After decades of complacency, the Indian state has recognised the nature of the beast. India’s missile strikes across terrorist camps at nine locations, deep inside Pakistan’s Panjabi heartland. The missile strikes under Operation Sindoor included Bahawalpur and Murdrike, the headquarters of jihadist outfits Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) and Jaish-e-Muhamad.
Operation Sindoor signals New Delhi’s unflinching resolve to decimate the terror factory and engage with the mothership of Jihadism on her own terms. After decades of complacency and recognising the futility of tedious engagements with an adversary hellbent on ‘salami slicing’ and ‘bleeding through a thousand cuts’, the Indian state has recognised the nature of the beast.
Operation Sindoor – named after the vermilion mark that married Hindu women apply on their forehead – is a bold payback to the perpetrators of the terror attack in Pahalgam, the picturesque town in Kashmir valley popular among honeymooners.
Pakistan is not a ‘normal state’
In International Relations, nations act on tangible self-interests and trade is said to be the best ameliorative. But that’s for ‘normal states’. Artificial states, either created as historical accidents, or drunk on the insular kool-aid of ideology, don’t usually follow this pattern. There’s no incentive that can dissuade them.
The potent combination of collective neurosis, fabricated history, and identity crisis, keeps them stuck in a vortex of destruction. In life, markets, as well as conflicts, there are limits to rational choice theory. No perestroika would be effective in the ‘garrison state’ which follows a version of Voltaire’s famous dictum on Bismarck’s Prussia – it is not a country with an army, but an army with a country.
The real decision-making happens in Rawalpindi, the military and intelligence headquarters, and not Islamabad, the new capital created after 1947. Pakistani historian Ayesha Siddiqua has written ‘Military Inc’, emphasizing the multi-sectoral, for-profit conglomerate that the military is. Pakistan Army’s covert and overt liaison and dirty dealings with jihadists is an open secret, more so after Hafeez General Aseem Munir’s speech.
The Ideological Motivations behind Pakistan’s state backed Terrorism
The Jihadist threat emanating from India’s western frontiers isn’t just about border patrol, law & order, or unforeseen slaughter by radicalised zombies. It is way deeper. The terrorists are also nourished on a steady diet of foundational state narratives such as the final showdown with the Hindus, and upholding the ideological as well as geographical sanctity of the ‘New Medina’ – the stated goal for the creation of a separate Muslim homeland in the Indian subcontinent in 1947.
Pakistan aspired to be a modern Islamic state in the subcontinent and till date her crowning glory is the possession of ‘Islamic nuclear bomb’ – it’s the only one among the 57 Islamic countries with a nuclear bomb. That certainly adds to grand delusions and raises the bar for zealotry, adventurism, and brinkmanship.
“It was Muslim insecurity that led to the call for the creation of Pakistan,” wrote the distinguished novelist VS Naipaul in his 1998 travelogue ‘Beyond Belief’. “It went at the same time with an idea of the old glory, of the invaders sweeping down from north-west”.
How Operation Sindoor changes the game
Pakistan continued with low-intensity asymmetric terror attacks because it kept the cauldron burning, and people accustomed to grief and the daily grind moved on with a remarkable spirit of resilience. After every terror attack, there was a predictable Pavlovian public response that must have been mapped by the experts in psy-ops – the cycle of grief, rage, melancholia, vowing vengeance, and then amnesia.
By hitting deep inside Pakistan’s territory, and holding the Indus Water Treaty in abeyance before that, India has called off the blackmailing chip of nukes forever, making the zero tolerance policy for jihad absolutely clear. Pakistan’s tendency to obfuscate, and play victim card in the international arena has also come to a cipher, as was demonstrated in the closed door United Nations Security Council(UNSC) meeting.
The most optimal game theory outcome from Operation Sindoor would be a Pakistan that knows India can strike anywhere, still maintaining strategic restraint befitting a dynamic, vibrant nation as opposed to a rogue incubation hub of Jihad.
India can swiftly rain down missiles of retribution on the warren of terror groups, indoctrination centers, and the syndicates nurturing it. There’s will as well wherewithal, and an awakened public conscience.
