Pahalgam attack: Retaliation is easy, but restraint serves India’s long-term interest

For its self-definition as a nation, Pakistan must find an alternative to the notion that India is intent on its destruction; only then can it begin to rebuild itself as a normal nation

Retaliation is easy, Restraint is better

The terrorists who killed 26 innocent tourists in Pahalgam hoped to destabilise and reverse the return to normalcy in Jammu and Kashmir in the wake of successful elections and movement towards the restoration of statehood for the territory.

The outfit that carried out the atrocity calls itself The Resistance Front, which the Indian authorities have identified as an offshoot of the Pakistan-sponsored Lashkar-e-Taiba. The nomenclature has been chosen carefully, avoiding any Islamist references, to portray its motivation as nationalist, rather than religious zealotry.

The attack coincides with the ongoing visit of US vice-president J.D. Vance and his family to India. A similarly timed massacre, which killed 36 people, occurred in 2000, just before the visit of the then US president Bill Clinton. The terrorists seem to convey to the US that India’s political stability is make-believe.

Shortly before Vance's visit, Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir chose to reiterate an old claim that Kashmir is Pakistan’s “jugular vein". This rhetoric comes even as Pakistan is being bailed out for the umpteenth time by the International Monetary Fund, and is undergoing austerity measures.

The IMF has forecast Pakistan’s growth rate at 2.6%, and India’s at 6.2%. Pakistan has been receding into the irrelevant margins of the world economy, even as India emerges stronger, becoming the eventual gainer from the Trump turmoil, with supply chains reconfiguring to reduce America’s dependence on Chinese manufacturing.

Terror strikes in Balochistan, the Taliban’s seeming indifference to Islamabad’s wishes for Afghanistan, and the internal political instability complementing economic woes, all seem to accentuate schism in the Pakistani state. The tried and tested antidote to that has been the revival of the India bogey for Islamabad, particularly its armed forces. After all, Pakistan was founded as a secure homeland for Muslims away from Hindu-majority India.

New Delhi might choose to help Islamabad find legitimacy for its portrayal of India as the perpetual enemy working to weaken and dismantle Pakistan, by raining retribution across the border for the dastardly terror strike in Pahalgam. Pakistan would be hard put to find any international support for itself if India chooses to punish Pakistan’s so-called unconventional instrumentalities of strategic depth.

The US and Russia have strongly condemned the terror attack and said they stand with India. So have the UAE, Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose capital India’s prime minister was visiting at the time the incident occurred.

Pakistan’s biggest external supporter, China, is hardly in a position to give Islamabad much diplomatic support when it comes to shielding terrorists. Chinese nationals have been the targets of terror attacks in Pakistan, as they worked on various projects of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. It has been Chinese policy to crack down hard on Islamic terror within China.

Moreover, with its own trade tensions with the US, China needs global support, or at least neutrality. India is a major player and mover among the countries of the Global South. It makes little sense for Beijing to compromise its core commercial interests, in order to lend support to Islamabad’s desperate measures at shoring up internal legitimacy via external terror strikes.

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The question is what matters more: the outraged Indian public seeking strong responses to aggression from across the border, or the Pakistani public growing tired of excusing the Pakistani state’s failure to provide political cohesion and economic succour to its people.

India’s long-term interest lies in exposing the false premise for partition, the two-nation theory, through the gradual erosion of the military-backed state structure built on that shaky narrative.

Only when Pakistan finds an alternative to the notion of an India intent on its destruction as the foundation for its own self-definition can it begin to rebuild itself as a normal nation and move away from being a source of malice and conflict targeting India.

Pursuing that long-term goal requires restraint and sagacity on New Delhi’s part, coupled with the ability to retain public confidence without the need to resort to the show of capacity to punish the enemy. That path demands more strength than immediate retribution and serves the broader strategic goal. While retaliation may be the easier option, it is not necessarily the wiser one. We would be glad to be proven wrong.