahideen.
  • Pakistan replied with drones and missiles against installations in Jammu and Kashmir, largely intercepted, and India then struck Pakistani airbases and radar installations — a widening from terrorist to military targets.
  • The crisis strained India’s relations with Turkey and Azerbaijan, both of which backed Pakistan publicly, and reinforced the reading that India will now act unilaterally rather than as a swing state whose choices Western capitals can assume.
  • A ceasefire was reached on 10 May through the DGMO channel, without a formal document.
• India announced a doctrinal change: any future act of terrorism originating in Pakistan will be treated as an act of war, with no distinction between terrorists and those who host them.
• On 2 May 2025 India banned all trade with Pakistan, direct and indirect; formal bilateral trade has been effectively nil since.

“Any future act of terrorism originating in Pakistan will be seen as an act of war by India.”

— the Government of India, after Operation Sindoor

Crisis	India’s response	Settled	Did not settle
Kargil 1999	Force confined within the LoC	Territory recovered; legitimacy	Deterrence; the army’s autonomy
Parliament 2001	Operation Parakram	A ban on LeT and JeM	Compellence; exposed the mobilisation gap
Mumbai 2008	Restraint; legal campaign	Documented state linkage	Prosecutions; ended the composite dialogue
Uri 2016	Surgical strikes; SAARC boycott	Cross-border retaliation as policy	Attack tempo; the LoC grew more violent
Pulwama 2019	Balakot; MFN withdrawn	Air power across the boundary	Escalation control
Pahalgam 2025	Sindoor; water abeyance; trade ban	Struck military targets	Whether Pakistan’s calculus changes

What Sindoor changed, and the sceptical case

• The case that it changed the equation rests on three claims.
  • Strikes hit headquarters-level facilities in Pakistan’s Punjab heartland, not merely launch pads, breaking a geographic taboo.
  • India escalated to military targets and Pakistan did not escalate further, suggesting the nuclear threshold sits higher than Pakistani signalling implies.
  • The water abeyance ended a sixty-five-year compartmentalisation, adding a non-military instrument of indefinite duration, and the act-of-war doctrine removes the deliberation window in which international restraint used to operate.
• The sceptical case is at least as strong.
  • The ceasefire came in three days, roughly the duration of previous crises — the ladder was climbed faster but the exit was the same.
  • Third-party involvement recurred, including an American claim of mediation India rejects but cannot erase — precisely the internationalisation Simla was designed to prevent.
  • Deterrence is measured by what does not happen next, and Balakot too was read as a doctrinal shift in 2019.
  • The Pakistani army’s domestic position improved: its chief was made Field Marshal and the constitution rewritten in its favour within six months, the opposite of the internal cost India seeks.
• The honest assessment is that Sindoor changed India’s declared thresholds and Pakistan’s target set, and has not yet been shown to change Pakistan’s calculus — the only test that matters.

The Treaty and Dialogue Architecture

Instrument	Date	What it did	Status
Karachi Agreement	27 July 1949	Delineated the Cease-Fire Line under UN observation	Superseded by Simla
Liaquat–Nehru Pact	8 April 1950	Minority rights and refugees; Minority Commissions; return of property; forced conversions not recognised	Historically important, functionally dead
Indus Waters Treaty	19 September 1960	Eastern rivers to India, western to Pakistan	In abeyance from 23 April 2025
Tashkent Declaration	10 January 1966	Restored pre-war positions	Spent
Simla Agreement	2 July 1972	Line of Control; bilateralism	India’s standing legal basis; Pakistan threatened suspension in April 2025
Non-attack on nuclear installations	Signed 31 December 1988; in force 27 January 1991	Annual exchange of lists every 1 January	Never once interrupted
Advance notice of exercises	6 April 1991	Notification of manoeuvres and troop movements	Nominally alive
Lahore Declaration	21 February 1999	Nuclear risk reduction and a peace agenda	Destroyed by Kargil in three months
LoC ceasefire understanding	November 2003; recommitted February 2021	Halt to firing on the LoC, IB and AGPL	Broadly holding
Ballistic missile pre-notification	October 2005	Advance notice of flight tests	Continues
Kartarpur Sahib corridor	9 November 2019	Visa-free pilgrim access from Dera Baba Nanak	Suspended since 9 May 2025

Why some instruments survived

• The instruments that lasted were insulated from politics and technical in content.
  • The 1988 non-attack agreement has produced an unbroken exchange of nuclear-installation lists every 1 January since 1992 — through Kargil, Parakram, Mumbai, Balakot and Sindoor.
  • Missile pre-notification and the DGMO hotline likewise survived, because they serve both sides’ interest in avoiding accidental war and cost neither anything politically.
• The instruments that died required a political constituency — trade normalisation, the composite dialogue, cross-Line-of-Control trade and Kartarpur all vanished with the atmosphere.

The dialogue formats

• The Composite Dialogue, launched in 2004, ran eight baskets simultaneously — peace and security including CBMs; Jammu and Kashmir; Siachen; Sir Creek; Wullar barrage; terrorism and drug trafficking; economic cooperation; and people-to-people exchanges.
  • Four rounds were completed and the fifth was suspended after Mumbai; the format has not been revived.
• Structured restarts — Ufa in July 2015, the December 2015 Paris and Bangkok contacts, and the “comprehensive bilateral dialogue” announced after Modi’s Lahore stopover — each collapsed within weeks.

The 2004–07 four-point formula

• The process began with Vajpayee’s visit to Islamabad in January 2004 and the joint statement in which Musharraf undertook that territory under Pakistan’s control would not be used for terrorism.
• The back-channel was run by special envoys outside the formal dialogue — Tariq Aziz for Musharraf, and successively Brajesh Mishra, J.N. Dixit and Satinder Lambah for India.
• Its four elements, as later set out by Pakistan’s foreign minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, were:
  • No change in borders, but the Line of Control made irrelevant to the movement of people and goods.
  • Self-governance or maximum autonomy for both parts, short of independence.
  • Phased demilitarisation, beginning with urban centres.
  • A joint supervisory mechanism of elected representatives from both sides for trade, travel, tourism, infrastructure and water.
• It collapsed for domestic reasons on both sides — Musharraf’s confrontation with the judiciary from March 2007 and the emergency that November; and, in India, a government with a thin majority and no appetite for a Kashmir settlement in an election cycle.
• Its significance is diagnostic: a settlement was conceivable within the existing territorial status quo, and the binding constraint was the domestic political capacity of the two leaderships, not the distance between their positions.

The one time a Kashmir settlement came within reach, it was killed by domestic politics in Islamabad and Delhi, not by the substance of the dispute.

Confidence-building measures and their limits

• Military and nuclear measures are the class that has worked — the DGMO hotline and weekly contact, flag meetings, exercise notification, the non-attack agreement, and missile pre-notification.
  • Their common feature is that they are war-avoidance instruments, not peace instruments: they reduce accident and misperception without touching a single substantive dispute.
• Political measures — the Joint Commission of 1982, the composite dialogue, the 2007 joint judicial committee on prisoners and fishermen — depend on atmosphere and have been repeatedly suspended.
• People-to-people and economic measures were the most visible and the most fragile.
  • The Srinagar–Muzaffarabad bus from April 2005 and the Poonch–Rawalakot route, both suspended, and cross-LoC barter trade from 2008, suspended in April 2019.
  • The Samjhauta and Thar trains, the Delhi–Lahore and Amritsar–Nankana Sahib buses, the 1974 protocol on visits to religious shrines, and Kartarpur.
• The limits are structural rather than accidental.
  • They address symptoms, not causes — no measure in the inventory touches Kashmir, terrorism or the civil–military balance.
  • They are asymmetrically vulnerable: one attack cancels a decade of accumulation, so the ratchet turns only downward.
  • Their verification is weak — the 1991 notification agreement has no independent monitoring, so compliance is assertion.
  • The military CBMs are the ones that survive, which says what the two states actually agree on: avoiding an unintended war, and nothing further.
• The correct verdict is neither dismissal nor enthusiasm. CBMs have probably prevented accidental escalation in four crises and have moved the relationship not one step toward settlement; treating them as peacebuilding is the category error that makes their repeated failure look surprising.

CBM type	Examples	Record
Nuclear	Non-attack 1988; missile pre-notification 2005; Lahore MoU 1999	Most durable
Military	DGMO hotline; exercise notification 1991; 2003 ceasefire, recommitted 2021	Durable
Political	Joint Commission 1982; composite dialogue 2004–08	Suspended since Mumbai
Economic	MFN promised 1996; cross-LoC trade 2008–19	Dead since May 2025
People-to-people	Buses, trains, shrine protocol, Kartarpur	First to be cut in every crisis

India’s Pakistan Policy from Nehru to Modi

Basrur’s prime-ministerial survey is the most useful organising device for Indian policy, because it shows oscillation without cumulative learning.

Nehru: the assumption of reunion

• Nehru held that Pakistan’s economy, geography and destiny were bound to India’s and that partition would eventually be reversed by the logic of interdependence, so he never treated Pakistan as a first-order strategic challenge.
• The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 is the clearest expression of that idealism — India accepted an allocation heavily favourable to the downstream state on the reasoning that a settled water regime would build trust.
  • Six decades later the treaty had produced no trust, and India was arguing it had signed away the use of most of its own basin waters.
• The UN reference of January 1948 belongs to the same worldview: an appeal to international legality by a state that assumed the law would vindicate it.

Indira Gandhi and the 1971 bargain

• Her approach was realist in method — the Indo-Soviet treaty of August 1971, careful sequencing, and the willingness to use force decisively.
• Basrur’s judgment is that the settlement did not match the victory: with 93,000 prisoners and captured territory in hand, India obtained a procedural undertaking and returned everything else.
  • The strongest defence is that Simla’s bilateralism has been worth more over fifty years than any territorial gain — but that concedes the point that no settlement was extracted when leverage was maximal.

Rajiv Gandhi and the Gujral Doctrine

• Rajiv Gandhi’s policy was largely a continuation, with the significant addition of the non-attack agreement of December 1988, signed with Benazir Bhutto — the most durable instrument the relationship has produced.
• The Gujral Doctrine of 1996–97 was the one genuine attempt at a different logic: non-reciprocity toward smaller neighbours, on the reasoning that a dominant state should give without demanding equivalence.
  • Pakistan sat formally outside the principle, but the atmosphere produced visa liberalisation for students and medical patients and a real, brief relaxation.
  • Its limitation is the one every generous strategy encounters here — unilateral concession is read in Pakistan as weakness or manipulation, and no domestic actor is positioned to reciprocate.

Vajpayee: the most ambitious and the most inconsistent

• Vajpayee understood the geography better than any predecessor, and said so.

“We can choose our friends, but we cannot choose our neighbours. We can change history but we cannot change geography.”

— Atal Bihari Vajpayee

• The nuclear tests of May 1998 were his most consequential decision, and Basrur reads their consequences as three-fold and adverse.
  • A sharp deterioration in India’s immediate security environment, as sanctions and crisis risk both rose.
  • The legitimation of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, which within a fortnight went from a covert programme of contested status to an overt arsenal.
  • The opening of space for nuclear blackmail — the coercive use of nuclear risk to deter Indian conventional responses.
• The bus to Lahore in February 1999, undertaken partly under American pressure, produced the Lahore Declaration and then Kargil, and the crisis was contained only by American and Chinese pressure.
• Agra in 2001 and the mobilisation of 2001–02 completed the cycle; Vajpayee then reopened talks in 2003–04, launching what became the four-point back-channel.

Manmohan Singh: economic diplomacy, interrupted

• His wager was that economic interdependence could do what diplomacy could not.
  • The priority was securing MFN status from Pakistan, which India had granted in 1996 and Pakistan had promised without delivering.
  • Cross-LoC trade and bus services opened from 2005–08, designed so Kashmiris on both sides were the direct beneficiaries.
  • The back-channel he continued came closer to a Kashmir settlement than any formal process.
• Mumbai in 2008 ended it, and the operative principle became that talks and terror cannot proceed together.
• His other distinctive proposal was to convert Siachen into a “mountain of peace” with joint scientific exploration — opposed by the Indian army, and a question that sits with the subcontinent’s boundary disputes.

Narendra Modi: invitation, isolation, Sindoor

• The opening was the most generous of any incoming Indian government: Nawaz Sharif was invited to the swearing-in in May 2014, and Modi made an unannounced stop at Lahore in December 2015, the first Indian prime ministerial visit in over a decade.
  • Foreign-secretary talks were nonetheless cancelled in August 2014 over the Pakistani high commissioner’s meetings with Hurriyat leaders, establishing the pattern of rapid reversal.
• Pathankot in January 2016 was the hinge. India’s initial response was startlingly novel — a Pakistani joint investigation team was permitted to visit the Pathankot airbase in March 2016, an unprecedented act of investigative cooperation.
  • When Pakistan produced nothing, the experiment was read domestically as naivety and the policy turned; Uri completed the turn, and the framework since has been isolation and cost imposition rather than dialogue plus terrorism management.
• The instruments of that phase were the SAARC boycott and the promotion of BIMSTEC, the surgical strikes, Balakot, the FATF campaign, the withdrawal of MFN, and the constitutional changes of 5 August 2019.

August 2019 and its aftermath

• The abrogation of Article 370 was the largest unilateral change to the dispute’s terms since 1947; the state was reorganised into the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.
• The Supreme Court upheld the abrogation on 11 December 2023, holding Article 370 to be a temporary provision, while directing that statehood be restored and elections held.
• Assembly elections were held in September–October 2024, producing a National Conference government under Omar Abdullah; statehood had not been restored as of mid-2026 and remains the principal domestic demand.
• The verifiable internal changes are a sharp fall in organised militancy from its 2018 peak, the resumption of electoral politics, and the growth of tourism — the last of which was precisely what the Pahalgam attackers targeted.

The Doval doctrine, assessed

• The doctrine is offensive defence: rather than absorbing attacks and responding diplomatically, India should work on Pakistan’s vulnerabilities and speak the language its security establishment recognises.
  • Its instruments, as publicly articulated, include covert capability, the Balochistan card, the Gilgit-Baltistan question, financial pressure, and leverage over the Indus waters.
• The case for it is that fifty years of restraint produced neither deterrence nor settlement, and that the post-2016 record has at least established that attacks draw responses.
• The case against is serious.
  • Symmetry is a trap — adopting the adversary’s methods surrenders the normative asymmetry that is India’s most effective diplomatic asset, and complicates the FATF and UN campaigns that constitute the strategy’s other half.
  • Escalation is not controllable by the initiator, and each rung climbed raises the floor for the next crisis.
  • The Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan cards invite reciprocity in a state with more internal fault lines than Pakistan and a hostile northern neighbour.
  • It has no theory of termination — no articulated condition under which Pakistan’s calculus is deemed changed and pressure stops, which is what distinguishes coercion from attrition.
• The defensible formulation is that offensive defence is a necessary instrument and an insufficient strategy: it restores credibility that restraint had eroded, and credibility is a precondition for settlement, not a substitute.

Doctrine	Logic	Instrument	Result
Nehruvian idealism	Interdependence will reunite	Treaties, UN, generosity on water	No trust; instruments outlived the logic
Indira’s realism	Decisive force, then bilateral lock-in	1971; Simla bilateralism	Victory converted into a procedural gain
Gujral non-reciprocity	A large state gives first	Visa liberalisation, atmospherics	Brief relaxation; no reciprocation
Vajpayee’s duality	Deterrence plus outreach	Tests, bus diplomacy, Agra, back-channel	Inconsistency; but also the 2004 opening
Manmohan’s economism	Trade will erode the dispute	MFN pursuit, cross-LoC trade	Nearest to settlement; ended by Mumbai
Offensive defence	Raise the price until the calculus changes	Strikes, isolation, FATF, water, trade ban	Credibility restored; calculus unchanged

The Indus Waters Treaty as an Instrument of Statecraft

The hydrology and the wider riparian argument belong with the subject of river water disputes. What belongs here is the treaty’s career as an instrument of India–Pakistan statecraft.

• The architecture, briefly. Brokered by the World Bank and signed on 19 September 1960, it allocated the eastern rivers — Ravi, Beas and Sutlej — to India and the western rivers — Indus, Jhelum and Chenab — to Pakistan, with India retaining limited non-consumptive, agricultural and run-of-the-river hydropower rights on the latter.
  • Its dispute machinery is graded: the Permanent Indus Commission for questions, a Neutral Expert for technical differences, a Court of Arbitration for interpretation.
• Its reputation rests on survival — it held through 1965, 1971 and Kargil, and the Commission met through crises in which nothing else did.
  • The analytical point is that its durability was a function of quarantine: it worked because both states agreed to treat it as outside the relationship, not because either loved it.
• The design disputes eroded that quarantine from the 2000s.
  • Baglihar on the Chenab went to a Neutral Expert, who reported in 2007, upholding India’s right to build subject to design modifications.
  • Kishenganga went to a Court of Arbitration, whose 2013 awards confirmed India’s right to divert for power generation while setting a minimum environmental flow.
  • Ratle produced the procedural crisis: Pakistan sought a Court of Arbitration while India sought a Neutral Expert, and the World Bank in 2022 allowed both to proceed in parallel — which India treats as a violation of the graded mechanism and as grounds for non-participation.
• India served notices seeking modification in January 2023 and September 2024, citing changed circumstances, the machinery’s breakdown, and demographic and climatic change.
• On 23 April 2025 India held the treaty in abeyance — a status the treaty does not provide for, since it has no exit clause and can be modified only by a further ratified treaty.
  • The declared condition for reversal is that Pakistan “credibly and irrevocably” abjure support for cross-border terrorism; India has reaffirmed the position through March, July and August 2026.

The arbitral sequence and the award of 1 September 2026

• The Court’s Supplemental Award on Competence of 27 June 2025 held that abeyance cannot extinguish a jurisdiction already established.
• The Award on Issues of General Interpretation of 8 August 2025 and the Award concerning Maximum Pondage of 15 May 2026 followed; Pakistan filed for review in March 2026, and hearings were held at the Peace Palace on 26–28 April 2026 with only Pakistan participating.
• The award of 1 September 2026 is decisive. The five-member court held unanimously that the treaty “remains fully in force” and that India “must observe its obligations” under it, rejecting every ground India had publicly cited — sovereignty, Pakistan’s unwillingness to renegotiate, cross-border terrorism, demographic change and climate.
  • An accompanying order on interim measures restrained construction of the Ratle dam wall and power intake until ninety days after the Neutral Expert’s determination, expected around July 2027.
  • India rejected the ruling within hours, calling the court illegally constituted and denying it any jurisdiction over India’s sovereign decisions; the abeyance stands.
• What the episode establishes matters more than who is right.
  • A treaty’s durability rested on insulation, and once insulation ends the instrument becomes leverage rather than an agreement.
  • Enforcement is the missing element — there is no mechanism comparable to a Security Council order, so Pakistan’s remedy is diplomatic pressure rather than compliance.
  • The reputational cost to India is real: it has argued for decades that it accepts third-party settlement, citing its acceptance of the 2014 maritime award against it, and that argument is harder to make now.
  • The material effect on Pakistan is limited today but cumulatively serious — India lacks the storage to withhold significant volumes, but abeyance frees it from design constraints, flushing restrictions, data-sharing and inspection, and every new project changes the timing of flows in the sowing season.

The treaty survived three wars because both states agreed to pretend it was not part of the relationship; the abeyance is the admission that the pretence is over.

Kashmir: the Positions and the Alternatives

The two legal cases

• India’s case rests on instrument and process. The accession of 26 October 1947 was legally identical to that of every other princely state; it was ratified by the state’s Constituent Assembly; and the plebiscite envisaged in 1948 was conditional on a Pakistani withdrawal that never occurred.
  • Simla superseded the UN framework by committing both parties to bilateral settlement, which is why India rejects mediation as a treaty obligation rather than a preference.
• Pakistan’s case rests on principle and demography. A Muslim-majority territory contiguous with Pakistan was, on the two-nation logic, the natural completion of Partition; the accession was procured under duress; and the resolutions on self-determination remain unimplemented.
• The dispute is unresolvable at the level of legal argument, because the two cases are not addressed to the same question — one concerns the validity of an instrument, the other the legitimacy of a principle.

Internationalisation and India’s bilateral wall

• Pakistan’s strategy has been to internationalise; India’s to bilateralise, and since 1972 India has largely succeeded. The Security Council’s closed-door consultations of August 2019 produced no outcome document.
• The instruments of internationalisation — the Security Council, the OIC, the Human Rights Council, appeals to major powers — have lost effectiveness steadily as India’s economic weight has grown.
• The persistent Indian vulnerability is crisis internationalisation: every military crisis draws third parties, and the 2025 crisis produced an American claim to have brokered the ceasefire that India denies. Bilateralism holds in peacetime and weakens precisely when it matters most.

Gilgit-Baltistan: limbo as strategy

• The region was never formally integrated into Pakistan and has no constitutional status; administered as the Northern Areas until 2009, it was renamed under the Gilgit-Baltistan (Empowerment and Self-Governance) Order, 2009.
  • Its Assembly has twenty-four elected and nine nominated members with limited powers, and provisional provincial status was announced in November 2020 — remaining “provisional” for a reason.
• The limbo is deliberate: Pakistan has held since 1948 that annexing either Gilgit-Baltistan or Pakistan-administered Kashmir would undercut its own case for a plebiscite — a tacit concession that the territory is disputed on Pakistan’s own theory.
• The origin was a mutiny, not an accession. After the Maharaja acceded, the Gilgit Scouts under Major William Alexander Brown detained the Governor, Brigadier Ghansara Singh, on 1 November 1947 and raised the Pakistani flag; Baltistan followed.
• The local politics complicate every account.
  • The population, around 1.5 million and predominantly Shia, has long sought integration with Pakistan on grounds of rights rather than affinity, resents sectarian violence and external control of its resources, and has little connection to the Valley.

Shaksgam and Parliament’s resolution

• Pakistan ceded the Shaksgam Valley — the trans-Karakoram tract — to China under a provisional agreement of 2 March 1963, transferring territory it does not own to a third state.
  • It made Kashmir a trilateral rather than bilateral question, and is the origin of India’s two-front problem.
• Parliament’s resolution of 22 February 1994 remains India’s formal position: the whole of Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India, Pakistan must vacate the areas held under aggression, and any change to the state’s status will be resisted.
• CPEC runs through territory India claims, which is the substantive — not merely symbolic — basis for India’s refusal to join the Belt and Road Initiative.

The alternatives, assessed

Alternative	Content	Why it fails
Plebiscite under the 1948–49 resolutions	Region-wide vote on accession	Pakistan never completed stage one; Simla superseded it; no binary fits a plural territory
Independence	A sovereign Kashmir	Rejected by both states; landlocked between three nuclear powers; no majority for it in Jammu, Ladakh or Gilgit-Baltistan
Religious partition	Valley to Pakistan, Jammu and Ladakh to India	Repeats 1947’s logic; destroys India’s constitutive premise; unworkable for minorities
LoC as international border	Legalise the status quo	The most realistic option; no Pakistani government can sell it; the 1994 resolution forecloses it for India
Four-point formula	Soft borders, self-governance, demilitarisation, joint mechanism	The only version both leaderships once accepted; needs domestic capacity neither now has
Trusteeship or UN administration	International supervision	Rejected by India as internationalisation; no state will supply guarantees
Indefinite management	No settlement; keep violence low	The de facto policy of both; supplies no exit and leaves the dyad hostage to the next attack

• The realistic judgment is that no settlement is available and management is the operative strategy — Cohen’s mutually hurting stalemate translated into policy.
• Siachen and Sir Creek are the two territorial questions where technical settlement is genuinely within reach — the first turning on whether authentication of positions taken in Operation Meghdoot precedes demilitarisation, the second on whether the Thalweg principle applies to a tidal creek — and both belong with the subject of the subcontinent’s boundary disputes.

Cross-Border Terrorism as the Structural Obstacle

Terrorism is not one irritant among several here; it is the mechanism through which the rivalry is conducted, and the reason every dialogue format has failed.

From insurgency to externalisation

• The Kashmir insurgency of 1989 began as an indigenous political revolt against a rigged election and a hollowed-out state, drawing on genuine grievance.
• It was externalised within three years. Pakistani support shifted from the pro-independence Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front to Islamist and pro-accession groups, and from Kashmiri cadres to foreign fighters returning from the Afghan war.
• The instrument was cheap, deniable and calibrated: it imposed costs far exceeding its price, and the nuclear ceiling protected the sponsor from conventional retaliation.

Jalal on the strategic use of militants

• Ayesha Jalal’s comparative argument is the essential frame. The divergence between India and Pakistan is not cultural or religious but institutional: at independence the Congress was a mass organisation with deep roots and a doctrine of civilian supremacy, while the Muslim League had no comparable structure in the territories that became Pakistan.
  • Pakistan inherited a disproportionate share of the colonial army and an acute security problem, giving the military-bureaucratic apparatus primacy over an underdeveloped political class.
• From that primacy follows the use of jihad as an instrument of state policy — militants as a low-cost asset in Kashmir and as “strategic depth” in Afghanistan, cultivated by an institution answerable to no electorate.
• The implication is uncomfortable for every engagement strategy: the actor able to end the policy is the actor whose institutional position depends on it.

The organisations and the designations

• Lashkar-e-Taiba, with its charitable front Jamaat-ud-Dawa, executed the 2008 Mumbai attacks; its founder Hafiz Saeed was designated by the UN in 2008 and convicted on terror-financing charges in 2020.
• Jaish-e-Mohammed, founded by Masood Azhar after his release in the 1999 IC-814 hijacking exchange, is linked to the 2001 Parliament attack, Pathankot, Uri and Pulwama; Azhar was listed in May 2019 after a decade of Chinese technical holds.
• The Resistance Front, which claimed Pahalgam, is the current front-organisation pattern — a locally-branded label designed to defeat the attribution on which designation depends.
• The designation regime is India’s most effective non-military instrument and its most easily blocked, since a single permanent member’s hold at the 1267 Committee suffices.

FATF and the cost-imposition argument

• Pakistan was placed on the FATF grey list in June 2018 — the second time, after 2012–15 — for deficiencies in anti-money-laundering and counter-terror-financing frameworks.
• The listing had measurable effects: raised borrowing costs, complications in IMF and multilateral programmes, reduced investment, and heavy scrutiny of cross-border transactions.
• Pakistan was removed on 21 October 2022 after completing two action plans covering thirty-four items, including prosecutions it had previously avoided by detaining figures such as Saeed and Azhar under public-order rather than anti-terrorism law.
• The episode is the strongest evidence for the cost-imposition thesis — Pakistan changed enforcement behaviour when the price became concrete, quantifiable and multilateral.
  • It is equally evidence of the thesis’s limits: the changes were procedural and reversible, delisting removed the pressure, and the groups’ leadership and infrastructure survived.
• The general proposition follows: Pakistan’s calculus changes only when the cost exceeds the benefit, and the benefit — a cheap instrument against a much larger adversary, and a domestic justification for military primacy — is very high.

The regional dimension

• Terrorism in South Asia is overwhelmingly a product of this dyad, and its regional effects are structural.
  • It destroyed SAARC: the 19th summit collapsed after Uri, and the association has not met at summit level since 2014, so the region’s only comprehensive institution is hostage to one bilateral dispute.
  • It blocks connectivity — the motor vehicles, railway and energy agreements were all obstructed at the same forum, forcing India into the sub-regional workarounds of BBIN and BIMSTEC.
  • It prevents trade integration: intra-regional trade remains under six per cent of the region’s total, and the largest missing link is a border closed to commerce since 2019 and to all trade since May 2025.
  • It militarises borders and criminalises movement, and it invites external involvement, since counter-terrorism cooperation has been the currency of extra-regional influence in South Asia for two decades.
• The regional irony is severe: Pakistan is now the principal victim of the instrument it institutionalised.
  • It ranked first in the world on the Global Terrorism Index for 2026, with 1,139 deaths in 2025.
  • The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan caused 637 deaths, the highest since 2011; the Balochistan Liberation Army was the second most active group.

“Terrorists are terrorists; there are no good and bad ones. Those who propagate this distinction have an agenda, and those who cover up for them are just as culpable.”

— S. Jaishankar

India’s non-military instruments

• Multilateral standard-setting through FATF, and sustained pressure at the 1267 Committee.
• The Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism, proposed by India in 1996 and still deadlocked over the definition of terrorism and the treatment of national liberation movements and state forces.
  • Its value would be a binding common definition that removes the “one man’s terrorist” defence; its failure measures how little international consensus exists.

The Islamic Factor, and What It Explains

The religious dimension is real and explains less than it is asked to. The useful move is to separate religion as founding ideology, as instrument, and as diplomatic constituency.

• As founding ideology, the two-nation theory made religion the constitutive principle of Pakistan and Kashmir the test of it — which is why a Muslim-majority territory in a secular India is intolerable in Pakistani constitutional logic and indispensable in Indian.
  • Bangladesh in 1971 is the decisive refutation of the theory as social science: shared religion did not hold the two wings together against language, ethnicity and economic exploitation.
  • Pakistan’s response was not to abandon the ideology but to intensify it — Zaidi’s post-national condition in action.
• As instrument, Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamisation from 1977 — the Hudood Ordinances, the blasphemy provisions, madrasa expansion, and the fusion of the Afghan jihad with state doctrine — converted religion from founding myth into operational tool.
  • The organisations that operate against India are the direct institutional legacy of that period.
  • The instrument has since escaped its makers, producing sectarian violence against Shias, Ahmadis and Christians, the TTP insurgency, and blasphemy politics that constrains every civilian government.
• As diplomatic constituency, Pakistan has sought to convert Muslim solidarity into support on Kashmir, principally through the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and its contact group.
  • The returns have fallen sharply, because India’s Gulf relationships now rest on energy, a very large expatriate workforce, trade and counter-terrorism cooperation.
  • The clearest marker was the invitation to India’s External Affairs Minister as guest of honour at the OIC foreign ministers’ meeting at Abu Dhabi in March 2019, weeks after Balakot, with Pakistan boycotting in protest.
  • The counter-development is the Saudi–Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement of 17 September 2025, under which aggression against one is to be treated as aggression against both.

What it does not explain

• Not the timing of any war. 1965, 1971, Kargil and every major crisis are explicable by strategic calculation and domestic politics without reference to doctrine.
• Not Pakistan’s alignments. Its closest partner is an officially atheist state that has interned its own Muslim minority; its most difficult neighbour on the west is an Islamic emirate.
• Not the divergence between India and Pakistan, which Jalal attributes to the party–military balance at independence rather than to culture or creed — better supported and more useful.
• Its real analytical weight is as a constraint on settlement: religion supplies the vocabulary in which concessions become betrayals on both sides, which is what makes leaders unable to sell what negotiators have agreed.

Internal Conflict and External Posture

The proposition that neighbours’ hostility to India is linked to their own internal social conflicts is a version of the diversionary theory of war, and Pakistan is its most instructive case.

• The mechanism is that externalising conflict is cheaper than resolving it: where internal cohesion is contested by ethnicity, sect, region or class, an external adversary supplies the unifying identity domestic politics cannot.
• In Pakistan the mechanism is institutionalised rather than episodic.
  • Praetorianism — the army’s budgetary and political primacy requires a permanent existential threat, and India is the only candidate.
  • Punjabi predominance in the army and bureaucracy has produced grievance in every other province: the Bengali question that ended in 1971, the Baloch insurgency in its fifth wave since the Khan of Kalat’s accession was enforced in March 1948, the Sindhi and Muhajir questions, and Pashtun alienation.
  • Sectarian division is managed through militant groups the state cultivated and cannot control, and economic fragility converts recurrent balance-of-payments crises into political instability on a predictable cycle.
• The observable pattern is that Indian-directed rhetoric intensifies when internal pressure is highest — during the Bengali crisis, before Kargil amid a contested civil–military relationship, and around 2025 when the army’s domestic standing had been damaged by its confrontation with Imran Khan’s movement.
  • The 27th Amendment of November 2025 illustrates it: an external crisis in May was converted into constitutional entrenchment by November.
• The theory has limits and should not be overstated.
  • It risks explaining away genuine grievances — Pakistan’s Kashmir position predates any particular internal crisis.
  • It cuts both ways: Indian domestic politics also rewards hard positions, and no honest account exempts one side from the mechanism it attributes to the other.
  • It under-predicts — internal crises have also produced outreach, as in 2003–04 when Musharraf faced assassination attempts and opened the back-channel.
• The comparative half of this proposition — the Sri Lankan case, where India’s involvement flowed from the Tamil question in both countries — is answered with the subject of India’s relations with Sri Lanka.

China, the United States, and Pakistan’s Western Front

China as the third party inside the dyad

• The military dimension dates from 1963, when China and Pakistan signed the provisional boundary agreement transferring Shaksgam and made Kashmir a trilateral question.
• The strategic content since has been comprehensive — assistance to Pakistan’s nuclear and missile programmes, the JF-17 and its successors, and a dependence now near-total.
  • On SIPRI’s March 2026 figures for 2021–25, Pakistan takes 80 per cent of its arms imports from China, and 61 per cent of all Chinese arms exports go to Pakistan — a relationship without parallel in the global arms trade.
• The diplomatic content is the protection Pakistan receives at the Security Council, where Chinese holds delayed the Azhar designation for a decade.
• CPEC gives China a material stake in Pakistan’s stability and in territory India claims, converting a bilateral dispute into a question about India’s continental security on two fronts.
  • The Indian planning assumption is the two-front problem, which is why India cannot treat Pakistan as a manageable irritant. China’s wider regional strategy is treated with that subject.

The United States and de-hyphenation

• Pakistan’s American relationship was built on Cold War alliance — CENTO and SEATO, the Afghan jihad of the 1980s, and the post-9/11 partnership — each delivering weapons and status disproportionate to its size.
• De-hyphenation was India’s central diplomatic achievement of the 2000s, completed with the civil nuclear agreement, and it survived even the suspension of American security assistance to Pakistan in January 2018.
• Crisis mediation is the residual American role and India’s residual problem. Washington pressed Pakistan to withdraw from Kargil, restrained escalation in 2001–02 and 2019, and claimed to have brokered the ceasefire of 10 May 2025 — a claim India denies, because accepting it would concede the internationalisation Simla was designed to foreclose.

Pakistan’s western front, and India’s options

• Pakistan’s strategic-depth doctrine has collapsed. The Taliban’s return in August 2021 was expected to deliver a compliant western neighbour; instead Kabul refuses to recognise the Durand Line, declines to act against the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, and pursues an independent regional policy.
• The conflict is now open. Pakistani air strikes in October 2025 produced the deadliest clashes since 2021; Qatari and Turkish mediation produced a ceasefire that collapsed; fighting resumed in February 2026 with strikes on Kabul and continued through the spring, alongside the expulsion of over a million Afghans and the closure of the border.
• India’s realignment has tracked the estrangement precisely — the technical mission returned to Kabul in June 2022, Amir Khan Muttaqi visited India in October 2025, and India announced the upgrading of its mission to a full embassy without extending recognition.
• The strategic options this creates for India against Pakistan should be stated as a spectrum rather than a preference.
  • Patient engagement with Kabul, which costs India nothing and imposes a permanent second front on Pakistani planning — the option already being exercised.
  • Connectivity leverage through Chabahar, which bypasses Pakistan entirely and weakens its transit chokehold over Afghan trade.
  • Diplomatic exploitation of the contradiction — Pakistan’s claim to be a victim of terrorism is harder to sustain while it accuses a neighbour of hosting the group attacking it.
  • Calibrated military pressure, whose credibility rises when Pakistani forces are committed westward, and whose escalation risk rises with it.
  • Strategic patience, on the reasoning that a Pakistan absorbed by internal insurgency and a hostile western border is a diminishing threat India need not accelerate.
• The prudential caution is that a distracted Pakistan is useful to India and a collapsing one is not.
  • The Kabul half of this question — India’s own relationship with Afghanistan, its stakes and its instruments — is answered with the subject of India’s relations with Afghanistan.

Economics, and the Constituency That Never Formed

• The potential is documented and unrealised. The World Bank’s assessment is that bilateral trade could rise from about US$2 billion to US$37 billion if tariff and non-tariff barriers were removed.
  • Formal trade before August 2019 was around US$2 billion, tilted in India’s favour; informal trade through Dubai, Singapore and Bangkok was estimated at nearly US$4 billion — roughly double the formal figure.
• The barriers are both policy and infrastructure: sensitive lists, restrictive visas, stringent standards, lengthy border procedures, and the absence of dry ports and rail cargo capacity.
  • A trust deficit produces its own economics: Pakistan’s business community resists liberalisation on the argument that cheaper Indian goods would displace domestic production, ignoring the input-cost gains its textiles and automobiles would make.
• The political sequence is instructive — India granted MFN in 1996; Pakistan promised reciprocity and never delivered; India withdrew MFN in February 2019 with 200 per cent duties; Pakistan suspended trade in August 2019; India banned all trade on 2 May 2025.
• The consequence is that no economic constituency for peace exists on either side. The businesses that would lobby for normalisation were never allowed to form, which removes the mechanism that has stabilised every other rivalry that ended.

Assessing India’s Options

• The four available strategies exhaust the field, and each has a disqualifying difficulty.
  • Diplomatic engagement — talks, CBMs, Kashmir in deep freeze, Pakistani action on terrorism, an Indian opening on trade — founders on the fact that Pakistan’s elected governments do not control the file and the institution that does has no interest in a settlement.
  • Full-scale war, superficially attractive given the conventional imbalance, is foreclosed by mutual nuclear possession and by the fact that Pakistan’s arsenal is not under civilian control.
  • International mediation is foreclosed by Simla and by India’s own trajectory: a state seeking recognition as a leading power does not invite arbitration of its territorial disputes.
  • Attrition and cost imposition, the current policy, has restored credibility without demonstrating a change in Pakistani behaviour, and has no terminating condition.
• The counsel of despair has distinguished proponents and should be resisted.

“To a significant extent, the future direction of the relationship is beyond India’s control, as much depends on events and processes inside Pakistan.”

— Rajesh Basrur

• The observation is true and, taken as policy, self-defeating — it converts an analytical limitation into a licence for inaction, and inaction has costs of its own.
• The opposite failure is equally common. Sushant Sareen’s formulation that India deals with Pakistan “less as a policy imperative and more as a pathology” identifies the risk of treating the relationship as a domestic emotional register rather than a strategic problem requiring management.

The failed-state question

• A collapsing Pakistan is a worse outcome for India than a hostile one. Fragmentation along Pashtun, Baloch, Sindhi and Punjabi lines would place an arsenal of roughly 170 warheads and delivery systems reaching well beyond the subcontinent into contested custody.
• Atul Kohli’s position is that India has a vested interest in Pakistan’s stability, because instability there makes Indian security harder to maintain. Amitabh Mattoo puts the point more starkly.

“A failed Pakistan would be a nightmare for India. It would be a breeding ground for terrorism and extremism, and it would pose a serious threat to India’s security.”

— Amitabh Mattoo

• The policy implication is clear if uncomfortable: India’s interest is in a Pakistan strong enough to control its territory and constrained enough not to use it against India — a far narrower target than either friendship or collapse.

Tharoor’s prescription

• Shashi Tharoor calls Pakistan India’s “brother enemy” in Pax Indica and argues India’s bilateral options are close to exhausted — bus diplomacy, cricket diplomacy, summitry and back-channels have all been tried.
• His alternative is back-channel diplomacy conducted through third parties with real leverage — the United States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — rather than a bilateral channel the Pakistani army can veto.
• The second instrument is economic weight: India should use its position in the international economy to press donor and multilateral institutions to attach counter-terrorism conditionalities to Pakistan’s financing — an argument the FATF episode subsequently validated.
• The third is normative leadership at the United Nations, above all pressing for the earliest conclusion of the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism (CCIT).
• The fourth is most often overlooked: the fundamentals of the Indian economy are the actual instrument, because raising the world’s stake in India’s growth is what makes attacks on India costly to those who sponsor them.
• The fifth is the idea of India itself — a functioning secular democracy is the standing refutation of the two-nation theory, and Pakistan cannot win while that demonstration holds.

Narayanan’s critique, and Cohen’s verdict

• M.K. Narayanan describes India’s Pakistan policy as a bundle of inconsistent and irrational options, and coins the label that has stuck: “Yo-Yo diplomacy”, swinging between engagement and rupture without an underlying logic.
  • His diagnosis is that India retains an unstated long-term goal of restoring the subcontinent’s geographical unity, that Pakistan understands this end-game, and that this is why Pakistan will not permit India to pursue it.
  • His prescription is capabilities rather than gestures — cyber options and a new counter-force doctrine in place of declaratory diplomacy.
  • The critique’s force is descriptive; the prescription carries real doctrinal risk, since any move toward counter-force erodes the crisis stability that has kept four crises below the nuclear threshold.
• Cohen’s conclusion is the least satisfying and the most likely to be right: the relationship will not normalise within a single political generation.
  • The corollary is patient management — keep the violence low, keep the war-avoidance instruments alive, keep building the asymmetry, and keep the door open for the moment Pakistan’s internal balance changes.
  • Ramachandra Guha’s argument for keeping it open is arithmetic rather than sentiment: two societies with immense shared history and complementary economies are locked in a cycle that costs both, and breaking it is the only route to the returns.
  • Political stability produces economic returns, as post-war Europe and Southeast Asia show; an arms race consumes resources on both sides; and the region’s energy security, connectivity to Central Asia and cooperation against organised crime remain locked behind this one relationship.

Where the Relationship Stands

• The formal relationship is at its lowest point since 1971 — the treaty in abeyance and the arbitral award rejected; all trade banned; visas suspended; Attari closed; missions downsized; Kartarpur shut since May 2025.
• The residual architecture is not nothing. The DGMO channel functions, the 2021 ceasefire on the Line of Control has broadly held, missile pre-notifications continue, and the nuclear installation lists were exchanged on 1 January 2026 for the thirty-fifth consecutive year.
• India’s declared position, restated to Parliament in August 2026, is unchanged: relations can move ahead only in an environment free of terror, hostility and violence.
• The one structural change working in India’s favour is Pakistan’s western front — an open conflict with Afghanistan, insurgencies in two provinces, and first place on the global terrorism index.
• Informal contact exists without political cover — Track 1.5 and Track 2 meetings of retired officials and legislators have continued in Muscat, Doha, Bangkok and London, and voices outside government on both sides have argued against closing the door.

Conclusion

India–Pakistan is not a dispute that has resisted solution; it is a rivalry that reproduces the disputes it appears to be about. Cohen’s paired minority conflict, Zaidi’s post-national condition and Mohan’s domestic-politics account converge on one conclusion — the conflict is sustained by what each state needs the other to be, which is why water, trade, buses and summits have never carried it.

• What India can realistically achieve is bounded, and worth stating precisely.
  • Raise the cost of terrorism until the instrument stops paying, while accepting that this has not yet been demonstrated and requires a terminating condition India has not articulated.
  • Preserve the war-avoidance architecture, which has worked, and stop confusing it with peacebuilding, which it has never done.
  • Keep widening the asymmetry, because economic weight is the only Indian instrument that grows without being spent, and it converts third-party leverage from aspiration into fact.
  • Keep the settlement design on the shelf — the four-point formula showed a workable architecture exists; what is missing is domestic political capacity, which changes faster than structures.
• The final judgment is Cohen’s, and it concerns time rather than policy: normalisation is a generational question, and the task of the present generation is to manage the rivalry at a low enough level of violence that the next one still has something to normalise.