India is fundamentally rewriting the rules of engagement with Pakistan. In response to high-casualty terrorist attacks – most recently the 2025 Pahalgam massacre that triggered Operation Sindoor – New Delhi has adopted a doctrine of calibrated military retaliation designed to operate below the nuclear threshold. By asserting that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal no longer provides blanket immunity for cross-border terrorism, India is discarding old constraints and demonstrating it has the political will and military capability to respond to terrorist attacks traced back to the Pakistani state.
This evolution is no longer implied – it has now been formalized. In a landmark speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi outlined India’s updated national security doctrine, emphasizing that future terrorist attacks will be met with swift and forceful retaliation, executed on India’s terms. The policy eliminates the distinction between terrorist actors and the states that provide them safe haven, signaling a shift toward holding state sponsors directly accountable. This affirms what New Delhi has long argued: that Pakistan’s deep state is not merely permissive of proxy groups – it is complicit.
Modi also rejected any strategic utility in Pakistan’s nuclear signaling, making clear that such threats will not deter India from targeting terrorist infrastructure. This codifies India’s willingness to act across the Line of Control and beyond it regardless of nuclear posturing from Islamabad.
This is not recklessness disguised as resolve. It is a deliberate and now officially articulated doctrine to impose costs without triggering full-scale war. India’s limited strikes – air and ground – are designed to signal that acts of terror will have consequences, even if those consequences stop short of a general war. In doing so, India is challenging a long-held assumption in Western policy circles: that any clash between nuclear-armed rivals in South Asia will inevitably spiral into catastrophe.
India is pursuing a doctrine of graduated escalation, designed not to coerce immediate behavioral change in Pakistan, but to inflict reputational damage and raise the cost of strategic miscalculation. This is a contest of resolve and time. New Delhi’s repeated, measured use of force aims to create a new equilibrium in which Pakistan can no longer act with impunity under the guise of plausible deniability.
For decades, Pakistan’s military-intelligence apparatus has nurtured and enabled a spectrum of anti-India terrorist groups. From the 1999 Kargil conflict, 2001 assault on the Indian parliament, 2008 Mumbai attack, 2016 Pathankot airbase strike, 2019 Pulwama bombing, and the 2025 Pahalgam attack, a consistent pattern emerges: terror is exported across the border, and official culpability is denied. This is the behavior of a state that wants all the rights but none of the responsibilities of being a sovereign state – Pakistan claims victimhood internationally while actively cultivating instability regionally.
India’s strategic communication is deliberate and leverages this decay of Pakistan’s credibility. It presents its limited retaliatory strikes not as acts of escalation, but as defensive moves within the bounds of proportionality – an effort to contain, not inflame. By contrast, Pakistan’s habitual denials are losing persuasive power – especially after Osama bin Laden was found living undisturbed near a major military base in Abbottabad.
Critically, this contest is not fundamentally about Kashmir. That claim, often echoed by outside observers, misreads the strategic picture. Kashmir is a symptom, not a root cause. Pakistan’s posture toward India is not just territorial – it is ideological. The Pakistani military establishment has built a national narrative around resisting India’s rise, viewing New Delhi not as a rival to negotiate with, but as an enemy to be checked, even if that means using violent terrorist groups.
That worldview will not be undone by diplomatic progress in Kashmir. It is anchored in a broader ideological rivalry between two nations with starkly different visions about themselves – one pluralist and secular, the other constructed around a religious identity whose narrative is built on opposition to its neighbor. Pakistan is not at peace with itself, so it cannot be at peace with others. Its internal contradictions – between democratic aspirations and military dominance, between modernity and religious fundamentalism – are projected outward in the form of strategic hostility toward India. Proxy warfare, in this context, is not merely a tool of misguided statecraft; it is a foundational element of Pakistan’s ideological self-expression.
But Pakistan does not operate in isolation. China’s long-standing strategic backing – from covert nuclear assistance to the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) – has emboldened Islamabad. That support has now moved into the operational realm. In the latest hostilities, Pakistan deployed Chinese-origin drones and J-10 fighter aircraft against Indian forces. This marked the first time modern Chinese platforms were used in a conventional engagement against a peer military. While Beijing did not intervene directly, it emerged as a beneficiary – watching closely, extracting data, and drawing operational lessons around its platforms’ performance under real combat stress, the use of uncrewed systems, multidomain coordination, and information operations.
Although constrained in how much it could learn, Beijing gained something perhaps more useful – a perception victory. The idea that Chinese weapons stood toe-to-toe with Western platforms operated by India has become a powerful narrative for Chinese domestic and export audiences. While Beijing did not publicly endorse the use of its weapon systems in Pakistan’s strikes, it allowed domestic narratives to celebrate their battlefield performance. Yet the test was not without risk. Pakistan’s Chinese-supplied air defenses, despite advanced warning and a two-week lead time, failed to prevent multiple Indian strikes, raising questions about their reliability.
Beijing’s support also comes with limits. China views Pakistan as a useful partner, but not as a cause to be entangled with. The 2020 Galwan Valley clash served as a stark reminder that India is capable of confronting China militarily – and willing to absorb costs in doing so.
China’s strategic calculus is clear. It seeks to constrain India’s rise, not provoke a war that would accelerate New Delhi’s tilt toward Washington and its allies. Beijing benefits from controlled tension in the region, not one that slips into a full-blown conflict. While Pakistan sees strategic depth in its relationship with China, Beijing is careful to avoid inheriting strategic liabilities.
The net result is a more volatile but also more balanced deterrence environment. India’s strategy does not aim to ignite conflict – it seeks to draw clear thresholds, enforced through measured retaliation, diplomatic assertiveness, and reputational costs. Crucially, India is not trying to reform Pakistan’s behavior. Rather, it is institutionalizing retaliation as the cost of provocation. Deterrence, in this context, has not collapsed; it is adapting to new realities and shifting to a new equilibrium.
This adaptation requires recognition from all actors, especially in Islamabad and Beijing. Pakistan must rethink its cost-benefit calculus for proxy warfare. China must acknowledge that excessive support for Pakistani adventurism could backfire by hardening India’s alignment with the U.S.-led Indo-Pacific partners as well as harm its bilateral ties with New Delhi.
The nuclear dyad between India and Pakistan is shaped as much by perceptions as by capability. India’s limited responses reflect a shift toward imposing costs without triggering general war, while Pakistan continues to rely on its nuclear umbrella to shield proxy aggression. Yet behind this dynamic lies a deeper challenge, as Pakistan’s Army Chief General Asim Munir’s statements emphasized. His comments reaffirming the two-nation theory and the supposedly irreconcilable differences between Hindus and Muslims served as a stark reminder of the ideological chasm that fuels Pakistan’s enduring hostility toward India. So long as that worldview persists, Pakistan’s aggression will remain hardwired into its policy.
Deterrence has shifted, creating a space for limited conflict to become normalized under the nuclear threshold. In this evolving dynamic, India is no longer waiting to be provoked without consequence. This is the new normal: a posture of controlled escalation under a nuclear overhang – neither war nor peace, but deterrence by resolve.
