The New Normal

AS THE CROW flies, Jacobabad in Pakistan’s Sindh is 400km from Longewala in Rajasthan, a fair distance from the border. It is an important base for the Pakistan Air Force’s (PAF) forward operations, its inland location seen to provide more time to detect an incoming attack. But Jacobabad’s location—it sits on the provincial border with Balo­chistan—offered little protection against BrahMos missiles that rained on the base early on May 10. Any doubts about the results were settled soon enough. A Bengaluru-based global intelligence and defence company, Kawa Space, released a series of high-reso­lution images, laying bare the full extent of the damage to hangars at the base. The PAF could consider operating Jacobabad’s usual complement of Chinese-made J-17s and F-16 Falcons only at its peril.

Detailed briefings jointly addressed by Indian armed forces officers Colonel Sofiya Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh alongside Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri pro­vided real-time information on Indian attacks in retaliation for Pakistan’s attempts to target dozens of military and civilian loca­tions all along the western border on May 8 and 9. India’s claims were swiftly established by satellite imagery released by Kawa Space that showed the damage to airbases and radars that stripped Pakistan of essential elements of its air defence against Indian missile, drone and fighter attacks. Kawa Space’s analysis, some of it carried out in collaboration with another Bengaluru-based startup, Kepler Aerospace, cut through Pakistani propaganda. The satellite imagery provided by the companies, set up as recently as 2018 and 2019, delivered critical evidence even as the joint defence ministry-foreign service briefings proved to be a successful inno­vation, effectively projecting India’s standpoint that its actions were justified, pin-pointed and non-escalatory.

The open-source intelligence was a game changer. The im­ages with geographical coordinates and date and time stamps convinced international experts that Pakistan’s claims that India had failed to hit targets were incorrect. The briefings by the Paki­stan military claiming to have struck Indian Air Force (IAF) bases and missile batteries fell flat as no corresponding proof could be produced that remotely matched the images of damaged PAF bases flooding the internet. “Kawa Space is a global intelligence and defence space company. Our core product is what we call ‘Operating System for Strategic Deterrence’—a platform which ingests electronic intelligence and other satellite data to give more information about a scenario, an event, a location or a hypotheti­cal—land, oceans or air. Satellite data can be satellite imagery, SAR (synthetic aperture radar), AIS (Automatic Identification Systems), ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast) or any kind,” Kawa Space founder Kris Nair told Open. He added that the very high-resolution imagery that provides visual con­firmation of the impact of Indian attacks does not involve any special programs or tools. While Nair did not comment on assets and methods, the analysis and use of systems for surveillance and tracking position, course and speed of aviation and maritime vectors generated irrefutable proof of Indian strikes in Pakistan.

The quick display of proof of Indian attacks, according to analysts, helped establish the credibility of India’s escalation management. It demonstrated that India was responding to Pakistani actions in a measured manner. After the May 7 Indian hits on Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Hizbul Mujahideen camps and bases, Pakistan responded by targeting as many as 36 Indian military bases and some civil­ian areas. It caused civilian deaths but could not penetrate the defences of military establishments. The Indian response was to move from targeting terrorist bases to Pakistani military instal­lations, choosing to avoid civilian zones.

When Pakistan, desperate to score just a few ‘hits’ that would allow it to claim revenge for the humiliating Indian attacks, un­leashed another barrage of drone attacks and artillery fire, the IAF struck eight PAF bases and a few radar stations with deadly accuracy on May 10, setting the stage for a ceasefire later in the day. “India kept the door open for Pakistan right throughout. But it also seems clear that when the Americans contacted India, it was put across that the call must come from the Pakistan army’s Director General of Military Operations (DGMO). Throughout, the response was calibrated and India struck back with greater force at a similar set of targets Pakistan was seeking to hit, except we did not strike civilian areas,” former diplomat Dilip Sinha, who served in Pakistan and was India’s ambassador and perma­nent representative to the United Nations in Geneva, told Open.

The careful adherence to a publicly defined set of objectives and the use of military power to dominate the escalation ma­trix—responding to Pakistani aggression with punishing blows but not letting the conflict spill into all-out war—created room for the cessation of hostilities. But it also marked a fundamental shift in India’s policy that prioritised restraint. “There were actions that were seen as ‘not done’ like rethinking the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) despite Pakistan refusing to acknowledge the good-faith aspects of the pact. Similarly, cross-border action was often seen as a no-go. All that has changed,” said Sinha.

In keeping with precedent, Pakistan’s civilian government and the military claimed to have “won” the exchange. Although Pakistani elites are highly practised at denial, the Indian mili­tary strikes have given the Pakistan army a lot to mull over for years. As an observant commentator, who chose not to be iden­tified, put it, Pakistan has to first consider the ineffectiveness of its air defence. But even if it took measures to close the gap, Operation Sindoor has created a more serious problem for the generals in Rawalpindi. The scale and locations of the Indian at­tacks could not be denied. Unlike Balakot in 2019, when IAF jets struck a remote Jaish seminary and training camp on a hilltop, Pakistan could not pretend that nothing had happened. It was left with no choice but to seek some kind of parity by striking within India and the outcomes were not great. The line that In­dia crossed was a mental Rubicon, a breaking of shackles that were self-imposed. “There was a self-imposed censorship that India would not hit inside Pakistan. It was as if we ingested the nuclear threat scenario or concern about the consequences of war and hamstrung ourselves,” the commentator said. The line was eroded by the cross-Line of Con­trol (LoC) surgical strikes in 2016, the air raid on Balakot in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and obliterated by Operation Sindoor.

The long interval between the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack that killed 26 Indian tourists and the post-midnight air strikes of May 7 played on the Pakistan military’s nerves as the generals had to keep guessing when and where India would strike. “It needs to be kept in mind that the Indian attacks of May 7 succeeded despite Pakistan being on high alert. They succeeded thereafter too even after hostilities began,” said Sinha. The use of BrahMos, a nuclear-capable missile, proved highly successful even as Pakistan had no way of divining the nature of the warhead. Going by available information, Pakistan does not appear to have used its shorter-range missiles such Abdali or Nasr, relying on Chinese ordnance like the PL-15 missile. Why it did not use the Haft-type missiles is unclear but given the high level of integration achieved by India’s automated air defence sys­tems that linked legacy Pechora SAMs that go back to the Soviet era to the latest S-400 batteries, the Pakistani missiles might not have met a different fate. The debris of its failed military campaign leaves Pakistan with a lot to deconstruct.

IF ONE OF its objectives was to bring Kashmir back on to the international stage, it does not have much to show. After US President Donald Trump’s initial comments about offering to mediate on Kashmir, the State Department reverted to stating it will urge India and Pakistan to talk to one another. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remarks on May 10 and 11 make it clear that India is simply uninterested in improving relations with Pakistan, the only subject open to discussion being terrorism. India states that the “return” of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) is the other issue it can talk about and while this may seem a positioning exercise, the message will not be lost on Islamabad. What the statement means is that the abrogation of Article 370 with regard to Jammu & Kashmir ends the region’s special status and it is irreversible.

As doctrinal pronouncements go, India’s declaration that any future act of terror will be considered an act of war has a directness to it, a clarity of purpose that can be grasped by ordinary citizens. As a statement of intent, it is plain enough but figuring out the nuts and bolts is more challenging. Although the declaration has an ‘all bets are off’ element to it, there is a lack of specificity that might well be deliberate. The next time a terrorist incident occurs—a ‘routine encounter’ between armed jihadists and security forces in J&K or one like the June 2024 attack in Reasi on a bus that killed nine pil­grims—India’s response may not be easy to predict. India might limit itself to internal security operations to track down assailants, issue condemnatory statements and not do much else. But it could also re­sort to punitive strikes on terror launch pads in PoK or choose to alter the flow of Indus-basin rivers by flushing or withholding flows from dams. What is certain is that the threshold for puni­tive measures has been dramatically lowered. The theoretical framework is similar to the concept of “compel­lence”, coined by game theorist and strategic thinker Thomas Schelling, which is more proactive than tradi­tional deterrence though both are coercive. Deterrence is a retaliatory posture while compellence envisages proactive actions to force an adversary to consider the consequences of escalation. Sponsor­ing terrorism against India has been a low-risk, low-cost option for Pakistan. It is now being forced to share the risk of its actions.

The economy of words in the new anti-terror axiom intro­duces a degree of unpredictability in estimating just how India will respond to terrorism beyond the bottom line that it will do so. Just when and how will be situationally dynamic. The pro­nouncement came on May 10 ahead of the declaration of ceasefire between India and Pakistan and a few hours after the IAF blud­geoned Pakistani airbases, including one near Rawalpindi, in a fierce counter-offensive against Pakistani attacks the previous night. Spelling out the essentials of the proclamation, Prime Min­ister Narendra Modi on May 11 and 12 said India would neither succumb to nuclear blackmail nor differentiate between terror­ist groups and sponsoring governments. The needle had moved since May 7 when India asserted that its initial strikes had targeted terror hubs and not the Pakistan military.

While India has dramatically altered the threshold for retribu­tive action that might include cross-border strikes, Pakistan finds itself at the receiving end after having elevated ‘irrationality’ to a strategic mantra. By not defining the red lines of its nuclear posture, loosely referring to “all elements of national power”, and test firing nuclear-capable missiles in the midst of border tensions, Pakistan has tried to ward off the use of hard power by India. The shoe is now on the other foot and it is Pakistan that will be guessing what the Indian action will be: the penny could drop or it might not.

Given Pakistan’s symbiotic relationship with anti-India terror groups like Lashkar and Jaish, more terror attacks in J&K and else­where can hardly be ruled out. Not all will invite a cross-border punishment but Pakistan can no longer be sure. India’s response could be a more conventional special forces’ action behind en­emy lines or the use of armed drones Pakistan’s air defence system failed to detect. Till the Pahalgam attack, Pakistan-backed terror­ists were extracting a rising toll on Indian security personnel over the last few months, but the incidents remained below a tipping point that would warrant cross-border military action. This self-imposed restraint that gripped the Indian psyche for decades is now a thing of the past.

2025 India-Pakistan warOperation SindoorPahalgamPakistan Army