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PM Modi should have heeded the words of his mentor PM A.B. Vajpayee: “Hum jang na honay daynge; khoon ka rang na honay daynge [We will not allow war, nor spill blood]”. (The new Pope Leo XIV said as much, but in prose.)
Vajpayee recited this couplet at Lahore in 1999, conceding that India accepted Pakistan as a reality. Modi, however, sees no place for Pakistan in the subcontinent. Both PMs represent opposite ends of the BJP spectrum, just as here two PMs — Nawaz and Shehbaz Sharif — view our security from distant ends.
The incident at Pahalgam on April 22 has a sinister precedent in history. In February 1933, Hitler had used the Reichstag fire to blame the communists, releasing Nazism. In 2025, PM Modi (with an equal lack of evidentiary justification) blamed Pakistan for Pahalgam.
On May 7, he unleashed India’s Operation Sindoor across the Line of Control and our international border. The battle that ensued would have continued until doomsday, had PM Modi not asked President Trump to broker a ceasefire. (Modi denies this.)
Will PM Modi breed doves of peace?
In Washington, VP Vance explained the US’s position: “America can’t tell the Indians to lay down their arms. We can’t tell the Pakistanis to lay down their arms. And so, we’re going to continue to pursue this thing through diplomatic channels.”
History records that on July 11, 1971, during the Indo-Pak crisis over East Pakistan, Zhou Enlai told Henry Kissinger that “if India commits aggression, we will support Pakistan”. Kissinger replied: “But we cannot take military action.” Zhou agreed: “You are too far away. But you have strength to persuade India. You can speak to both sides.”
Over 50 years later, the US did just that. Between May 7–9, after red-eye negotiations, the White House and other countries (including Saudi Arabia and Turkey) intervened. According to CNN, on May 10 the White House conveyed to PM Modi “alarming intelligence”, which compelled the US to change from distant diffidence (“None of our business”) to active mediation.
Trump announced the “full and immediate ceasefire” first. Then, Secretary Marco Rubio tweeted that “the Governments of India and Pakistan have agreed to an immediate ceasefire and to start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site”.
In keeping with its instinctive mendacity, India put its own spin on events. In New Delhi, India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, announced that the two countries worked “directly” to reach the deal, without mentioning the US. In a terse statement, Misri announced that “the DGMO of Pakistan called [?] his Indian counterpart at 3.35 pm. It was agreed that both sides will stop firing on land, air and sea from 5 pm. Next talks on 12 May”.
Indian external affairs minister S. Jaishankar added his caveat: “India has consistently maintained a firm and uncompromising stance against terrorism in all its forms and manifestations. It will continue to do so”, ie, India will decide — as it did over Pahalgam — what constitutes terrorism, who is a terrorist, which individuals or state to punish, and how. It eschews independent investigation.
Will the May 10 ceasefire hold? Both countries have already begun accusing each other of violating it. On May 12, PM Modi declared that the ceasefire was simply “a pause” and that India will not tolerate any kind of nuclear blackmail. And in a pointed rebuff to Trump, he added: “Terror and trade cannot go together.”
Doesn’t PM Modi realise that the world has changed dramatically since 1971? Modern warfare is more than statistics of weaponry published in Jane’s Defence Weekly. Pakistan and the PRC are 50 years older, more mature, stronger militarily, and united. PM Modi has committed a Himalayan miscalculation by cementing Pakistan and the PRC into one indivisible adversary with two fronts.
India needs to rewrite its defence catechism, now that Pakistan has demonstrated that it can counter Indian onslaughts, without resorting to nuclear weaponry.
Will PM Modi and his Indian hawks breed doves of peace? Not likely. Our military leadership has no illusion. It knows that PM Modi is determined to destroy our armed forces, to eradicate Pakistan, and to ethnically cleanse 250 million Amit Shah’s “termites”. Do the Shimla and Lahore Accords hold any meaning for the BJP government? They should. Sharper minds than PM Modi’s understood the imperatives that made his predecessors sign those protocols and earn peace.
One analyst from Yale has argued that this misadventure has regressed India by decades. Indo-Pak is again hyphenated. Agreements to discuss issues bilaterally have been superseded and third-party intervention admitted. The issue of Jammu & Kashmir has been resurrected into international consciousness. A wit has suggested that before PM Modi went on his tiger shoot, he should have considered the possibility that the tiger might win.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, May 15th, 2025
