Hard Power at Play

INDIA HAS LONG prided itself on soft power: yoga, spiritualism, music, film, fashion and food. An inflection point was reached on May 7, 2025, when in an exhibition of hard military power Operation Sindoor was launched.

Hard power has several dimensions. Proactive military action is one. Tough global diplomacy is another. Holding on to red lines on trade with the US, on the Dalai Lama with China, and on the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) with Pakistan are yet others.

India has shed its Nehruvian self-effacement. In that era, India succumbed to the World Bank-mandated IWT signed in 1960. The treaty favoured Pakistan, a country that had long sold itself to the US and sought its pound of flesh in the form of an unequal IWT through the US-controlled World Bank.

India’s enemies knew it was a soft touch. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a canny zamindari prime minister, charmed, cajoled and bullied Indira Gandhi into releasing 93,000 Pakistani prisoners of war (PoWs) in 1972 following Pakistan’s military defeat against India and the liberation of Bangladesh.

What did India get in return? Nothing. Instead, magnanimous India gave Pakistan back territory across Punjab, Sindh, Baltistan, PoK and Kartarpur Sahib it had occupied in the 1971 war. It was classic soft power behaviour.

When India was attacked relentlessly by Pakistan-sponsored terrorists in Jammu & Kashmir, driving lakhs of Kashmiri Pandits from their ancestral land, India did nothing.

In November 2008, when Pakistani terrorists attacked several targets in Mumbai for over three days, killing 166 people, the Manmohan Singh government did nothing except send dossiers to Islamabad. This was the epitome of soft power.

The Indian government was applauded in Washington for showing restraint. US President George W Bush did not dwell on how America had acted seven years ago in September 2001 when terrorists flew passenger planes into New York’s Twin Towers and near Washington’s Pentagon. America showed how hard powers react: it custom-built one of the world’s most brutal prisons, Guantanamo Bay, to torture and punish those behind the 9/11 attack. It spent 20 years targeting and killing them in Afghanistan.

India did nothing for 17 years after the 26/11 terror attack on Mumbai in November 2008 till April 2025 when it secured the extradition from the US of key plotter Tahawwur Rana. In his confessional statement last month to the National Investigation Agency (NIA), Rana confirmed that he worked on the November 2008 Mumbai attack in close coordination with Pakistan’s ISI and terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

From Nehru to Manmohan Singh, Indian prime ministers preferred careful diplomacy to a display of hard military power. Pakistani terror strikes were met with Aman Ki Asha and back-channel talks designed to appease, not deter. It didn’t work. Terror attacks continued. Noting India’s timid response, China stepped up its aggression across the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

Prime Minister Narendra Modi initially followed the old Nehruvian soft policy. He met Chinese President Xi Jinping in three informal summits between 2014 and 2019. India got Galwan Valley in return in 2020. Modi also tried diplomacy with Pakistan, inviting Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to his inauguration in 2014 and then dropping in unannounced in Lahore on Sharif’s birthday in December 2015.

India got Pathankot in reply.

The penny finally dropped. Uri was followed by a surgical strike across the LoC. Pulwama was met with airstrikes on Balakot deep inside Pakistan. But it was only after Pahalgam in April 2025 that India’s gradual transformation into a hard power was manifest. India for the first time targeted the Pakistani military, not just terrorist camps, in response to a terror strike.

The message was heard globally. India would not only be the world’s third-largest economy by 2027. It would be a power with the ability and the intent to hit the enemy in its military heartland.

India’s transformation from a soft power to a hard power has created a decisive shift in the balance of both regional power and global perception. As John Spencer, executive director of the Urban Warfare Institute, wrote on July 8: “I’ve just returned from an extremely informative trip to India. At the center of many conversations was Operation Sindoor. Leaders described it not just as a counterterror operation, but as a strategic turning point. The operation demonstrated India’s shift from a reactive posture to a proactive, precision-oriented doctrine.”

Defence doctrineIndia-PakistanJawaharlal NehruManmohan SinghNarendra ModiOperation Sindoor