These reflections are being written on the cusp of the anniversary that extends for a fortnight between the horrific terrorist attack in a meadow outside Pahalgam on April 22, 2025, and the massive military retaliation against Pakistan a fortnight later through Operation Sindoor, during the May 7-10 period. Designed to cow down a terrorist state, what was the outcome of our policy of battling force with force? Has Pakistan changed its terrorist spots? No. What, then, are the principal lessons to be learned? More importantly, have we learnt them?

The first lesson must be that our overwhelming military superiority over Pakistan has not promoted our overwhelming foreign policy priority of deterring terrorism. The cardinal principle of that policy has been no compromise with terror and, therefore, no engagement with our terrorist neighbour. Hence, the Government of India’s unwavering resolve to keep Operation Sindoor open-ended to deter any further Pakistani perfidy and relentlessly project this resolve to the world.

Yet, instead of the global community denouncing Pakistan as a terrorist state, Pakistan’s international standing a year after Pahalgam has soared to unprecedented heights. Extraordinarily, it is making a name for itself not as a hub of terror but as a global peacemaker. And while Pakistan’s deft diplomacy is dismissed in India as “dalali”, apart from tut-tutting in general terms about the awfulness of terrorism, no one has, or is, joining India in damning Pakistan. Why?

One reason could be military. We inflicted massive damage to Pakistan’s air warfare capacities through Operation Sindoor, but their only response has been to repair the damage and augment military capacities, even as we repair and augment our capacity to inflict even more military punishment on them. Also, Pakistan inflicting unanticipated (and, therefore, undisclosed) losses to Indian air superiority at the start of Operation Sindoor has convincingly demonstrated to Pakistan and the world that India’s so-called military superiority has no leverage in bringing Pakistan to heel politically.

Need for engagement

This parallels US President Donald Trump’s Operation Epic Fury, which leveraged infinitely greater military strength to extract political concessions from Iran, but which only strengthened Iranian resolve and resilience to resisting US pressure. The difference is that after a quick (and continuing) military engagement, the US and Iran have resorted to political engagement, however tentatively and warily, while India continues to believe that its military superiority demands no diplomatic engagement with Pakistan to end the military confrontation and its underlying causes. Does this make sense?

True, we are a nuclear power. Yet, we are just about the world’s biggest procurer of highly sophisticated conventional foreign weapons systems, arms, and armaments. Our military budget is 10 times that of Pakistan. But none of this has forced Pakistan to put its tail between its legs. On the contrary, our keeping Operation Sindoor open-ended and massively enhancing our military capabilities to intimidate Pakistan has only strengthened the grip of its Field Marshal Asim Munir on the jugular vein of that country’s polity and added lustre to Pakistan’s glow in international approbation.

To justify our humongous expenditure on defence, we argue that we also have to face China, but the world sees our cover for what it really is: not confronting China but menacing Pakistan, allegedly to secure ourselves against state-directed terrorism. In consequence, our meretricious military acquisitions in the year since Sindoor have signalled not so much our strengthening our defences as projecting an offensive intent. Moreover, such signalling has triggered Pakistani countermeasures, including reinforcing their very effective military alliance with China while simultaneously sliding into Trump’s (and even Putin’s) welcoming arms.

Instead of underscoring India’s pre-eminence in South Asia, Modiji’s “Naya Bharat”, a year after Pahalgam and Sindoor, has been rendered the most isolated state in South Asia, mocked as a “hellhole” by the same power our Prime Minister had wooed so assiduously, even as Trump added injury to insult by lauding Munir as his “favourite Field Marshal”.

The saddest story of our fall is that our only really reliable friends are a war criminal overseeing a continuing genocide and, irony of ironies, the Afghan Taliban, a movement we labelled “terrorist” until it went to war with Pakistan, thus playing out a bizarre third century BC Chanakyan version of the strategy of perceiving “a neighbour as invariably an enemy and a neighbour’s neighbour as invariably a friend”.

“When”, as the Vietnam hit song of lament put it, “will we ever learn/when will we ever learn”?

Despite what Mahatma Gandhi taught both colonial India and imperial Britain, and indeed the whole world, will we ever learn that military superiority does not ensure political leverage unless dominance in arms is matched by engagement on the ground?

Even Trump shows signs of understanding this as he pleads with Islamabad to inveigle Tehran to come to the negotiating table laid out at the Serena Hotel in Pakistan’s capital. Even the demented rogue elephant understands, in the words of the most vicious proponent of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan, that “the only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used”. Resorting to military coercion is not “diplomacy by other means”, as Clausewitz so disastrously held, but proof only of the “bankruptcy of policy”—another Reagan quote.

But our saffron establishment does not understand this. They think keeping Operation Sindoor open while keeping Pakistan at arm’s length will compel Pakistan to desist. Modi’s “Naya Bharat” does not see that military dominance is no solution; it is, at best, a tool to foster restraint with a view to promoting reconciliation through mutual negotiation. It is our empty military posturing that is boomeranging on our pre-Modi reputation as the world’s most right-minded moral arbiter.

Winning Kashmiri hearts

A third lesson we do not learn is that the most effective barriers against terrorism are those built in the hearts of the Kashmiri people. We do not understand—at least Modi/Shah do not understand—that you cannot go on needling Kashmiris, strangling their asmita (pride/dignity) and denying them their constitutional rights, and still expect them to wholeheartedly align themselves with the Centre’s concerns.

As Haseeb Drabu, a former Jammu & Kashmir Finance Minister, said in a recent article on the anniversary of Pahalgam/Sindoor, “political engineering has not eliminated terrorism” and “the economic costs of insecurity are immediate and painful”.

Banal and obvious though the injunction might be, policies have to bring Kashmiris closer to India, not push them away. Yet, the current dispensation seems to believe that, as in the failed US experiment in Vietnam, hectoring and bullying will win the “hearts and minds” of Kashmiris.

According to an article in The Hindu dated April 24, 2026, security action taken in the wake of the Pahalgam terrorist attack, without judicial authorisation and solely on highly biased police discretion, in blowing up the three homes of Kashmiri “Pahalgam attack suspects”, besides seven houses of alleged terror-affiliated Kashmiris, is the way to deter discontented Kashmiri youth from providing shelter and succour to Pakistani terrorists. Is it?

While the initial narrative was around three Kashmiris identified earlier as involved with Pakistan-based terrorists, now only the three Pakistan-based terrorists are talked about, all of them conveniently killed and buried in two Hindu-named operations, namely Shiv Shakti and Mahadev. Is this justice or tyranny? Is this closure? Is this any way of promoting either Truth or Reconciliation?

The single worst example of the saffron element having learnt nothing in the past 12 months is Ladakh, the most enthusiastic supporter of the Centre’s “political engineering” on August 5, 2019. It has been cruelly pushed aside by the Centre’s haughty arrogance, of which the incarceration of the great and enlightened patriot Sonam Wangchuk (for doing no known wrong), is the most egregious, poignant, and persisting symbol. The Sangh Parivar knows Hindutva fanatics; it does not know the gentle, tolerant and diverse people of India over whom it seeks to rule in perpetuity. Be warned: the enemy is not at our gates; he is within.

Mani Shankar Aiyar served 26 years in the Indian Foreign Service, is a four-time MP with over two decades in Parliament, and was a Cabinet Minister from 2004 to 2009.

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