Rabia Akhtar------------------------
The current May 2025 crisis between India and Pakistan has now laid bare an uncomfortable and dangerous truth that we have known for the past ten years or so but ignored: Pakistan is trapped in a volatile security environment with a nuclear-armed neighbor, India, that increasingly exhibits ideological rigidity, strategic immaturity, and a troubling disregard for escalation risks. Since the crisis began on May 6-7, much of the international commentary has focused on how war was averted. However, that narrow lens misses the deeper, systemic problem. India’s behavior, as witnessed by the entire world during this crisis, was not just escalatory, it was irrationally escalatory, cloaked in the legitimacy of national security but fueled by political ideology and information warfare.
Is this normal? Absolutely not. This is no longer simply a case of strategic competition between India and Pakistan. What we are witnessing is the normalization of a Hindutva-driven nuclear signaling posture, one that does not conform to the tenets of credible minimum deterrence or rational cost-benefit calculation. Instead, India is increasingly relying on performative escalation, disinformation, and public spectacle to shape both domestic opinion and international perception. The danger for Pakistan, and also for the region at large, is not just in India’s capability, but in the absence of credible voices within India who are willing, or allowed, to question this strategic trajectory.
A New Level of Recklessness
The latest exchange of missile and drone strikes across international borders pushed South Asia into uncharted territory. For the first time since both countries became overt nuclear powers, we saw a direct military confrontation that went well beyond Kashmir, targeting critical military infrastructure in each other’s heartlands. Pakistan’s response, Operation Bunyan-un-Marsoos, was calibrated, conventional, and proportional to India’s Operation Sindoor.
But what followed was deeply alarming and extremely disturbing. India not only denied the reality of Pakistan’s retaliation but actively spread disinformation about it falsely claiming that a Shaheen missile had been used, knowing well that such a system carries dual-use implications.
India’s denial of Pakistan’s retaliatory actions, despite reporting, poses a direct threat to the credibility of deterrence in South Asia. Deterrence functions not just through action, but through acknowledgement of cost imposed. When a nuclear-armed state retaliates in a calibrated, conventional manner and the adversary refuses to acknowledge it, the signaling loop is broken. Such denial by India, as we have seen, has emboldened domestic narratives in India that no price was paid, reinforcing a cycle of miscalculation. The result is a dangerously unstable equation where strategic messages are ignored, and escalation becomes the only language understood, a logic which is antithetical to stable deterrence.
India’s distortion of reality is not an isolated incident. It is part of a disturbing pattern of weaponized narrative control, whereby India has created its own facts, denied its military losses, and manufactured legitimacy for future escalation. The goal is not clarity, but confusion. And confusion in a nuclearized dyad is a recipe for disaster.
Outsourcing Escalation Control
Once again, de-escalation between India and Pakistan came not through bilateral restraint but through third-party intervention, primarily by the United States. India, the self-styled regional hegemon, had to be nudged into a ceasefire by external actors after its own brinkmanship failed to deliver the desired outcomes.
This is not strategic autonomy but in fact, strategic irresponsibility dressed in nationalist bravado.
Pakistan, for its part, did not escalate beyond the necessary threshold. Its actions remained within the bounds of conventional deterrence, aimed at restoring strategic balance, not upending it. But that restraint should not be mistaken for comfort. Pakistan’s deterrence worked, again, but it cannot work indefinitely in the face of a neighbor that keeps rewriting the rules.
When Doctrine Meets Dogma
India’s approach is no longer driven purely by strategic rationale, it is increasingly shaped by Hindutva ideology, which views Pakistan not as a security challenge but as a civilizational enemy. That framing shifts the logic of conflict from deterrence to punishment, from crisis management to political theater.
This is a mindset that not only tolerates escalation, but invites it.
Forget Pakistan’s, no nuclear doctrine, no matter how well-crafted, can survive if it is subverted by political ideology (such as Hindutva) and unrestrained public sentiment. Yet this is exactly what is happening in India. We are witnessing a dangerous fusion of populist politics, military posturing, and nuclear signaling, with little room left for sober analysis or dissenting voices. The strategic community, with a few exceptions, is either silent or complicit in normalizing this trajectory.
The table below offers a side-by-side comparison of how Pakistan and India behaved during the recent crisis, revealing a widening maturity gap in their respective approaches to crisis management. While Pakistan responded with calibrated restraint and strategic clarity, grounded in deterrence logic, India displayed a pattern of impulsive escalation, disinformation, and denial. The contrast is stark: Pakistan maintained conventional discipline and transparency; India blurred critical signaling thresholds and relied on narrative manipulation. The result is not just tactical divergence, but a profound strategic asymmetry in crisis responsibility.
Talking Sense to the Strategically Deaf
So, the question we must ask: how do you talk sense to a neighbor that refuses to listen? That escalates first, denies later, and calls its own failure a success? How do you maintain deterrence stability when your adversary treats retaliation as illusion and escalation as virtue?
The answer for Pakistan is neither easy nor comforting. Pakistan must continue to strengthen its own conventional and nuclear deterrence posture but it must also expose, internationally and relentlessly, the gap between India’s claims and its conduct.
Narrative deterrence is now as important as conventional and nuclear deterrence. Pakistan must shape the global conversation with facts, credibility, and moral clarity.
Moreover, the international community can no longer afford to look away. This is not just a South Asian crisis, it is a crisis of nuclear stability in the age of disinformation and ideology, not entirely new variables, but relatively newly employed. India’s size, its market, and its alliances should not blind the world to the dangerous direction of its strategic behavior.
Pakistan responded conventionally, not because its nuclear capability is a bluff, but because it has the discipline not to escalate recklessly. Those who reduce nuclear strategy to domestic chest-thumping or headline wars are not engaging in analysis, they are normalizing instability in a region where the margin for error is already dangerously thin.
As witnessed, India’s crisis posture dripped with hubris, the sheer belief that it can strike Pakistan first, deny Pakistan the space for retaliation, and still control escalation. But hopefully India has learned that arrogance is not a strategy, and Pakistan’s measured yet firm response exposed the limits of India’s illusions.
From Pakistan’s perspective, India’s arrogance lies in assuming that escalation is a one-way street. But it is not. Deterrence is not a stage for bravado, it is a grave responsibility. Pakistan’s response was a reminder to India that arrogance in a nuclear environment does not end in dominance, it edges our region closer to catastrophe.
India is a billion-strong democracy, armed with nuclear weapons, but sadly captive to its own mythology. It is not a stabilizer but a risk multiplier, and should be seen for what it is.
What’s Next?
The world cannot ignore that beneath the missiles and military signaling lies a political wound called Kashmir. It remains unaddressed, inflamed, and central to South Asia’s instability. As long as Kashmir is treated as a territory to be subdued, South Asia will remain trapped in cycles of escalation.
This crisis may have paused with a ceasefire, but it has not ended. The next crisis could begin from a higher rung on the escalation ladder, with less time, fewer brakes, and more illusions.
It is time the world asked India: Where is your strategic maturity? And how long will you keep playing nuclear poker for domestic applause? Until those questions are asked and answered, Pakistan remains chained to a crisis-prone neighbor who is gripped by ideological madness, armed with nuclear weapons, and has an unrestrained appetite for escalation.
Rabia Akhtar is Dean Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Lahore. She is a visiting scholar in Managing the Atom project at Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School.
