Modi Doctrine Tested: Terror, Retaliation, and Nuclear Risks

Now that the fog of war has cleared, we can draw up an account of what we gained and what we lost. Where do we begin? Perhaps with the man who started it all. Within a few days of our taking out nine terrorist camps in Pakistan, the Pakistan Army chief, General Asim Munir, was transformed from General to Field Marshal, obscuring the peacemaking gestures of his predecessor, General Qamar Bajwa. Is that what we wanted—or should that be counted as “collateral damage”?

A nation and a people hopelessly torn between Sunni and Shia, Muslim and Ahmadiya, Barelvi and Deobandi, Sindhi and Muhajir, Baloch and Pashtun, divided, above all, by a looming Punjab vs The Rest, and faced with a flailing economy, has risen, since that night of May 6/7, united as one to the clarion call of Pakistan—One Nation. Was that inevitable outcome configured into Operation Sindoor? Is the civilian Prime Minister of Pakistan not more than ever in hock to the military?

We claim a “hundred” terrorists dead—but the field marshals of terrorism, Hafiz Saeed and Masood Azhar, strut the stage, their missile-wrecked buildings and outhouses notwithstanding. They do not cower in dread and fear. For terrorism does not live or die in brick and stone and wood. It lives in the hearts and minds of wicked men. Some have been eliminated, but uncounted hundreds remain. Have our actions strengthened the hands of the Pakistan government to deal sternly with the terrorists in their midst? Or weakened their will and capacity—if they ever had it—to curb the network of “jihad”?

Then there are the Chinese. Most of our independent security experts (Praveen Sawhney, Ajai Sahni, Sushant Singh, Angad Singh, et al) are of one voice in saying the Chinese J-10C aircraft and PL-15 BVR missile have, at the very least, “given an edge” to Pakistan over India—which is why our political bosses are keeping close to their collective chest vital information about the number and categories of Indian military aircraft downed. Moreover, instead of being across the high Himalaya, China is firmly on Pakistani soil and by Pakistan’s side. Operation Sindoor has consolidated Pakistan-China solidarity. They have taken air warfare, as Sawhney underlined in his interview to Karan Thapar, “to another level”, integrating electronic warfare with electromagnetic spectrum management and cyberattacks with lethal missiles capability. So, before hitting Pakistan next time even harder, would we not have to take into account not just puny Pakistan but their “all-weather friend”, the giant China as well?

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What lesson has the Modi government learned from the fact that the “Butcher of Kargil” emerged as the most accommodating Pakistan President we have dealt with since 1947? Was he not the co-author of the 2007 Manmohan Singh-Pervez Musharraf formula on Kashmir that came within a millimetre of being signed into an accord? Is there any equivalent prospect now? Alternatively, has the Indian riposte to Pahalgam taught Pakistan a lesson they will never forget and themselves rein in the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, not to mention the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its rogue agents? And will Sindoor II—should the Modi Doctrine be invoked—be short and sharp, as the first Operation Sindoor proved to be, or escalate into incalculable consequences?

The world has no difficulty in endorsing our horror at terrorism. Indeed, within three days of April 22, the member-states of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) convened to “condemn in the strongest terms” the “reprehensible act of terrorism” at the meadow near Pahalgam, demanding that the “perpetrators, organizers, financiers and sponsors…be brought to justice”. Ironically, Pakistan, as a duly elected member of the UNSC, went along unreservedly with this condemnation. But no one, then or now, has identified, as we so readily did, Pakistan—and none other—as the obvious “perpetrator, organiser and financier”.

For no one in the UNSC (and prospectively none or almost none in the UN General Assembly) endorses our conviction that the Pakistan government and its “deep state” are complicit in cross-border terrorism and that, therefore, “justice” lies in the infliction of condign punishment on Pakistan through immediate military retaliation under the Modi Doctrine. They are much more concerned about the possible, or even probable, escalation of India’s open-ended Operation Sindoor into a nuclear confrontation. Round Two (and successive rounds thereafter) will, they believe, only escalate the confrontation nearer and nearer to nuclear disaster.

An echo in world history

The world’s apprehensions are rooted in the dreadful experience of unanticipated escalation in the first half of the 20th century. No one imagined that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by Serbo-Bosnian terrorists in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, would unleash even one World War let alone two, killing close to 100 million in avenging the terrorist bullets lodged in the hearts of one man and his much-loved consort. For what the Austrians did was to demand, as we do of Pakistan, that Serbian terrorists be brought to justice by the Serbian government, notwithstanding the Serbian government’s repeated denial, as Pakistan’s government is doing, of any state involvement in terrorism emanating from their soil.

Historians are now unanimous in regarding the Serb government’s claim of non-involvement in terrorism as true. For the Austrians at the time, the assassination of their heir was in itself proof positive of hypocritical denial by the Serb government of their undoubted involvement, just as we need no convincing of Pakistan’s hypocritical posturing. So, Austria drafted an ultimatum threatening military retaliation if Serbia would not accept without demur every one of their demands.

The Modi Doctrine is similar: if Pakistan-based terrorist networks are not dismantled and Pakistani terrorists are not arrested by Pakistani security and severely punished by the Pakistani judiciary, then India reserves the right to immediate military retaliation for any Pakistan-based act of terrorism. Indeed, even though the Serb government accepted all but two of the Austrian demands, which they believed impinged on their sovereignty, the Austrian military retaliation to terrorism was as swift and certain as the Modi Doctrine warns Pakistan of what India will do if there is any further act of cross-border terrorism.

The fact is that rogue elements in Serbia’s military intelligence had clandestinely set up a terrorist organisation, the notorious “Black Hand”, which the Serbian civil government of Nikola Pasic was as impotent in controlling as Shehbaz Sharif’s is in reining in rogue elements in Pakistan’s military intelligence establishment. Since around 1989, when the Americans made clear that they were withdrawing their troops from Afghanistan, the ISI began funnelling armaments, funds, and training to terrorist organisations like Hafiz Saeed’s Hizbul Mujahideen and Masood Azhar’s Jaish-e-Mohammed to outsource their proxy war “of a thousand cuts”. Successive Pakistani governments could not curb these terrorist organisations for the same reason as in Serbia: fear of an army putsch. Therefore, we cannot rely on Pakistan to restrain terrorism; we need to immensely strengthen our counter terrorism measures, as the US has done post-9/11, not leave gaping holes as at Pahalgam.

In Austria’s case, their invasion of Serbia set in motion a steep escalation that first drew in, against the German and Austrian empire, the Czarist Empire of Russia, which also brought in Russia’s firm ally, France, and then Great Britain and her worldwide Empire and finally Turkey and Japan and much of the world into what was then called the Great War. It ended four years later with unprecedented millions of youth dead. Long-standing Empires fell—the Russian, the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Turkish caliphate. The peace treaty that followed at Versailles bred the next World War to address the questions left unanswered by the First.

A bilateral straitjacket

At the end of the two World Wars, instead of a peace, the world had a bitter Cold War—with this difference that the two major nuclear-armed contenders, the US and the Soviet Union, fully recognising that the only way to forestall unanticipated escalation into a nuclear Armageddon required continuous, persistent, and unbreakable contact with each other, even as the they pursued their overarching national goal of respectively using every means—short of war with each other—to defeat the other’s system. As Khruschev put it colourfully from the UN rostrum, “We shall bury you.” But implicitly added, “Not, however, under nuclear debris.”

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In the light of their own experience, the world has no difficulty in letting India and Pakistan get on with their bickering over Kashmir and Indus waters—and whatever else the two want to quarrel over. That is why the international community has been content to accept the bottom line of the 1972 Simla Agreement, which was to contain India-Pakistan issues in a bilateral straitjacket. But the story changed in 1998 when we both went nuclear. Escalation into nuclear war, unintended or deliberate, is unacceptable to the world—for the good reason that exchanges of nuclear weapons cannot be contained within a bilateral capsule. It is thus that the terrorist assassination which sparked the First World War has been linked in global minds with the terrorist assassinations that occurred in Pahalgam 111 years later. The only way the world will let us stockpile nuclear weapons and delivery systems is if India and Pakistan, like the US and the Soviet Union, devise ways of continually engaging with each other so as to ensure the stockpiles are never used: “uninterrupted and uninterruptible” dialogue.

That is the lesson the world wants India and Pakistan to understand—that nuclear weapon powers cannot give themselves the luxury of describing “nuclear deterrence” as “nuclear blackmail” or holding that “talks and terror can’t go together”.

Mani Shankar Aiyar is a four-time MP, former diplomat, and author of several books.