Military notes — perceptual battle between India and Pakistan
Listen to article
In a series from this week, we shall explore the various dimensions of the May 2025 India-Pakistan stand-off after the Pahalgam carnage on April 22, 2025.
First, what happened in the perceptual world? The aftermath of Pahalgam and Operation Bunyan Marsus (Iron Wall) should demonstrate 'strategic humility'. Miscalculations by Indian leaders – political and military – should never be forgiven in silence. In 'teaching Pakistan a lesson', India not only 'altered the regional equation', it also rehyphenated with Pakistan, something it loathed, after its hard-won Clinton-era de-hyphenation. And New Delhi unwittingly exposed itself to a parity with Islamabad that it vehemently denied under hubris, arrogance and over-confidence.
Rabid anchors like Arnab Goswami and military analysts like the froth-fuming Maj Gen Gagandeep Bakhshi and Major Gaurav Arya steered the debate about complex realities into loud nationalism, muting the voices of reason from the few and far between. They turned national strategy into a charade of slogans without substance. India, in doing so, lost its strategic narrative.
Intoxicated with its new-found economic relevance, India walked into the trap of 'buying and bullying into influence', only to lose both. It triggered the most dangerous regional escalation since Kargil without any investigation, without any shareable proof, without any satellite imagery, without any international inquiry and without remorse, just guided by 'nationalist theatrics', media jingoism and short-term political gains – all to abrogate Indus Water Treaty and humiliate Pakistan. And it failed.
A 'pauper' Pakistani response sent India suing for ceasefire, after being forced out of the skies, after targeted destruction on land, and a good drubbing in Kashmir. New Delhi 'mistook Pakistan's composure for collapse'. Islamabad's response was doctrinal and not theatrical. Pakistan's 'digital kill web' proved far more dangerous than terrorism, which India blames on Islamabad.
The 16-hour skirmish diminished India's role as a counterbalance to China, as a rising regional power and as a reliable partner. Instead of teaching a lesson to Pakistan, India was taught one – worth inclusion in the syllabi of all staff colleges and war courses.
From the skirmish, neither Pakistan emerged as a dwarf two-foot David, nor India as a loud-talking 10-foot Goliath. India was humbled by the unkindness of the event. Karachi did not fall, Islamabad remained steadfast, and Lahore kept pulsating, with daredevil Pakistanis eulogising their soldiers who were busy firing their deadly arsenal towards India from their fields, from their neighborhoods, and praying elders overseeing salvo after salvo. It was a national Bunyan Marsus.
Pakistan did not escalate; it equalised India's perceptual superiority. It emerged not as a weakened state, but an awakened country. Pakistan didn't blink, and stood its ground with dignity, restraint, precision and strategy.
Modi 'perceptually' had a bigger stick that now lies broken, and his power stands exposed not only to Pakistan, but to the admirers of 'shining India' worldwide. India, in public perception, lost its 'dominance' not through outright defeat, but through overreach, despite the 'theatrical illusion of victory' that Indian media continues to showcase for psychological conquest of its citizenry.
India's myth of conventional superiority, built and carefully managed for such an eventuality, lies in chaotic collapse before the public eye.
Pakistan's poverty, touted repeatedly over a berserk India media, is recognised by the world as its 'cool hardiness'. Islamabad emerged as a calm, articulate player and as a disciplined nuclear power, which can demonstrate restraint, resolve and resilience. And that its dwarfed defence spending, compared to New Delhi's $85 billion defence budget, still enables and equips its armed forces with doctrine, deterrence and determination to hold its nerve under fire.
Pakistan absorbed Operation Sindoor with a resolute defensive response and then responded with its own 'Bunyan Marsus', rewriting the rules of deterrence.
Consequentially, Pakistan gains more confidence and relevance, which is already buttressed by its geostrategic location at the crossroads of Karakoram, the Silk Road, South and Central Asia; and it being key to regional stability for 2.8 billion South Asians. The strategic map has shifted and with it the world's perspective. Pakistan once branded as a 'failing state', today emerges as a reliable strategic balancer.
This isn't just a strategic shift in the regional power dynamics, it is a psychological jolt and a rude awakening for Modi's Hindutva-laced, RSS dominated, bigoted brand.
Just when detractors thought Pakistan was sliding into a second fiddle status, Modi burnished its image by becoming Pakistan's unlikely brand ambassador, through his absurd persistence and stubborn obsession to turn Pakistan into a pliant state. From being overlooked to being overanalyzed and over-examined, Islamabad is back in global conversations especially among the dithering Arab world.
Second, India suffered doctrinal collapse. This brief war demonstrated India's 'doctrinal collapse', militarily as well as in the perceptual domains. Ajit Doval's sinister scheming to flush TTP, BLA and BRA with cash, incite synchronised uprising in KP and Balochistan, exploit Pakistan's many cleavages and turn Afghan borderlands and Pakistan into an inferno for Pakistan's military backfired squarely, roundly and embarrassingly. The operation, contrarily, jelled Pakistan's inner front like hell. India mistook Pakistan's doctrinal maturity as fragility.
Literature, at break-neck speed, is coming out with analysts reading, re-reading and analysing the 16 hours of combat that shaped South Asia and the world's military balance. Dassault Aviation's share prices plunged, whereas Chinese defense stocks AVIC, ALD Chengdu surged.
Modi's India miscalculated militarily, decided to ignore geopolitics, misread the doctrine, misjudged Pakistan's internal dynamics and resolve and overplayed its hand in trying to redefine South Asia's balance of power. A leaf from Israel's playbook did not match Chanakya Kotalia's script. India's doctrine of punitive retaliation through swift operations is broken operationally not just symbolically.
By denying truth to its own people and by constantly lying to unfathomable extents during this war, India lost any remaining credibility for its media, official and unofficial. Modi's strongman image took an irreparable hit, and his tattered ego is littered with strategic miscalculation, economic overreach, doctrinal unpreparedness and moral bankruptcy, exposing India's own multiple fault lines.
The dictum of the history is clear, New Delhi is not the victor in this round, Islamabad is. Bunyan Marsus was 'Pakistan's rendezvous with history' an existential moment of great peril, handled with dignity and precision. Allah be praised!
Continues...
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Express Tribune
5 minutes ago
- Express Tribune
Why Pakistan did not become an Islamic state
Of the fourscore or so countries that have majority Muslim populations at this time in their evolution, Pakistan occupies a unique position. It is the only one that was created out of a large geographic space – in its case the Indian British Colony – to accommodate the people of the Islamic faith. All other Muslim nations were either the product of the spread of Islam when the religion was founded by Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) or were the fragments of the large Ottoman Empire built by the Turkish rulers who brought under their control all of the present day Middle East and parts of Africa and southern Europe. All these were Muslim states that were to be governed by some aspects of the Islamic faith. That was not to be case with Pakistan, a state that was the outcome of a political movement that succeeded in pushing out from colonial India, long ruled by the British. As discussed below and was dealt with in the article in this space last week, of Pakistan's four immediate neighbours, three have chosen to be governed by whichever faith most of their citizens were following. Afghanistan and Iran have adopted extremist Islam as the governing philosophy – with the former opting for Sunni extremism, and the latter for extremist Shiism. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India is building a Hindu nation by adopting what it calls Hindutva. It has also changed the name of the country to Bharat. Why did Pakistan not go in this direction? To answer this question, we need to go back into history and discuss the origins of Pakistan as a nation-state. The movement for the expulsion of Britain from the Indian sub-continent was led by a group of Indian leaders, Hindus and Muslims, who were educated in British institutions and mostly studied law. The most prominent of these was Mohandas Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Both belonged to small business communities in the Western part of British India. Gandhi was from the state of Gujarat and Jinnah form across the border In the Province of Sindh. Having studied law, they returned to India but did not join the legal profession. Jinnah worked for a while as a lawyer and built a successful practice in Bombay, now called Mumbai, for a while but then switched to politics. While Gandhi wanted Britain to leave the large colony over which they had ruled for centuries, Jinnah wanted to protect the rights and cultures of the large Muslim minority. Had Winston Churchill who had led Britain during the Second World War continued as his country's prime minister, he would not have accepted the Indian leadership's demand for independence. But he and the Tory Party that he led lost the elections in 1945, and Clement Attlee of the opposition Labour Party became the prime minister. From the time he took over as the country's leader, he declared his intention to quit India. To get Britain out of India, he appointed Lord Louis Mountbatten, a distinguished member of the British Royal Family, to become India's last Viceroy and plan to hand over the governance of the large colony to the Indian leadership. Mountbatten arrived in New Delhi with the mission to transfer the government to the Indian leadership but that turned out to be a more difficult task than he believed would be the case when he accepted the assignment. The Indian political system was divided into three large groups: the Indian National Congress, (INC), the All-India Muslim League (AIML) and the Akali Dal (AD). The INC was dominated by the leaders belonging to the large Hindu community which in the late 1940s was estimated to number 300 million or 75 per cent of the total; close to 25 per cent were Muslims; and a small number was made up of the Sikh community based almost entirely in the province of Punjab. The INC wanted monopoly of power once the British went home while the Muslim community wanted to protect its way of life in independent India which would be dominated by the more numerous community. Jinnah, the AIML leader, proposed sharing of power between Hindus and Muslims but the formula he proposed was not acceptable to the Hindu leadership. That led him to demand the establishment of a country that would serve the social, political and economic interests of the Muslim community. Were such a country to be founded it should be called Pakistan, suggested Rahmat Ali, a Muslim student enrolled in Cambridge University. Pakistan, of course meant the "land of the pure", but the political entity Jinnah wanted to found had nothing to do with the Islamic faith. That was the reason why Pakistan's creation was opposed by Jamaat-e-Islami, led by Maulana Maududi who wanted Pakistan to be the central state in what he wanted to establish as the "Muslim Ummah" made up of the countries with Muslim majorities. However, from the very beginning, Jinnah made it clear that he was seeking to establish a Muslim state, not an Islamic state. This he made clear in a speech he delivered on August, 11, 1947 at the Constituent Assembly which was to draft a constitution for the new country. He spoke of an inclusive and impartial government, religious freedom and equality for all. It was made clear that Jinnah had worked hard not to create a country with a state religion. In such a country, there cannot be serious departures from the practices made explicit by the state religion. Even in such a state, the government permits religious practices of other communities besides those who belong to the state religion. It does not persecute believers in other faiths or those who have no faith at all. Jinnah died soon after the creation of Pakistan. His successor, Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated in 1951 while he was speaking at a public park. These two deaths left serious political space which eleven years after the creation on Pakistan was occupied by the military. In October 1958, General Ayub Khan assumed control of the country and imposed martial law. In 1962, he gave the country a constitution that did not give special status to religion in governance. In fact, the main feature of the constitution was considerable power given to local councils. They were part of a multi-tiered system in which the members of the lowest tier, called the Union Councils, were directly elected by the people. Ayub Khan had three military successors who together ruled the country for 33 years. All but General Zia Ul Haq were secular minded. But even Zia's attempt to bring religion into governance was weak and did not survive his death in a plane crash in 1988.
Business Recorder
2 hours ago
- Business Recorder
Pakistan has video evidence of downed six Indian aircraft, says Mohsin Naqvi
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi on Sunday that Pakistan has video evidence of six Indian aircraft, which were shot down during the recent military conflict between the two neighbouring nuclear states. Speaking at a seminar hosted by the Professor Waris Mir Foundation at Aiwan-e-Iqbal, titled 'Global Impacts of Pakistan's Military and Diplomatic Victories over India', the minister stressed that the country's intelligence and defense preparedness outmatched India at every level. Naqvi said, 'We have videos of six Indian aircraft that were shot down.' He said it was decided that no announcement would be made until field evidence was obtained, 'and believe me, we had it within minutes.' Pak-India conflict: Indian opposition assails Modi for failures Naqvi credited Pakistan's intelligence agencies for providing real-time information during the conflict. 'Every decision made in India, every flight their aircraft took — we knew in advance. This was the extraordinary work of our intelligence agencies, the silent warriors who rarely get the credit they deserve,' he said. He also spoke of divine protection, recounting an incident in which seven Indian missiles targeted a major Pakistani base but failed to hit it. 'Some missiles fell short, some landed to the side, but none hit the base. It was nothing short of a miracle,' he added. In contrast, Naqvi said that Pakistan's retaliatory missile strikes hit India's largest oil storage facility with precision. The interior minister praised Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir's leadership, saying he led with great courage and bravery. 'At that time, a delegation from the Saudi government visited Pakistan. The delegation had come from India to Pakistan, seeking peace. The field marshal told them: 'India is like a shining Mercedes, but we are like a dumper truck loaded with stones. Now imagine what will happen when the two collide.' The members of the delegation remained silent,' he said. The minister also highlighted that for the first time, the army, air force, and navy devised a joint strategy and fought the war under one plan. Whereas, he said India's each service chief reported separately to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. '…their viewpoints were entirely different and split. The result was before the world.' Naqvi said that two key figures behind India's strategy were National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Home Minister Amit Shah, not Modi himself. 'These two will be responsible for Modi's downfall and for the damage they are bringing to India,' he warned. IAF chief must have claimed downing Pakistan's aircraft under pressure: defence analyst He also emphasised political unity within Pakistan during the conflict, stating that all parties stood together. 'The Indian delegation failed to lobby international support, particularly in the U.S., while Pakistan's diplomatic front, led by the PPP chairman, was far more effective,' he said. Naqvi further stated India sponsored terrorism in Pakistan, especially in Balochistan, and used post-9/11 narratives to delegitimise the Kashmiri freedom movement. The seminar was also addressed by Chairman Senate Syed Yusuf Raza Gillani and Speaker Punjab Assembly Malik Muhammad Ahmad Khan.
Express Tribune
3 hours ago
- Express Tribune
Pakistan secured videos of six downed Indian jets, says Naqvi
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi on Sunday praised Pakistan's intelligence agencies for their critical role during the recent conflict with India, claiming they had early access to enemy plans and even obtained video footage of six Indian aircraft being shot down. The recent confrontation between the two neighbouring countries, triggered by the Pahalgam attack, marked one of the most serious escalations in decades, pushing the nuclear-armed rivals to the brink of full-scale war. The conflict resulted in civilian casualties on both sides before diplomatic efforts managed to defuse tensions. During the exchange, the Pakistan Air Force shot down six Indian aircraft, including a French-made Rafale fighter jet. A senior French intelligence official later confirmed the loss of at least one Rafale—marking the aircraft's first known combat downing. Also Read: Monsoon rains trigger widespread flooding across Punjab Speaking at a seminar organised by the Professor Waris Mir Foundation at Aiwan-e-Iqbal, Naqvi said, 'Our intelligence agencies' role was so important… we knew whatever they planned, what aircraft they would use.' He added, 'Within minutes, we received video footage of all six planes which were shot down.' The minister revealed that intelligence agencies received detailed information about India's plans well in advance, including sensitive intelligence and operational documents. 'We used to have every single detail of India's decisions and papers in advance. Later, when their aircraft were shot down, it was decided that until we had evidence, we would not announce how many planes had been downed. We needed field proof—and believe me, within minutes, the evidence was with us. We have videos of six Indian aircraft that were shot down.' Naqvi attributed part of Pakistan's success during the conflict to divine intervention. 'India fired seven missiles at one of our major bases, which contained valuable assets. Everyone was worried, but not a single missile landed inside the base—some fell before reaching, some outside, and some to the side,' he recounted. He added that when Pakistan retaliated, its missiles struck an Indian oil storage depot without causing civilian casualties. 'This was purely Allah's help,' he said. He also praised Pakistan's military leadership, particularly Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir. Naqvi recalled a meeting with a visiting Saudi delegation that included military and government officials. The Field Marshal, he said, told them, 'India is like a shining Mercedes, but we are like a dumper truck loaded with stones. Now imagine what happens when the two collide.' Highlighting the unique unity within Pakistan's leadership, Naqvi said, 'For the first time in Pakistan's history, the Army, Air Force, and Navy devised a joint strategy and fought the war under one plan.' He contrasted this with India's fractured command structure, where military chiefs reportedly operated independently. Read: PM deploys ministers to oversee K-P flood relief as toll hits 323 Naqvi also named Ajit Doval and Amit Shah as the true masterminds behind the Indian government's escalation. 'These are the two men behind it all, and they will drown India as well as Modi,' he warned. He emphasised domestic political unity amid the crisis: 'On Pakistan's side, all political parties stood united... everyone was in contact and supportive.' According to Naqvi, Pakistani leaders outperformed the Indian delegation's attempts to lobby internationally, noting, 'Our PPP Chairman outweighed them.' The minister also accused India of sponsoring terrorism within Pakistan, particularly in Balochistan, and claimed India used the war to suppress Kashmiris. He commended the resilience shown by the Prime Minister and national leadership in responding firmly, saying they defied pressure not to retaliate. The seminar also featured addresses by Senate Chairman Syed Yusuf Raza Gillani and Punjab Assembly Speaker Malik Muhammad Ahmad Khan.
