Operation Sindoor and India’s Diplomatic Gamble: Isolation or Strategic Assertion?

Nidhi, what do you think is the purpose behind sending these delegations and what has been achieved?

Nidhi Razdan: As far as the purpose is concerned, a lot of it has to do with managing the narrative and the appearances—doing your propaganda in a sense. So it looked good on paper that you’re sending Members of Parliament (MPs) across party lines, projecting a united front that India is united when it comes to terrorism. And to a large extent, that is true—all of us got behind the government and condemned the Pulwama attack unequivocally.

But whether it actually achieved anything is the big question mark because I personally, having covered Indian diplomacy for 25 years now, have never seen India so diplomatically isolated as it is at the moment. And I feel that’s extremely unfortunate. We don’t seem to have very many friends in the international community who’ve been willing to stick their necks out, unequivocally condemning Pakistan for its state-sponsored terrorism against India.

The Americans are not only taking credit for the ceasefire repeatedly, with President Trump doing it, but they’re also actively wooing the Pakistanis. One does wonder what these delegations were able to achieve at the end of the day, if you don’t really have anyone standing in your corner, the way the Chinese do with the Pakistanis

Why do you think that is the case? The US General, the Central Command Chief, describes Pakistan as a phenomenal partner in counter-terrorism efforts. Does this reflect where we actually stand with the United States?

Nidhi Razdan: Part of the problem is that America leads the world when it comes to hypocritical foreign policy and double standards. When President Biden was doing his democracy summits, I laughed because the Americans are very happy to deal with autocrats and dictators, whether it’s the Saudis or the Venezuelans, when it suits them, and then pretend that they stand for democracy elsewhere. America is doing whatever it is doing for its own interest. That’s transactional diplomacy—it’s not based on ideology or morality, it’s based on what can benefit your country at that point.

The lesson for India is that we’re on our own. We have a legitimate grievance against Pakistan and what it has done to this country for decades, bleeding us through state-sponsored terrorism. But we’re not going to be able to depend on the international community to have our backs when it comes to the crunch.

Angsuman, in 1999, India did not go up the escalation ladder. In 2008, when India suffered from the attacks in Bombay, many options available to Prime Minister Modi today were also available to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, but we didn’t use them—it won us international support. On this occasion, we have evidence of terrorism emanating from Pakistan, but we chose to exercise a conventional response to a terrorist strike. Do you think that’s what has isolated us?

Angshuman Choudhury: What happened this time is like a logical conclusion from what we have been seeing in the last few years—the 2019 surgical strike after Uri, or the Balakot airstrike. The Modi government has tried to put together this doctrine of highly interventionist and bellicose crossing the border every time there’s a Pakistan-sponsored militant attack. That’s why it’s pushed itself into this strategic corner from where it always has to escalate.

Because this time the attack in Pulwama was against civilian targets, there was an added strategic burden on the Modi government to escalate. That is one of the reasons why the Modi government chose to send these delegations outside because it knew it had climbed up the escalation ladder in a way that it hadn’t before. There was a sudden alarm throughout the world that this was going to spiral into a wider South Asia-wide conflict.

But it also comes back to the question—did the Modi government send these delegations because the Indian position was not self-evident? If it wasn’t self-evident, then why? Did the government not invest enough diplomatic assets in the last few years making India’s position on Pakistan-sponsored terrorism evident to the world? Did India lose that critical time that now it had to send delegations outside to almost combatively defend its diplomatic position?

What is your sense of the feedback? These MPs were asked questions, including about India’s silence on Palestine. The world has always believed, especially after Osama bin Laden was found in Abbottabad, that Pakistan sponsors terrorism. So, what is the need to corner Pakistan on terror when these countries are saying they have relations with Pakistan and have to deal with them too?

Angshuman Choudhury: That is the reality of geopolitics—it’s not a zero-sum game where the world believes this country is good and that country is evil. Every country, particularly the West, operates on hard-nosed calculation of strategic interests. The West has had a very strong strategic relationship with Pakistan for decades. Even the Osama incident could not derail that relationship. Initially, the West saw Pakistan as a partner in counterterrorism, and now the US sees Pakistan as a pivot in renewed geopolitical competition against China.

India has to realise that this constant, obsessive attempt to corner Pakistan at the global stage is counterproductive for India’s interests. It distracts from issues that India can really focus on.

Avinash Kumar asks: How did these multi-party delegations strengthen India’s stand against Pakistan-funded terrorism?

Nidhi Razdan: I want to slightly disagree with Angsuman on India obsessing over Pakistan internationally. In the last few years, India has been far less obsessed with Pakistan, to the point where we barely have a relationship with the neighbouring country. This terror attack was a huge inflexion point. While geopolitics is rooted in pragmatism, it’s also important to make Pakistan accountable for state-sponsored terrorism. Whether that has to be done militarily, we can disagree, but whether it is at the Financial Action Task Force, an IMF loan, etc.

Today, Pakistan is chairing the United Nations Security Council Taliban Sanctions Committee and is vice chairman of the Counterterrorism Committee. It makes the United Nations a joke, frankly. The West looks conveniently the other way because, as long as the Pakistanis are dealing with the TTP and groups that affect them, they’re okay with it. But we know Hafiz Saeed and Masood Azhar have sanctuaries within Pakistan, and there is no accountability for that.

My sense was that the moment India went from striking terror camps across the border to hitting military targets, this became less about Pulwama and more an India-Pakistan issue—nuclear war, all the problem issues that the West sees. It rang alarm bells around the world. Immediately, we got hyphenated with Pakistan again. So the focus shifted away from Pulwama and became about India and Pakistan.

To answer the question, I don’t know whether sending these multi-party delegations strengthened anything. Then what was your diplomacy doing all these years? Why did you have to give an explanation?

Angsuman, we have invested so much in the US relationship, whether Congress or the BJP, and then you see a US general come out and say this. Does that reflect that we have invested in the wrong place?

Angshuman Choudhury: The point I had made was specifically about isolating Pakistan versus holding Pakistan accountable, which is a goal India should focus on. My argument was that this obsession over isolating Pakistan distracts us from other, more effective ways to hold Pakistan accountable. The reality of geopolitics is such that it’ll be extremely difficult for India to isolate Pakistan from the global system.

General Michael Kurilla and Paul Kapur, who is soon going to be the Trump administration’s South Asia hand, the comments they have made show the resilience of the US-Pakistan relationship, which seems to be becoming even stronger under the Trump administration, likely because of American interests to counterbalance the Chinese presence in Pakistan. The thinking in DC right now is that we’ve got to work with Pakistan to make sure that China doesn’t have a complete foothold in that part of the world.

New Delhi should recognise these inevitable geopolitical realities and work with those rather than ignoring and bypassing those realities.

Nidhi, these delegations that have travelled—there was hand-wringing between the Congress and the BJP on their constitution. Do you think this detracted from the purpose, and is the Modi government politically outmaneuvering the opposition domestically

Nidhi Razdan: Politically there are two parts to this. It’s ironic that a political party that has an aversion towards the minority community, Muslims, had to depend on Asaduddin Owaisi to be one of those leading from the front to speak for India. It’s all very well to project a united face to the world politically and religiously, but we need to reflect on how we’re treating our own people at home.

On the composition itself, I actually thought this was a great opportunity for the Congress to take a march on the BJP on the nationalism card. In the beginning, the way they handled their reaction to Sindoor was brilliant because they didn’t fall into the 2019 Balakot trap. They didn’t question the impact of the strikes. But the moment Shashi Tharoor became the face of one of these delegations, it exploded. It exposed the weaknesses, the divisions within the Congress. It made the Congress look petty and petulant, and they started training their guns on Tharoor instead of focusing on what the mission should have been.

The TMC [Trinamool Congress] was smarter—they got their way, they got their nominee, and Abhishek Banerjee’s speech in Japan was widely circulated and praised even by the ruling party. It says something that it is your opposition MPs who had some of the strongest arguments on Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in these delegations. Politically, it’s played well for the BJP and Modi because it’s shifted the focus away from the security failures in Pulwama and why this happened at all in the first place.

We saw Prime Minister Modi meeting all the delegation members upon their return but he did not meet any all-party leaders himself, though Rajnath Singh presided over those meetings. Why do you think that’s the case? Is he trying to score a political point?

Angshuman Choudhury: There is a sense that he does not tend to micromanage things. He would be there as a big figure, as a ritualistic presence in the big meetings. When there’s an all-party meeting, which is well-photographed, well-publicized—I was looking at the news cycle after he met the all-party delegation, and the Operation Sindoor news cycle was inundated by that meeting. Almost across the board, it was just the Prime Minister’s meeting with the all-party squad as if nothing else had happened. The details of the meetings with the foreign delegations remain sketchy.

The Prime Minister knows very well how to play the nationalism card. He also knows how to place himself in the media cycle in a very strategic manner. By outsourcing the smaller meetings to subordinates like the Defence Minister, he tries to give the sense that the larger system is involved and that he would be reserved only for the grander engagements

Prasad Iyer asks: Does India need to act like Israel in future to deter terrorist attacks?

Angshuman Choudhury: I have written an entire piece on this after charges of extrajudicial assassinations by India that Canada levelled. I argued that this is a strategy that India should not follow. Israel’s counter-insurgency doctrine is based largely on preemptive strikes and taking the enemy out before it can strike you. The Mossad style is that you take out your enemies abroad on foreign soil before they can take you out at home.

Israel has certain geopolitical leverage—most importantly, the backing of the US-led Western Alliance, which India does not have. So it’s very dangerous and a slippery slope for India to do things in the style of Israel. More importantly, the context of India-Pakistan is very different. Pakistan has a major military power backing it in the region, which is China, with which India shares a disputed border and a very hot border dispute at the moment. It would be extremely counterproductive for India to adopt the Israeli International Security Doctrine.

Nidhi, we’ve seen individuals like Masood Azhar and Hafiz Saeed who are known for directing terrorist operations against India. We’ve also seen our own prime minister say India is not a democracy, it’s a Hindu Rashtra. Does this not take away from the deniability of covert actions?

Nidhi Razdan: That’s the nature of the BJP’s politics. Part of the problem that we are seeing today with our challenges on the foreign policy front is that the political rhetoric that the BJP has wound itself up in on Pakistan and terrorism is what led to the kind of escalation we saw. We now have a new threshold, a new template in how we deal with terror attacks.

When we get caught up in our own political rhetoric, when the Prime Minister and the Government of India say that future terror attacks will immediately involve retaliation, what is the threshold of that? Is it Pulwama style? If two security men are shot and killed, are you going to go and attack Pakistani military bases? We are in a constant state of escalation now. The political rhetoric is part of the problem.

Because you did the surgical strikes, you made a big deal out of that, and you made a big deal out of these operations. So now, when something awful has happened, you have to be seen to be acting, if nothing else, to be seen to be retaliating. If you’re serious about covert operations, you shouldn’t really be saying, Ki ghar ke ghus ke marenge, because then you are negating the whole idea of why you’re doing these covert operations. With politics getting mixed up in all of this, it’s complicated.

Rohan Bende asks: Why did the delegations prioritise meetings with lawmakers, think tanks and diaspora communities over direct engagement with senior government officials?

I don’t think that was a bad idea because I think, government-to-government to government, one hopes that we do have contact with these countries. But it’s very important to engage with other opinions in another country, through think tanks and other lawmakers, opposition leaders, those who can influence opinion, who have a say, who are not within the government framework. I think that was actually a smart move by India, not just to confine it to government to government level.

Aftab Abdul Kader asks: How would this new normal avert India from its earlier notions of peace diplomacy?

Angshuman Choudhury: It seems to be the case that India is now in a constant state of escalation. And where is the threshold? What decides what kind of military action India is going to take now, and at what point? This is actually a contradiction if you zoom out and look at it, because we have the Prime Minister going around the world, especially in the Ukraine-Russia context, talking about peace, saying things like, this is not an era of war, and proposing peace diplomacy and conflict mediation between Russia and Ukraine.

During the G20, we saw this narrative that India is a force for good in the world. This new normal, which is a constant state of war, almost does a disservice to that peace-centric narrative that the Modi government itself has tried to build over the last few years. And it could come back to haunt us in the sense that if India chooses to remain at a constant state of war or combat in its region, then what moral stand does it have to go around the world, sermonizing about peace and conflict mediation? It does a disservice to India’s Nehruvian legacy of peace diplomacy, and not in a good way.

Vin Part asks: Should India involve the West or resolve issues with Pakistan more efficiently through bilateral means?

You know this as well as I do—we’ve covered the India-Pakistan saga for decades. I’ve always been someone who has batted for dialogue and finding some kind of resolution sitting across the table rather than ghar ki ghus ke marna and all that. But I have to ask this question today. What is the point? If you talk to a civilian government in Pakistan, that government is not the one that’s really calling the shots.

We have had contact with the Pakistani army and the army chief in the past. To that extent, it did help, particularly with the ceasefire along the line of control. That basic level of engagement needs to remain even now. But when you talk about an India-Pakistan dialogue today, who are you going to talk to and what is it going to resolve? You have an army chief in Pakistan today who is so rabid and rabidly anti-India and extremely reckless that I don’t know where this would go.

I don’t think involving the West—as I said earlier, we’re on our own. The question is, is there any other way that we can make Pakistan accountable, whether it is the Indus Waters Treaty, or renegotiating that, probably is the biggest weapon that we have right now. But in the long run, at this point, I’m a little more pessimistic about even a bilateral dialogue with Pakistan.

What happens next to Operation Sindoor? Is it right to take aggressive steps against the neighbor? How does India maintain a good relationship with the neighbor after this?

Angshuman Choudhury: The other day, I was in this meeting where we were lamenting the almost complete disappearance of India-Pakistan track twos or track 1.5s, which used to be a thing earlier—the Nimrata dialogue, the Chao Phraya dialogue. Those things seem to have disappeared in the last few years. This is quite regrettable. In the current strategic context of India-Pakistan, track 2s and track 1.5s, which would include behind closed-door discussions, reviving them is extremely important to reset this relationship.

Ultimately, we cannot wish away Pakistan. They are our neighbours. It’s a geographical fact. We cannot delete Pakistan from the region. So we have to deal with Pakistan in some way. And it cannot happen by this constant state of combat and anxiety. The first consequence of any conflict is borne by the people who live along this border. So we have to also think about them, on both sides of the border. To reset this relationship, we have to be audacious and imaginative in the longer term.

The neighbour is killing your own citizens. The neighbour should also have some shame and a sense of responsibility about what it is doing. The ball can’t only be in India’s court. We need to take a step back and look at our own security failures. It shouldn’t have happened in the first place. This is a major tourist destination. There were reports of an imminent attack, probably they thought in Srinagar or in some hotel. But Pulwama is a major tourist destination. Pulwama town was well protected, this place was not.

At some point, we have to ask questions. We have to shift the focus and look inwards. Enough time has passed for us. That grace period is over, where we can turn the lens a little inwards and say, okay, we messed up. We have to make sure this doesn’t happen again. And how do we do that? What went wrong? Fix the gaps. There has to be accountability, but then that is another dirty word in the last 10-11 years.

Shwetanshu Kumar asks: India has isolated itself in its neighbourhood with Pakistan, China, and Yunus in Bangladesh. India cannot count on the support of the West while Russia is at war itself. What would India do if things go south after another terrorist attack?

Angshuman Choudhury: It’s a very ominous question because one thing that was made amply clear this time was that I don’t think India has any major military backer to rely on. If a future terrorist attack leads to far greater escalation and spillover than we have seen this time, then probably India would be in trouble. Pakistan does seem to have a major military backer in China. There is evidence to show that China provided active intelligence to Pakistan during the escalation this time, including aerial reconnaissance and satellite imagery. I don’t think India received that level of intelligence from its strategic partners or allies. Least of all, its Quad partners.

In the last few years, we have heard a lot about this multilateral diplomacy, plurilateral diplomacy, and Indo-Pacific diplomacy that India has been doing. The Quad has been talked about so much that India has this kind of new strategic umbrella. But ultimately, when we talk about international diplomacy and security, it boils down to this question: What happens when there’s a shooting war? Who will stand with you when there’s a shooting war? The prospects that we have seen during Operation Sindoor are bleak in that sense.

India is still not a great power in the sense of the United States or China. It’s an aspirational great power which puts it in a very awkward in-between spot. The position that the Modi government finds itself in geopolitically is very delicate. It’s not an easy position to navigate. But Operation Sindoor should have very critical lessons for the government—next time it happens, what are the security guarantees that India has to protect itself?

Pranshu Sharma asks: What role has the Indian and international media played in shaping the narrative around Operation Sindoor?

I am embarrassed that I once worked in the Indian broadcast space because it’s a joke. What these people on television don’t realise is that when you do this kind of hysterical, non-factual, blatantly false coverage of something like this, you are hurting India’s case in the international community. When the Indian media lies and puts out propaganda, unverified information, takes videos from past conflicts and passes them off as Indian, you hurt the credibility of your profession, yourself and your country’s case to the world.

As far as the international media is concerned, a lot of the Western press has a very narrow view with which it looks at India and India-Pakistan relations. The Pakistanis are very good at maintaining relations with the media. They’re really good with the press and how they communicate their narrative. We realised that much later. But there is a certain tinted veil with which the Western media looks at India, which doesn’t necessarily make their reporting helpful.

The Modi government has been very tough with some international media representatives—cancelling visas, raiding BBC offices. This doesn’t help you win friends.

Nidhi Razdan: It doesn’t at all. There is a reason why we rank so badly in the press freedom index. The government may say it doesn’t care, but it’s been lobbying for years to get that ranking up. But the moment you raid media offices—what happened to NDTV—it doesn’t help, it doesn’t give you any credibility. You may disagree with how the New York Times or the Washington Post covers India, but that doesn’t mean you go and raid them. You have to put forward your case with evidence, and you have to counter that narrative. But the domestic Indian media is not helping India’s case at all. In fact, it is hurting it.

Soham Day asks: Is America a dependable ally?

Angshuman Choudhury: There is a very old saying that America doesn’t have friends, only allies. The short answer is this: no, America is not a dependable ally for India. For the US, India serves a very specific purpose at the moment, which is a strategic bulwark against China. As long as India is ready to serve that purpose, America will continue to entertain Delhi from its own spectrum of narrow interests. India also offers this huge market, including consumer market for American goods, American military hardware.

In that sense, there is this very narrow tunnel vision way in which Washington looks at India, and India has to be conscious of that. The United States not just refused to clearly stand with India during Operation Sindoor, forget about providing direct military aid or intelligence, but also framed the India-Pakistan dispute as some kind of ridiculous 5,000-year or generational dispute. If that is the framing, then on this particular issue of India-Pakistan, I don’t think India can rely on the US.

Despite all the energy after Modi’s visit to the United States last year and the quadrilateral security dialogue framework, we didn’t see any kind of clear support for India’s position when it mattered the most.

Harshit Roy asks: In this era, any relation is based on merit. Nobody is an all-weather friend. Does India need to carve out its own policy?

Nidhi Razdan: That’s exactly what I was saying—the only one who seems to have an all-weather friend, unfortunately, is Pakistan, and that’s China, who’s flanking us on the other side of the border. That is a huge disadvantage to us. But we’re on our own. We are on our own. Even the Russians are not firmly in our corner.

Instead of having this sort of bombastic foreign policy that is often lecturing the world on how it should look at India, go and make your case quietly in various capitals. Give them the evidence. Do it quietly, do it behind the scenes. Work the phones that way. And at the same time, just be prepared to know that the next time something happens, you’re on your own and that’s how it’s going to be.

Angshuman Choudhury: One thing that we have heard from the Modi government’s foreign policy apparatus is this term repeated ad nauseam: strategic autonomy, which you could say is a refashioning of Nehruvian non-alignment. But it looks like non-alignment but it is far from what non-alignment was, which was an independent foreign policy but with a strong set of principles backing it.

On the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, our Foreign Minister clearly said that it went against our principles to support the American invasion. There was a time when Delhi used to talk about morality and principles while maintaining this policy of not aligning with any bloc. On strategic autonomy, we have been told that we have an independent foreign policy, but we also have these contradictory voices which say we need to ally stronger with the United States now.

Is there a place for principle in foreign policy?

Nidhi Razdan: I wish there was, because it’s actually very disappointing when India can’t even vote for a ceasefire in Gaza. Unfortunately, the realities of geopolitics are such today that that’s not the case anymore. I don’t think there is much place for morality in international politics and international diplomacy any longer.

Avinash Kumar asks: How should India diplomatically confront the emerging China-Pakistan-Bangladesh alliance within South Asian geopolitics?

Angshuman Choudhury: This language of confrontation has to be diversified, if not changed entirely. We don’t need to confront everything, but we need to work around these things. We have to remember that there are governments and there are people. One of the strategic mistakes that India made in Bangladesh was that it put all its eggs in one basket. For the longest time, India put all its eggs in the Awami League basket. In the process, it alienated large sections of the civil society and the younger population who were very disenchanted with the Sheikh Hasina government because of its authoritarian attitudes.

When things hit the roof last year, India was left in the lurch. A good way to confront this alliance would be to preempt and diversify our relationships across the board in these countries. These are three countries we share long borders with, and we can’t wish them away.

Why do you think not a single delegation was sent to any South Asian country? Why not even to Nepal or Sri Lanka?

Nidhi Razdan: I don’t know. That is a thought that struck me, that one of the things that we needed to do was to get support in our own neighbourhood, and we didn’t. I don’t know whether that’s because our relationship in the neighbourhood with all our neighbours is pretty bad. Did we not see it fit to reach out to them because the relationship isn’t at its best? This mystifies me.

Angshuman Choudhury: Nepal lost one of its citizens in the Pulwama attack. It didn’t say anything about Operation Sindoor, particularly. Since 2014, we have been hearing about the neighbourhood first policy, that India will focus on the neighbourhood, and the Modi government even tried to revive SAARC. But it actually shows a larger tendency within this government, which is that it has tended to take the neighbourhood for granted—that come what may, it will fall in line because we are the largest power economically, militarily in South Asia.

But the reality is that the Chinese have made very significant and worrying inroads into the neighbourhood and have invested a lot of diplomatic capital in influence operations with parties, civil society, and think tanks in India’s neighbourhood, which I feel India has not done. India used to have excellent track-two level relationships with civil societies in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka.

Today, the relationship looks bad with all of them. I don’t know why India did not send any delegation to the neighbourhood despite committing to a neighbourhood first policy. It should have.

Just because a country doesn’t like you or you have difficult relations with them, all the more reason to send delegations to these countries to explain your point of view. There was no harm in even sending a delegation to Bangladesh if they would listen to us. Thank you so much for joining us, Nidhi and Angsuman.