By Kavita Mistry 
Photo caption: Given the atrocity, a serious escalation is only to be expected but its aims should be clear
A major terrorist attack, a vast human tragedy, nationwide anger and distress, and an India-Pakistan crisis…This is hardly an unfamiliar situation. Such choreography has been part of the playbook multiple times through this century, and its antecedents can be traced back to the 1980s and the 1990s.
What lies ahead is a terrain that is also not unfamiliar. In the aftermath of the Dec 2001 terrorist attack on our Parliament, the then foreign minister, the late Jaswant Singh, had written about the challenges he faced. Alongside sending a message to Pakistan, containing it diplomatically, and defeating terrorism on the ground, there was an internal and an external challenge. The internal challenge, he said, “was to carry the nation’s mood, to contain its belligerence, its desire for revenge and retaliation, but to give it a sense of achievement.” The external challenge was “to carry conviction with and thus carry the opinion of the international community”.
Variants of the 2001 situation have been encountered multiple times thereafter. The package of responses designed may have varied on each occasion but remained at its core, a mix of measures addressed towards Pakistan, the international community and domestic public opinion. It is true that after the Pulwama terrorist attack, the military component in the overall response ratcheted up several notches. But even earlier, the coercive element was never entirely absent.
The package of measures announced by the Indian govt and the countermeasures announced by Pakistan reflect the overall state of India-Pakistan relations. The relationship has been progressively hollowed out since 2016 following major terrorist attacks such as at Uri (2016) and Pulwama (2019) and on account of measures announced by the govt of Pakistan after the legislative changes concerning J&K in August 2019. In 2025, this was evidently a near zero relationship — no high commissioners in place; a total absence of high-level contacts; diplomatic relations downgraded and respective high commissions downsized; a ban on trade; a freeze on civil society, cultural and sporting contacts; a shutdown of all usual modes of travel such as bus, train etc.
Yet oddly enough over the past four years, this near-zero relationship had also acquired some features of stability. This was evidenced by the ceasefire on the LoC in Feb 2021; the surprisingly mature handling of a potentially very serious situation such as the mistaken launch of a missile in March 2022; and the reopening post-Covid of the Kartarpur Sahib visa-free corridor in Nov 2021. This was no doubt a minimum stability at a very low plateau, but it was stability, nonetheless.
Over the past 60 years, periods of such stability have usually led to some efforts to revive relations. In many ways, this contributed to the up-down seesaw nature of the relationship which has also been its most frustrating feature. This time around, however, somewhat unusually over the past four years, the relationship remained almost constant, frozen in a sense, at its low plateau with bilateral diplomacy suspended. The Pahalgam outrage has now pushed it from this low plateau into a deep abyss.
Post the Pahalgam outrage, some of the diplomatic measures announced by India, and thereafter echoed and reiterated by Pakistan, are symbolic. The announcement by India that the Indus Waters Treaty will be kept in abeyance is certainly new and a far more serious step. Its immediate impact is limited but what this means is that the regular meetings of the Indus Commission will not take place and the routine information sharing that took place during the flood seasons will not happen. Yet the step is of very great significance for Pakistan as it directly touches its sensitivities as a lower riparian and points to the deep anxieties that have been present since 1947 itself. The Pakistani hyperbolic response which equates the interruption of water to an act of war underlines these hyper-sensitivities as does the announcement that it shall exercise the right to hold all past treaties with India in abeyance.
But, in sum, all these measures put together do not do much except bring a near-zero relationship even closer to zero. What is relevant is that they reflect a high state of tension and the realisation that this is only the starting point of a potentially very serious escalation. Given the scale of the atrocity that has been visited upon us, this was to be expected. In adversarial relationships such as those existing between India and Pakistan, coercive measures in such situations are often unavoidable. Nevertheless, what is important is that they are embedded in a clinically designed policy with clear aims of what is feasible and what is not.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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