Operation Sindoor: The Pakistan Problem Temporarily Contained, Not Permanently Addressed – Analysis

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By Sushant Sareen

A new paradigm is being established in the Indian subcontinent with the enunciation of what can be called the ‘Modi Doctrine’. In his address to the nation on 12 May 2025, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi laid down India’s policy on cross-border terrorism—no nuclear blackmail will be accepted, cross border terrorism will be considered an act of war, and water (not limited to Indus Waters Treaty or IWT) and blood can never flow together. These are the red lines that have been drawn, not just for Pakistan but presumably also for Bangladesh and any other neighbour which might be harbouring any hostile sub-conventional intentions towards India. But rest assured, India’s enemies, especially Pakistan, will test these red lines.

Smarting under the humiliation of having its 11 most important airbases destroyed by the Indian Air Force (IAF), its air defence systems taken out, nine terror organisation headquarters and camps bombed, and the complete failure of the Pakistan armed forces to cause any mentionable damage to India, the Pakistanis will be itching to even the scores. Islamabad’s claims of having brought down some Indian fighters—the numbers keep going up as the humiliation quotient of the debacle suffered by Pakistan’s real ruling party, the Pakistan armed forces, rises—are like saying India comprehensively outplayed Pakistan and won the cricket match, but lost a few wickets in the process.

Pakistan’s only success was in the domain of information warfare. This was in part a function of the Pakistan military’s media corps—Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR)— ability to monopolise information flow using the captive and compromised media. But in part, it was also how Chinese and Turkish propaganda outfits used their resources to amplify the Pakistani position. The dubiousness and hostility of Western media organisations also helped Pakistan’s info-war operations. While the kinetic operations were underway, the Pakistanis and their Chinese, Turkish, and Western media allies kept their focus on reports of having downed Indian fighters. They blatantly and blithely ignored the beating that was meted out in response to Pakistani counterattacks on the 8th, 9th, and 10th of May. It is only after Pakistan sued for ending firing that some of these media outlets are being grudgingly forced to acknowledge how badly Pakistan has been hit and how little damage it could inflict on India.

Despite the brave face being put up by the Pakistani regime, and their ‘free and independent’ media parroting  ISPR instructions,  these independent journalists, the armed forces know how comprehensively they have been worsted in just four days by India. It would be difficult for the ISPR to hide this monumental debacle. However, accepting defeat is not an option because the survival of the hybrid military-political regime is at stake. Therefore, regardless of the mountains of evidence of the shock and awe effect of Indian counterattacks and the readiness to keep escalating to force Pakistan to back down, the deeply unpopular and illegitimate regime will keep brazening it out. This is the Pakistani tradition, one which their compliant and compromised media will obediently play along with. The defeat will be denied by giving the spin that the drubbing they received pales in front of their achievements: internationalising the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) issue by bringing in the Americans and driving a wedge between the United States (US) and India. The fact that the US will have a limited interest in Pakistan and the offer of mediation or prospects of internationalising J&K are non-existent will not dawn upon the indoctrinated public until it is too late.

The problem for the Pakistan Army is that despite wanting to hit back at India, it cannot. Its air defences are in tatters. India has established a technical superiority that will take time for Pakistan to match. In the meantime, India won’t be sitting back; it will upgrade, acquire, develop, and deploy systems and platforms to maintain its technological superiority over its enemy. Pakistan’s much-vaunted Chinese Air Defence (AD) systems failed spectacularly. The poor performance of Chinese junk was matched by the disastrous Turkish drones, which proved utterly useless in the counterattacks that the Pakistanis launched against Indian military and civilian targets.

The damage done to the reputation of Turkish drones and Chinese AD and EW (electronic warfare) systems means that the Pakistanis will have very little confidence in whatever systems they receive from these countries. It also means Pakistanis will be spending many sleepless nights to source and rebuild their defensive and offensive systems. This means that Pakistan will find it difficult to test India’s Modi doctrine until it can recover from its debilitating setback. The fig leaf for not acting will be the narrative spun for its public—that international mediation on Kashmir is around the corner.

A lot has been written and will be written on the significance of Operation Sindoor. It has been firmly established that there is significant space for a military response to terror attacks until the nuclear thresholds are reached. Pakistan always knew this, as it had been established during the Balakot air strikes in 2019. Operation Sindoor has only carved this fact on the tarmacs of Pakistani airbases. It is not just that there is this space below the nuclear threshold, but also that Pakistan was careful not to cross the threshold of even conventional deterrence. This is borne out by the fact that Pakistan’s response to Indian bombing of nine terrorist bases in the heart of Pakistan was to launch drone swarms, short-range missiles, armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and as it escalated, a few short-range surface-to-surface missiles (SSMs) of the Fatah (victory) series. Ironically, the Fatah missiles turned into shikast (defeat).

Similar weapons were used on the Indian side, along with air-to-surface missiles, which caused havoc in Pakistan and brought out Pakistan’s old strategic nightmare—its lack of strategic depth. India, too, desisted from using its formidable arsenal of SSMs that could have caused far greater devastation and destruction had Pakistan not backed down. Perhaps Pakistan knew that if it had used any of its long-range SSMs, the Indian response would not have been restrained. What both sides can take some credit for is that they, by and large, avoided targeting the civilian population and infrastructure, unlike previous India-Pakistan wars—the firing by both sides across the Line of Control (LoC) in J&K being an exception to this rule.

India can therefore quite confidently claim that it managed to dominate the escalation ladder. After the devastating strikes on the 9 and 10 May, when India hit virtually all important cities and airbases of Pakistan—Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Chakwal, and Sargodha—it forced Pakistan to seek cessation of firing. Together with escalation dominance, the exploitation of space below the nuclear threshold means that India has effectively called Pakistan’s nuclear bluff. The significance of this fact is just starting to sink in on the Pakistani military and civilian establishment. Although Pakistan tried some good old-fashioned nuclear sabre-rattling—its Defence Minister Khawaja Asif threatened India and the world with nuclear holocaust—and it did the usual nuclear signalling by first calling and then calling off a meeting of the Nuclear Command Authority. In the end, Pakistani ministers were found abjectly backtracking from nuclear blackmail. Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar even said that Pakistan had never even considered the nuclear option during the Operation Sindoor— effectively debunking the scare-mongering done by some people in Washington.

Another important facet of Operation Sindoor is that India has exponentially increased the cost of terrorism for Pakistan. This has been a decades-old quest for India. The kinetic operations, along with non-kinetic measures—the IWT, trade, transport, and communication links being snapped—will keep raising Pakistan’s costs if it continues to be addicted to its jihadist fantasies. This includes Pakistan having to spend serious money to build its conventional forces to deny and deter India’s offensive actions below the nuclear threshold. With an ailing and failing economy, and free money from the US, Europe, and even China and Arab countries drying up, Pakistan will face a big economic burden for its terrorism misadventures. Finally, the Modi Doctrine has established a new baseline of India’s response to any egregious act of terrorism by Pakistan. Every future government will have to match, if not better, the Operation Sindoor baseline.

India must, however, remain eternally vigilant against the implacable enemy state called Pakistan, and increasingly Bangladesh. Despite having delivered a salutary blow to Pakistan, India should also be realistic enough to know that the terror problem is not going to disappear overnight. Israel’s dominance and retaliatory policy to any and every terrorist attack have not deterred terrorism against Israelis. Neither targeted nor steamroller operations of the kind being carried out in Gaza will completely eradicate terrorism. That is just the nature of jihadism. India needs to keep building its military and economic strength and forge a political and ideological strategy to eradicate jihadist terror.


Observer Research Foundation

ORF was established on 5 September 1990 as a private, not for profit, ’think tank’ to influence public policy formulation. The Foundation brought together, for the first time, leading Indian economists and policymakers to present An Agenda for Economic Reforms in India. The idea was to help develop a consensus in favour of economic reforms.

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