New doctrines, old dangers
One year after Op Sindoor, India’s new normal faces Pakistan’s new abnormal — putting a fragile truce at risk
On the anniversary of the 2025 summer skirmish with Pakistan, India can claim to have forged a credible new doctrine of counterterrorism and controlled escalation in a nuclear neighbourhood. The 88-hour conflict, triggered by the Pahalgam terror attack and carried out under Operation Sindoor, marked the culmination of a decade-long shift towards assured kinetic responses to cross-border terror and served as a stress test for the subcontinent’s nuclear architecture.
The conflict followed a now-familiar script. As in 2016 and 2019, India retaliated after a terrorist attack in Kashmir that it attributed to Pakistani state-backed actors. What set Sindoor apart was the depth and precision of the response. Nine terrorist base camps were struck on May 7, 2025. Three days later, India hit eleven Pakistani airfields after suppressing Pakistani air defences. India’s indigenous air-defence systems also proved highly effective against Pakistani drones and missiles.
Over the past year, most global analysts reviewing satellite imagery and competing claims have concluded that the military advantage lay overwhelmingly with India — despite documented evidence of Chinese technical personnel operating Pakistani systems, a significant detail that drew too little international scrutiny.
India’s diplomacy secured broad acceptance of its right to defend itself against terrorism. Where it fell short was in the information battle. Television and social media often amplified jingoistic claims unsupported by facts, while the government was slow to present credible evidence to a global audience against a propaganda state flooding the zone with half-truths. That gap is now being addressed.
India’s five commandments
In July 2025, the Modi government codified its counterterror doctrine before Parliament in five explicit tenets: cross-border attacks will invite direct responses; terrorists and their state backers will be treated alike; talks and terror cannot go together, though talks about terror may still be possible; nuclear blackmail will not alter India’s calculus; and blood and water will not flow together.
The last tenet carries particular weight. India placed the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty ‘in abeyance’, even though it had survived two full-scale wars and multiple crises. For policymakers, it was the last major non-kinetic lever available to deter terror. Suspending such a consequential treaty signalled that India’s tolerance for terrorism — whether sponsored from within or beyond its borders — had sharply diminished. In February 2026, India unveiled Prahaar, the first comprehensive national counterterrorism doctrine, aimed at disrupting terror networks at home and abroad. The message was clear: the era of strategic restraint was formally over.
A ladder of consequences
In the longer view, Operation Sindoor was the third rung on an escalation ladder India had been building for a decade. As its military posture shifted towards progressively harder kinetic action against terrorist havens, its diplomatic posture hardened as well. After Uri in 2016, surgical strikes across the Line of Control were accompanied by a policy of no talks with terror. After Pulwama in 2019, the Balakot airstrikes were preceded by punitive tariffs on Pakistani imports, adding “no trade with terror”. After Pahalgam in 2025, India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty days before kinetic operations began, adding a third layer: no water for terror.
Each provocation has drawn a qualitatively higher response. India has built a visible cost architecture in which the price of future provocations is, in principle, known in advance. Whether that visibility deters or instead invites calibrated brinkmanship is now South Asia’s central strategic question.
The end of Operation Sindoor deserves equal attention. India entered the operation with defined political objectives, demonstrated overwhelming capability and disengaged on its own terms — before exhaustion or external pressure forced an off-ramp. In the fifth year of the Ukraine conflict and the third year of horizontal escalation in West Asia, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump would do well to study the Sindoor playbook.
Pakistan’s new abnormal
The sharpest escalation of the past year has been Asim Munir’s rise. He entered the spring of 2025 as perhaps the most vulnerable Pakistani army chief in a generation — presiding over a contracting economy, the jailing of a former prime minister and deep public resentment. He emerged from Sindoor dramatically stronger. Promoted to Field Marshal in May 2025, appointed Chief of Defence Forces in December and granted lifelong legal immunity under the 27th Constitutional Amendment, he now wields a degree of formal personal power without recent precedent in Pakistan.
Yet this political rebirth rests on structural weakness: Pakistan’s polycrisis of economic decline, security failures and political tension. Munir now accumulates roles — military supremo, chief economic planner, chief regional peacemaker — that in a functioning state would be distributed across accountable institutions.
As Pakistan’s chief diplomat charged with brokering a deal to resolve the Iran crisis, Munir’s army claims he has skilfully made Pakistan relevant again to its three principal benefactors: the US, China and Saudi Arabia. On the anniversary of Operation Sindoor, he also cast himself as Pakistan’s chief spokesman, again claiming victory against India and defining Pakistan’s new posture as one of conventional strength, multi-domain operational capability and the ability to strike India ‘in depth’ with high-tech weaponry.
Unpeace equilibrium
There has been no Pahalgam-scale attack in the year since the May 10 ceasefire. That pause is real, but it should be read carefully. The incentives that reward controlled provocation from Pakistan remain intact. Munir’s political survival depends on maintaining calibrated tension with India — enough to justify the army’s primacy, but not enough yet to trigger another Sindoor.
South Asia has reached a new equilibrium: more stable on the surface, more dangerous underneath. Pakistan has a more powerful army chief, a temporarily suppressed terrorist infrastructure and a deepening fiscal hole. A hard state built on military dominance, without economic foundations or democratic legitimacy, is ultimately brittle.
The danger of future conflict still lies within that weakness. What deserves debate now is a more creative approach to mitigating that risk and managing the next crisis, and a doctrine better suited to dealing with an abnormal neighbour.
This article was first published by The Tribune.