India’s Militarized ‘New Normal’ With Pakistan Is a Dead End

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Demonstrators wave posters and the Indian flag in support of missile strikes against targets in Pakiistan and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, in Siliguri, India, May 7, 2025 (photo by Diptendu Dutta for NurPhoto via AP).

Demonstrators wave posters and the Indian flag in support of missile strikes against targets in Pakiistan and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, in Siliguri, India, May 7, 2025.

The fighting may have ended at the India-Pakistan border, but the battles on social media and the broadcast airwaves rage on. New Delhi and Islamabad are both claiming victory after a “ceasefire-like understanding” to their four-day conflict was announced on the evening of May 10. However, their purported victories came at a significant cost for both sides, with lives disrupted and lost, especially in the areas surrounding the Line of Control that serves as their unrecognized border in Jammu and Kashmir.

The hostilities began when India launched nine missile strikes on May 7 at four different locations in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and four in Pakistan that New Delhi called “terrorist infrastructure.” The missile strikes came in response to a terrorist attack on April 22 in Pahalgam, in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, in which 26 Indian nationals, most of them tourists, were shot and killed. Even before the investigations into the Pahalgam attack had been completed, however, New Delhi held Pakistan responsible for them based on Islamabad’s long-standing links to terrorist groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, or LeT, and Jaish-e-Mohammed, or JeM. In the face of a strong domestic public outcry, India vowed revenge.

Following India’s initial strikes, the intense shelling in the border areas and series of tit-for-tat drone and missile strikes deep into each other’s territories brought both countries perilously close to a conventional war. It took high-level diplomatic engagement by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia with the leadership of both sides to bring about the ceasefire.

Indian policymakers and analysts now claim that the military operations have brought about a “new normal,” indicating that from now on, terrorist attacks will be met with conventional warfare. However, with this round of fighting over, it is imperative for New Delhi to make a sober assessment of whether such policies can achieve the objective of stopping cross-border terrorism.

Such a sober assessment would begin first with the fact that the new normal was already in place before the present crisis. In 2016, after JeM militants attacked an Indian military base in Uri, Kashmir, killing 16 soldiers, New Delhi responded with surgical strikes into Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. In 2019, after a JeM suicide bombing in Pulwama, Kashmir, killed 40 security personnel, India targeted “terrorist infrastructure” in Balakot, Pakistan, with airstrikes. As a result, the military strikes that followed the most recent attack in Pahalgam were not only expected but also a continuation of an Indian government policy that dates back nearly a decade.

In fact, the only thing new about this new normal is the use of overwhelming airpower, drones and missiles by both countries in their most recent exchanges. That means that each crisis from here on out may set new thresholds, as both sides strengthen their capabilities as well as their resolve to respond with greater force.

Second, the limitations of India’s approach are visible in the recurrent need to resort to military force. New Delhi’s military objectives, both in 2016 and 2019, were to establish deterrence against terrorism originating from Pakistan. Each time, however, deterrence failed, forcing New Delhi to retaliate with greater force than it had previously. In other words, not only have the conventional attacks meant to stop cross-border terrorism repeatedly failed, but each successive crisis has stepped up the escalation ladder between the two countries. Military strikes, combined with domestic political rhetoric, have created a built-in commitment trap requiring New Delhi to respond with greater force, making military engagement—and by extension, future India-Pakistan confrontations—inevitable.

Third, the policy disproportionately empowers terrorists. New Delhi has now responded to terrorist attacks with conventional military operations on three occasions, and its rhetoric in recent weeks suggests that every future attack in Jammu and Kashmir will warrant a similar response. But that gives any fanatic with a gun the power to bring the Indian and Pakistani militaries eyeball to eyeball. The decision over whether or not to start a war is usually reserved for a state’s highest executive and military officials, but India is effectively handing it over to terrorists.


India has committed itself to conventional retaliation against Pakistan after every terrorist strike. However, it remains questionable whether this can achieve deterrence or stop cross-border terrorism.


Pakistan has undeniably been harboring internationally recognized terrorists in its territory and has used them for its proxy warfare in Kashmir. But to claim that every terror operation is controlled by the Pakistani military is a leap. Moreover, Pakistan also accuses India of indirect involvement in militant and terror attacks perpetrated in Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Should Pakistan mirror India’s policy of responding to terrorist attacks with conventional action, all counterterrorist activities in both countries would carry with them the risk of war.

Fourth, by resorting to military options against Pakistan as the first resort, New Delhi effectively closed off other diplomatic, financial and political means that it has at its disposal to respond to terrorism originating from Pakistani territory. By contrast, in 2001, after JeM militants attacked the parliament building in New Delhi, then-Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee mobilized Indian forces on the border with Pakistan, but stopped short of giving them orders to go to war. This was enough to pressure then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to denounce religious extremism, pledge to reform the country’s madrassas and ban LeT and JeM. He also announced that “no organisation will be allowed to indulge in terrorism in the name of Kashmir.”

Similarly, in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks in 2008, then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s administration took a slew of measures, including engaging Islamabad to conduct a joint investigation and pressuring Pakistan through the Financial Action Task Force, a multilateral anti-money laundering organization. The former led to conclusive evidence of the LeT’s role in the attacks, and the latter led to a decline in foreign investment in Pakistan. Islamabad subsequently engaged in domestic reforms to shed its reputation as a safe haven for terrorists and regain the confidence of the international community.

By contrast, after the Pahalgam attacks, New Delhi’s only major nonmilitary measure besides banning all trade, canceling visas and closing border checkpoints with Pakistan was to suspend the Indus Water Treaty, which is both untenable under international law and catastrophic from a humanitarian perspective. Moreover, while India’s partners, such as the European Union, Russia and countries in the Global South, condemned the Pahalgam attacks, they refused to endorse the military strikes.

Fifth, the military response to the terror attacks overshadowed the question of domestic accountability and reforms with regard to India’s counterterrorism policy. In his book, “Subcontinental Drift,” Rajesh Basrur persuasively argues that focusing blame on external agents, such as Pakistan, effectively diverts attention away from the need for improved capacity to both prevent such attacks and respond to them by measures other than conventional military strikes.

Notably, almost a month after the Pahalgam attack, serious questions remain. Was the attack the result of an intelligence failure or a security lapse? What were the attackers’ motives and objectives? How could such an attack occur just a week after Home Minister Amit Shah toured Kashmir to conduct security reviews? That mirrors how, years later, similar questions can still be asked about the attacks in Uri and Pulwama. Perhaps the most important among them is, What measures has the government taken to improve its capacity to prevent such attacks? The military response to Pahalgam has not only put these questions on the backburner but has shielded India’s political leadership from accountability and political costs.

With its persistent aggressive and populist rhetoric, which often revolves around Pakistan and the metaphors of war, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has boxed itself into a position where anything less than a military response to a terrorist strike will make it seem weak. Starting with the surgical strike of 2016 to the much more expansive operations earlier this month, the “new normal” has committed future governments to conventional retaliation after every terrorist strike. However, it remains questionable whether these military actions can achieve deterrence or stop cross-border terrorism.

Moreover, since the Pahalgam attack, there has been a rise in hate crimes against Kashmiri Muslims across India, even as Jammu and Kashmir suffered the most damage from cross-border shelling during the ensuing military clash. With Kashmiris bearing the brunt of both war and India’s sectarian polarization, their grievances are only bound to increase under the new doctrine.

For its part, Pakistan is confronted with the same conundrum with regard to the Afghanistan-based Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP. The Pakistani military’s strikes into Afghan territory to prevent cross-border attacks have failed to yield any intended results, while triggering retaliatory violence by the Afghan Taliban and undermining relations with Kabul.

But while Afghanistan is much weaker than Pakistan, both India and Pakistan are nuclear states that also have significant conventional capabilities. The slightest miscalculation between them comes with the risk of immense and tragic destruction. The most recent confrontation has once again underscored how hard it is to control escalation when their militaries faceoff against each other. What’s more, Pakistan’s reaction to India’s initial strikes has demonstrated its willingness to back up its claim that it would respond with more than equal measure—what it calls “quid pro quo plus”—notwithstanding any losses and potential risks of escalation.

As in the past, it came down to international mediation to calm the tensions and allay fears of nuclear war. But as the threshold for the use of conventional military force is lowered, any future conflicts between the two nations will become even more unpredictable, even as the willingness of outside actors to serve as mediators becomes less certain. It is easy to see that the stakes have been raised, but harder to ascertain any proportional rise in the potential benefits.

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Bilal Ahmad Tantray is pursuing a doctorate in the Department of International Relations and Governance Studies at the Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence.

Rishabh Yadav is pursuing a doctorate at the MMAJ Academy of International Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, and is a Network for Advanced Studies of Pakistan Fellow 2024-2025 at Takshashila Institution.

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