By Anil Raturi
The trauma evoked by the massacre of 26 innocent lives at the evil hands of terrorists in Pahalgam on 22 April 2025 continues to linger long after the sound of the assailants’ bullets has died.
It is said that Indian security agencies have gathered evidence to conclude that this dastardly act is yet another instance of Pakistan trying to “bleed India through a thousand cuts” via its proxies.
Consequently, on 7 May 2025, the government of an anguished Indian Nation, provoked by the incident, was compelled to launch “Operation Sindoor”, targeting terrorist camps in Pakistan.
The political ideology of the creators of Pakistan expounded that the India of 1947 was inhabited by people of two different civilisations, one Muslim and the other primarily Hindu.
Their belief in this so-called “two nation” theory led to a socio-political scenario wherein a United India became untenable, compelling the partition of the newly independent India to establish two separate countries of Pakistan and India.
Despite the religio-civilisational beliefs on which Pakistan was founded, on partition, more than 30 million Muslims did not leave for Pakistan, but chose to remain in Secular India!
This historical fact, at the very inception of Pakistan, negated the religio-civilisational rationale that its founders had propounded as a cause for a separate nation!
This contradiction that rests at the very birth of Pakistan unleashed an existential paranoia, which continues to haunt it till today.
Its religio-civilisational principle as a rationale for a separate nation received yet another setback in 1971, when East Pakistan, despite having a Muslim majority, seceded from Pakistan to form the new nation of Bangladesh.
Since Independence, the Muslim population in India has grown from about 30 million to more than 200 million today. Whereas, during the same period, the substantial Hindu population in Islamic Pakistan has diminished to appalling levels.
Ostensibly, Pakistan’s main disagreement with India is on the issue of Kashmir. However, Kashmir is just a “fig leaf” for it to hide the real reason for its annoyance with India.
For Pakistan, a thriving democratic and secular India (in which millions of Muslims too are bona-fide citizens) is an anathema because it negates the premise on which Pakistan was founded!
The growing prosperity of a Secular India is viewed by its ideologues as a repudiation of Pakistan’s raison d’être!
Recently, the hubris of this ideology was manifested in the April address of Pakistan’s General Asim Munir. Trying to bolster the depleting public faith in his leadership, he desperately resorted to distract his people by raising the Kashmir issue, calling it their “jugular vein” and also reiterated the age-old religion based “two nation” theory!
It was this ideology that the terrorists (Pak proxies) were executing at Pahalgam when they segregated the victims on the basis of their religion before killing them.
Drunk on its pathological ideology Pakistan was once again nefariously attempting to foment communal passions in India. In this context, the Indian Army’s Col Sofiya Qureshi’s media briefing about “Operation Sindoor” is a fitting tribute to the secular credentials of India.
The feudal elite of Pakistan, exemplified by its military leadership, has aggravated the misery of its country by preventing the growth of real democracy. Generals have consistently deposed political leaders to either impose martial law or rule through their political puppets.
Propelled by their desire to hold on to power, they continuously keep whipping up communal passions in the hearts of their people.
Manipulating the gullible public, they magnify hatred against India, effectively shutting out any possibility of a people to people rapprochement between the two countries.
Pakistan’s inability to come to terms with the false premise of its ideology has compelled it to fight four unsuccessful wars with India.
Its disgraceful defeat in the 1971 war with India and the consequent loss of East Pakistan, made it realise that it cannot win a conventional war against its more resourceful and bigger neighbour.
Therefore, during the 1970s, under Gen Zia-ul-Haq, it transformed its strategy towards India.
It concocted the doctrine of “Bleeding India through a thousand cuts”, a malevolent euphemism for its state sponsored terrorism propagated through its proxies.
In 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, USA and its allies became fearful about the possibility of communism gaining hold in South Asia.
In order to counter this perceived threat, USA started backing the Afghan rebels against USSR and converting their war against the Soviets into a religious “Jihad”. This led to the creation of a formidable force called “Mujahideen”, comprising volunteers drawn from various Muslim nations. The USA and its allies supported the “Mujahideen” by liberally providing it with resources.
At such a time when the “Cold War” was at its height, USA found Gen Zia’s relatively modern Military and Intelligence agency (ISI) useful for training “Jihadi” militants to wage war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
It declared Pakistan a “Front Line” State for its campaign against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and liberally started pumping military resources and funds into Pakistan.
The likes of Osama Bin Laden were cultivated in one of the many such “Jihadi” nurseries.
Gen Zia-ul-Haq’s political instincts made him realise that, to remain in power, he should continue to fuel polarity between “Muslim” Pakistan and the Hindus of India.
Receiving billions of dollars and resources from the USA, he cleverly diverted some of it for executing his policy of ” Bleeding India”.
The moorings of Khalistan Terrorism in Punjab, Militancy in J&K, and Islamic terrorist acts across India from the 1980’s till date, all lie in this policy of Pakistan, formulated by Gen Zia-ul-Haq!
Successive Army Chiefs of Pakistan have carried on with this unholy legacy. In 1999, Gen Pervez Musharraf, another military ruler of Pakistan, sabotaged the Lahore peace initiative of top political leaders of the two countries by engineering the Kargil episode.
In this light, therefore, there is nothing new in Pakistan’s Gen Asim Munir’s machinations, since Pakistan has been consistently “bleeding” India for more than four decades now, through its State sponsored acts of terrorism.
It has been attempting to achieve what it failed at, even after fighting four wars against India.
It has been using “deniability” as a convenient tool in this asymmetrical warfare against India by conveniently distancing itself from the terrorists, calling them “Non-State” actors to avoid culpability. It has also effectively employed nuclear blackmail as a stratagem whenever India tried to leverage its traditional military advantage.
With this approach, Pakistan cleverly kept India’s hands tied for more than four decades while consistently bleeding it. During the period, India was also unwilling to risk its economic growth by getting into a spiralling war with Pakistan.
Its intrinsic cultural value of abhorrence for violence and war also made it appear weak to its enemy.
Through its military’s “Surgical Strikes” in 2016 and air attacks of Balakot in 2019 in the Pak Occupied Kashmir (POK), India attempted to change this paradigm.
Now, with the missile attacks of “Operation Sindoor”, India has attempted to transform the security calculus by trying to wrest the initiative away from Pakistan. Through its bold and calibrated missile attacks on sensitive targets not only in POK but also all across Pakistan, India has exhibited an uncharacteristic audacity that Pakistan is not used to.
For now, Pakistan has sought a ceasefire through its DGMO’s call to his Indian counterpart.
Critics and baiters of the Indian Government have been active on social media, often doubting and finding faults with many of its actions. It may be true that a close scrutiny of the Government’s recent response to the hostilities created by Pakistan may require future improvements.
However, in times of war, responsible citizens are expected to rally around its national effort without overt dissension. Postmortem of the Government’s actions should wait until the objectives are achieved and peace is restored.
In a liberal democracy it is healthy and necessary to discuss and even criticise the conduct of the government and its actions. However, in times of war, one should debate very discerningly so as not to end up crossing the line and unwittingly becoming a tool of the enemy’s disinformation campaign!
Incurring losses are a part and parcel of a war campaign. The paramount issue in war is achieving one’s strategic objectives.
The objective that India’s “Operation Sindoor” seems to have set for itself is to substantially raise the costs for Pakistan regarding its policy of State sponsored terrorism.
Looking from that perspective, at least for now, “Operation Sindoor” seems to have successfully achieved that!
Whether this “new normal ” ushered in by India is sustainable will depend on Pakistan’s next move!
(Anil Raturi is a retired IPS officer who has been DGP, Uttarakhand.)
