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INDIA’S true enemy is not Pakistan: it is hubris, the arrogance of a born-again bully. India emerged as a unified nation-state in 1947, the People’s Republic of China two years later. Both boast a heritage that is more than 5,000 years old. Yet each has spent the past seven decades struggling to resolve unfinished business left by divisive powers — Great Britain and America. In India’s case, this included the disputed former kingdom of Jammu & Kashmir. In China’s case, it was the renegade island of Taiwan.
Today, China and India are determined to straddle the 21st century. They have hegemonic ambitions. India aspires to dominate its subcontinent; China, the rest of the world.
China is a post-1972 enemy of US’s making, just as Russia (once an ally against Germany) is a product of Europe’s post-1945 paranoia. Meanwhile, hostility in the subcontinent, has brought Pakistan and India yet again to the edge of an abyss.
Tensions following the terrorist attack in Pahalgam on April 22 are simmering. It is a sign of the BJP government’s insecurity that it should have reacted so quickly and so pointedly after that incident. It accused Pakistan (without naming it) of masterminding the attack. It unleashed punitive measures such as an unwarranted suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty, banning overflights, sealing borders, expelling Pakistani nationals, freezing trade, and appealing to the IMF and ADB to stop aid to Pakistan.
Even Dr Goebbels would have admired the jingoism of Indian media anchors.
It released a barrage of transparent propaganda aimed at winning the sympathy of the international community. Even Dr Goebbels would have admired the jingoism of Indian media anchors, chained all too obviously to the mothership of the Ministry of External Affairs.
Their aim is to convince their compatriots that India has won the phoney war. Realists know that both countries will have to revert (hopefully sooner rather than later) to a state of phoney peace — the period of uneasy relations that followed the Tashkent Agreement of 1966, the Shimla summit in 1972, and the Lahore Declaration of 1999.
Analysts meanwhile are busy calculating who has gained what, and who lost how much from this latest India-Pakistan confrontation?
Had this country carried out an attack at Pahalgam, it would have had everything to lose: the sympathy of the beleaguered Kashmiris, damage to its precarious solvency, its credibility with the IMF, agricultural dehydration, diplomatic isolation, and political schism within. And unlike 1999, there would have been no Bill Clinton in the White House to rescue it from a Kargil-type incursion.
India on its side has gained less than it had planned. It has dented the front-fender in its drive to obtain a seat in the Security Council. It enjoys less credibility in international circles than it assumed. It does not have the United Nations in its back pocket. Its blunderbuss diplomacy has backfired. It will have to admit that water is not an India-owned natural resource, and that impetuous repudiation of international agreements is bad policy.
Indian governments have yet to learn that anti-Pakistan patriotism is an obsolete, outworn tool with which to start a fire.
I had written this much when news came that very early on May 7, India had unilaterally attacked five targets in Azad Jammu & Kashmir and Pakistan, including Muridke, which is 55 kilometres from where I live. I drove around my neighbourhood. Everything appeared calm as the city woke up to another cloudless morning.
Since then, throughout the day, reports of attacks and counterattacks have inundated news channels. The phoney war has turned serious and in ea-rnest. Not quite the conventional war yet with sirens and air-raid shelters and a run on the banks, but an aerial-cum-cyber war with strategic objectives like airports, com-mand centres, possibly even dams. The Indians have made the first strike. Any escalation will be at a time and place of Pakistan’s choosing.
I recall after the 1965 war M.M. Ahmad (then adviser to president Ayub Khan) talking to the Americans who feared an escalation, involving other allied countries. He told the US ambassador that for Pakistan it was already a world war.
Since those who start wars never ask for a public mandate before declaring hostilities, they should listen to voices outside their own minds. They should heed the advice of persons who fought wars against wars. “War does not determine who is right,” the philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell warned, “only who is left.” And the British prime minister Stanley Baldwin’s chilling advice to the living: “War would end — if the dead could return.” All sides should keep his warning in mind as they contemplate their next move.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, May 8th, 2025
