The Modi Doctrine on Terror and War

AT 8PM ON MAY 12, PRIME MINISTER NARENDRA MODI SPELT out the contours of India’s new policy towards Pakistan. The address came 20 days after the killing of 26 Indian tourists at Pahalgam in Kashmir, after confirming they were non-Muslims, by jihadists backed by Pakistan. Break­ing with a past of platitudes on ‘strategic restraint’, Modi announced the end of engagement with Islamabad except on terror and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

Following high-precision strikes on Pakistan’s airbases using state-of-the-art BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles—this came just two days after India razed to the ground nine key terror-training schools, including in Muridke and Bahawalpur, in the first phase of Operation Sindoor—Modi announced the new normal: every act of terror would, from now on, be seen as an act of war and retaliated with “fierce and punitive action”. No more fence-sitting or twiddling of thumbs. No more candlelight tributes and lip-service to the resilience of Indians against Pakistani terror. There would be zero-tolerance hereon towards terror­ism perpetrated inside Indian territory and zero-tolerance for nuclear blackmail as well.

And no distinction would be made between “state and non-state actors”. No Line of Control (LoC), international border or nuclear threat could protect Islamabad from the full wrath of India and its people.

Again, on May 13, spending a morale-boosting five hours with Air Force personnel at the Adampur Air Force Station in Punjab, Modi dedicated the courageous action of the armed forces involved in Operation Sindoor to every mother, sister and daughter of the nation. “The terrorists had wiped out the sindoor from the foreheads of our sisters and our forces have avenged the humiliation,” he said. He also doubled down on Pakistan and said any outrage would be punished and India would hit back at a time and place of its choice. He emphasised that Operation Sindoor was no longer just one mission; it was now formally India’s policy towards Pakistan.

“You have increased India’s self-esteem, united the nation and elevated national pride to new heights,” Modi told the forces and added that the cry ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ is the voice of the nation that echoes not just on the battlefield but on every mission. “When our soldiers raise this cry, it shakes the enemy to the core.” In an emotionally charged speech, the prime min­ister asserted, “This is not just a slogan, it is an oath, the strength behind every mission that you undertake in the name of the country. Enemies hear this when our drones and missiles strike and the cry echoes in the skies.”

This was a historic shift in policy, one that forecast a full stop to the generational trauma suffered by Indians as a result of Is­lamabad’s use of cross-border terrorism as an intrinsic part of state policy. Apart from a firm resolve to retaliate decisively for any act of terror inside India by Pakistan, on New Delhi’s own terms, and a refusal to buckle under nuclear blackmail, Modi made it clear that India would no longer see terrorists and their state sponsors as distinct entities.

As part of Operation Sindoor, India’s security forces had launched precision strikes on eight key airbases across the length and breadth of Pakistan and two radar installations, in­cluding at the heart of the garrison city of Rawalpindi, the nerve centre of Pakistan’s military. Rawalpindi is home to the SPD forces, tasked with the protection of Pakistan’s tactical nuclear weapons. Indian planes neutralised strategic assets including drone warfare command centres and aircraft deployment hubs. Nur Khan, Rafiqui, Murid, Sukkur, Sialkot, Pasrur, Chunian, Sargodha, Skardu, Bholari, and Jacobabad all suffered the fury of Indian forces. Director General of Air Operations, Air Marshal AK Bharti, said at a press conference on May 11: “Operation Sindoor achieved its mission objectives as it decimated terror camps and dented the hostile neighbour’s air capabilities.”

Clearly, Modi’s strategic doctrine alters the fundamentals of New Delhi’s Pakistan policy, replacing the genetic code in the traditional terms of engagement—terms that were, for an inordinately long time, married to a warped understanding of strategic restraint.

Under its heavy burden, generations were schooled in the fa­talistic belief that India had to resign itself to Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. The threat of a nuclear conflagration was invoked at regular intervals although India knew for decades the exact locations from where such terror was deployed. But that infor­mation was reserved mostly for classified dossiers and for inter­actions with Pakistan-friendly foreign interlocutors.

The liberal brigade, meanwhile, had used the opportunity to travel across the border and relish kebabs, mushairas, listen to Abida Parveen’s Sufi music live, and mouth politically cor­rect platitudes. Inextricable ties to a toxic and faux historical narrative of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, moored to the objective of minimising communal tensions in a newly independent In­dia, too, laid the foundation for a Pakistan policy that leaned towards an ingrained and misplaced forbearance, even under great provocation.

Driven by his own conviction, the determination of his gov­ernment and the support of a restive Indian public for a forceful deterrent against further misadventures by Pakistan, Modi has now buried that forbearance and given carte blanche to the secu­rity forces to repel the forces of terrorism. A day after Islamabad violated a ceasefire agreement be­tween the DGMOs of India and Pakistan, Modi reportedly told officials attending a high-level security briefing, “Wahan se goli chalegi, toh yahan se gola chalega (If they fire bullets, we will respond with cannons).”

This is the face of New India and she demonstrated a supreme sense of self-confidence, strate­gic autonomy and sovereignty. New Delhi now has a different playbook. Outlining this, Modi stressed that there would be no talks with Islamabad as long as its terror sponsorship continued; there would be no trade along­side terror attacks; and that, as long as Pakistan’s terror strikes aimed for the blood of Indian citizens, there would be no water flowing down the Indus.

But this was not a radical transformation that happened overnight.

In 2016, after the Uri attack which killed 19 soldiers, Modi or­dered a cross-border strike on terror launchpads, just some 5km inside PoK. In 2019, after the Pulwama attack killed around 40 CRPF personnel, the Balakot (Khy­ber Pakhtunkhwa) airstrike by the Indian Air Force (IAF) was well in­side Pakistani territory. Both terror strikes were fomented by Pakistan. Each new Indian retaliation has moved further on the aggression curve, going beyond the scope and scale of both 2016 and 2019. Operation Sindoor has expanded from Pakistani Punjab to Malir Cantonment in Sindh and is now enshrined formally as India’s Paki­stan policy. India is now the only country that has undertaken precision strikes on installations inside a nuclear-armed nation. In fact, this was the first time that two fully nuclear-armed states engaged in conventional military operations.

The message to Islamabad is that every inch of Pakistani terri­tory—from the best-defended airbases to strategic assets—is now well within India’s reach, crosshairs, and political will to retaliate.

For a nation that has thrived using only nuclear blackmail and terrorism as state policy to battle India, fearing a crushing defeat in conventional warfare, Pakistan’s pride has taken a big hit, its air defence exposed as weak, its AWACS (Airborne Warn­ing and Control System) destroyed, its military infrastructure badly damaged.

The unalloyed support of the Ummah can no longer be taken for granted (countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE did not come to Pakistan’s rescue) and Pakistan is battered by immense debt, high inflation, unprecedented unemployment levels, mas­sive energy shortages and, once the Indus water flow slows, a badly hit agriculture and food sector, something no primarily agrarian country can risk.

At Adampur, Modi asserted that Pakistan’s audacity had been demolished. “Not just terror camps, but the enemy’s audacity has been blown to smithereens. The world witnessed the power behind your oath to defend our country.”

IN JULY 2009, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh held talks with his Pakistani counterpart Yusuf Raza Gilani at the Egyp­tian resort Sharm El-Sheikh. Instead of holding Islamabad accountable for the Mumbai attack of November 2008, a joint statement was issued at the end of the talks, delinking composite dialogue from Pakistan’s action on terror. Worse, Singh practi­cally accepted in the cunningly worded joint statement that India was meddling in Pakistan’s Baloch region. India had till then of­ficially dismissed any link until Singh signed the joint statement which indirectly legitimised Pakistan’s allegations. This opened the gateway for Pakistan to lay the blame at India’s door every time a Baloch nationalist caused trouble of any sort, including disrupting gas lines or kidnapping a Chinese engineer from the Gwadar port. Worst of all, it took the onus away from Islamabad as the key terror sponsor in South Asia.

Evidently, past Indian governments had responded to terror­ism without a systematic policy of addressing its external sources. Only one country has sponsored terrorism on Indian soil regu­larly: Pakistan. In the 1993 Mumbai bombings, in which 257 people were killed, gangster-turned-terrorist Dawood Ibrahim and his local proxies were involved. Dawood Ibrahim continues to live safely in Pakistan. The 2008 Mumbai attack, in which 173 people lost their lives, was planned and executed by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorists who had been trained in and dispatched from Pakistan. The list of terrorist activities in which Pakistan has been involved is considerably longer. After 26/11, India practically sued for peace even as New Delhi allegedly followed a policy of trying to “isolate Pakistan diplomatically”. That did not bring about any change in Pakistan’s behaviour; it continued to send terrorist squads to India with impunity.

The India of Modi’s era is clearly not the India of the 1990s. It has made it plain that strategic patience has its limits and it was tested brutally on April 22 at Pahalgam. The images released by the Army this time around have only strengthened Modi’s status as a protector. Those in charge of the government today are not those who ran the country in 2008 and history will no longer repeat itself. Indeed, India’s tri-services’ retalia­tion was so fierce and the political resolve behind it so forceful that Pakistan’s DGMO Major General Kashif Abdullah was compelled to place a direct call to his Indian counterpart Lt General Rajiv Ghai. This call came after Modi told US Vice President JD Vance, “If they [Pakistan] repeat their action, our retaliation will be far stronger.”

The success of the govern­ment’s new strategic doctrine towards Pakistan promptly saw Modi’s political rivals comparing the events of 2025 with Indira Gandhi in 1971. But they ignored the fact that Pakistan was not a nuclear power till well over two decades later. And that the Soviet Union had not splintered at the time and was behind India. Besides, the US, though with Pakistan, had an ongoing Vietnam problem.

Operation Sindoor resulted in the elimination of around a dozen high-value terrorists in Pakistan, including IC- 814 hijacker Yusuf Azhar, chief of Lashkar’s Muridke headquarters Abu Jundal aka Mudassar, and the son of the 2016 Nagrota attack plotter. The killing of 10 jihadist commanders was a severe setback to Pakistan’s military-terror nexus. Estimates suggest that over 140 terrorists were killed. The mission also tore apart the thin veil long separating the government in Islamabad, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and the terror proxies used by them. A senior official in the thick of the current developments emphasised, “We reduced 11 airbases to smoke and cinder in 90 minutes. We have clearly shown that we can penetrate wher­ever we want into Pakistan, while the maximum they can do is look up and shake their fists. We have rained the wrath of God on them,” he said.

Traditional terms of engagement with Pakistan were tied to the belief of erstwhile governments in the philosophy of Ganga- Jamuni tehzeeb. Sponsored by the establishment for decades—in an understanding of sorts between the ruling Congress and the left-liberal pantheon of leaders—NCERT texts, studied uncriti­cally by lakhs of students across India, whitewashed the persecu­tion of Hindus by Islamic invaders, choosing instead to deck the likes of Mughal Emperor Akbar in the garb of benevolence and syncretism. He was the initiator of the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb that became a revisionist touchstone for secularists after 1947.

Akbar, in these textbooks, could do little wrong towards Hin­dus; he found no mention except with a positive spin. Akbar thus was an emperor who espoused liberal values; was a champion of religious tolerance; and appreciated art, music and poetry with roots in both his place of origin and his vast ‘empire’; thus allow­ing both to flourish individually and together, equally impacting the Islamic and Hindu cultures of his time. This revisionist reading of historical wrongs in the name of Islam and with little respect for facts was extrapolated to modern times and laid the foundation for a Pakistan policy that preferred passivity and patience even under attack. It is only the current genera­tion, in the Modi era, that is witness­ing India and Indians shaking off a conditioning that began just before Independence with Congress’ sup­port for the Khilafat movement which sowed the seeds of minority appeasement at home and diffidence concerning Pakistan.

In August 1921, the Moplah Muslim community in the Mala­bar region of what is now Kerala proclaimed jihad against the British Empire, establishing a ‘Khilafat Kingdom’ there defined by Dar-ul-Islam. This led to the massacre of thousands of Hindus, rape of Hindu women, and grabbing of Hindu property as part of the religious war against kafirs. Forcible proselytisation fol­lowed. The Indian National Congress backed this agitation for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate under the deposed Turkish sultan who was seen as the head of the Muslim world.

Mahatma Gandhi, who deified Hindu-Muslim unity as the cornerstone of a strong and independent India, wrote: “Forcible conversions are horrible things, but Moplah bravery must com­mand admiration. The Malabaris are not fighting for the love of it. They are fighting for what they consider is their religion and in the manner they consider is religious” (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi). As far back as 1921, decades before Independence, Gandhi had already set up luminous signposts for India, of passivity and forbearance under provocation in the name of Islam.

The misplaced empathy in dealing with communal terror since before Independence led to the strangulation of the evi­dence of terror by Pakistan later whenever Indians were thrust into harm’s way by cross-border attacks. Over decades, this senti­ment was pushed deeper into the consciousness of the leaders of free India, spawning what became wokeism. Its grip is now lost for good.

2025 India-Pakistan warNarendra ModiOperation SindoorPahalgamPakistan Armyterror camps in Pakistan