Asian Peace Programme: by Kishore Mahbubani

India-Pakistan ties: Going beyond deterrence

Nirupama Rao 

Nirupama Rao is a former Indian foreign secretary and currently a distinguished visiting research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore (NUS).

The article is first published in the Straits Times: https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/india-pakistan-ties-going-beyond-deterrence.

16  September,  2026

For nearly eight decades, India and Pakistan have perfected the art of living badly together. Wars, terrorist attacks, military crises, severed dialogue and occasional thaws have generated a unique accumulation of history with no agreed destination. Rather than remain confined to the role of India’s recalcitrant neighbour, Islamabad has sought to recast itself internationally as a useful interlocutor, particularly during the Iran crisis. Its relationships with Washington, the Gulf states and Tehran have infused it with diplomatic relevance, and it has worked overtime to burnish an image of itself as facilitator and even peacemaker.

India today is stronger than at any previous moment in this relationship. Strength must expand strategic options, not narrow them. A confident power retaliates when necessary and communicates when useful without confusing either action with weakness. Geography never negotiates. India and Pakistan will remain neighbours despite the deep enmities that cast their long shadows in the twilight zone between us.

Today, the relationship is perhaps colder than at almost any point since 1947. Formal political dialogue is non-existent, trade has withered, travel is severely restricted and even the Indus Waters Treaty, once regarded as an almost steadfast bulwark despite bilateral hostility, is now mired in the arena of strategic contestation. India’s response to Pakistan has also changed. Uri, Balakot and, most recently, Operation Sindoor marked a clearly tangible evolution in Indian thinking. The references are to successive changes in India’s response to major terrorist attacks emanating from Pakistan.

After the November 2008 Mumbai attacks that claimed 166 lives, India relied principally on diplomatic pressure rather than military retaliation. Following the Uri attack of September 2016, however, Indian forces conducted surgical strikes across the Line of Control 11 days later. After the Pulwama bombing in February 2019, India struck a militant facility at Balakot in Pakistan.

Operation Sindoor marked the latest stage in this evolution. Following the April 2025 terrorist attack in Pahalgam, in which 26 people were killed, India launched missile and air strikes on terrorist camps and military bases in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

The strikes marked an escalation in India’s response. It sent the message that terrorism would carry costs. The assumption that Pakistan’s nuclear capability indefinitely insulated it from conventional retaliation was challenged.

For India, this was a manifestation of both capability and political will. The recalibration was inevitable. Deterrence against terrorism must remain credible.

But deterrence by itself is not a political strategy. Military force can punish, disrupt and impose costs. It is designed to force an alteration of the adversary’s calculations. But it does not answer the larger question: What relationship does India ultimately seek with a nuclear-armed neighbour it cannot ultimately ignore?

Communication is not concession

It is a curiously difficult question to ask in India. Public debate has increasingly presented two choices. Dialogue translates into appeasement; refusal to talk is proof of undeterred resolve.

Serious statecraft has, however, never operated through such binaries. Nations have traditionally communicated with adversaries precisely because they are adversaries.

Washington and Moscow maintained channels throughout the Cold War. India continues to engage China diplomatically and militarily despite profound strategic distrust and an unsettled boundary.

Communication is not concession. It is an instrument that seeks predictability and control.

The question is not whether India should return to the composite dialogue of another era in a replay of romantic nostalgia. It should not.

Nations move on; Pakistan has changed, India has changed, and the political conditions that produced the tentative breakthroughs of the years under Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, as well as former Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh, have long evaporated.

But history has always offered useful lessons, and both nations would be remiss in ignoring them.

Lesson from the Agra Summit

Twenty-five years after the 2001 Agra Summit between Vajpayee and Musharraf, its significance lies less in its failure than in the fact that it happened at all.

Vajpayee invited Musharraf scarcely two years after the Kargil war and the trauma of the seizure of an Indian airliner by Pakistani hijackers.

Despite the lack of trust in Pakistan, Vajpayee took the risk as he instinctively understood that strength and political exploration were not mutually exclusive.

Agra failed, but contact did not disappear forever.

The 2003 ceasefire followed; dialogue resumed; back-channel discussions subsequently explored possibilities that, for a time, brought the two countries closer to a modus vivendi on Kashmir than at almost any point in their history.

Agra, long gone, cannot be recreated. The lesson it teaches is that states should preserve room for manoeuvre.

Pakistan, too, has demonstrated an ability to exploit diplomatic openings with considerable agility.

The period following Operation Sindoor has lessons. Rather than remain confined to the role of India’s recalcitrant neighbour, Islamabad has sought to recast itself internationally as a useful interlocutor, particularly during the Iran crisis.

Its relationships with Washington, the Gulf states and Tehran have infused it with diplomatic relevance, and it has worked overtime to burnish an image of itself as facilitator and even peacemaker.

That image may not be deserved at all. A state with Pakistan’s history of support for militant proxies cannot simply acquire the mantle of regional peacemaker through clever diplomatic branding.

But international politics has never been a morality play. States accumulate influence when they make themselves relevant.

Pakistan has done this before: in facilitating the American opening to China, during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, after the 9/11 attacks on the US and, now, through West Asian diplomacy. It is tactically agile while continuing to remain strategically self-defeating.

India must avoid the opposite error: becoming strategically stronger while allowing diplomatic imagination and initiative to atrophy.

Troubled waters

The Indus Waters Treaty illustrates the inherent risks of this approach. The 1960 treaty governs the allocation and use of the six principal rivers of the Indus system between India and Pakistan. It survived wars, military crises and prolonged periods of diplomatic hostility for more than six decades.

Following the 2025 Pahalgam terrorist attack, however, India announced that the treaty would be held in abeyance until Pakistan “credibly and irrevocably” ended its support for cross-border terrorism.

A Court of Arbitration has since held that the treaty remains legally binding, a ruling India rejects on the ground that the tribunal itself was improperly constituted.

India’s stance reflected understandable anger at Pakistan’s continued association with cross-border terrorism. But Pakistani political rhetoric has cleverly elevated water into the realm of existential deterrence, with suggestions that serious interference with Indus flows could warrant military response.

Once both sides attach existential meaning to water, what was once a technical and legal disagreement becomes a pathway for escalation.

This is not to suggest that India should simply restore the old arrangement unchanged. The treaty is more than six decades old. Climate change, altered hydrology, population growth and energy requirements render adaptation a legitimate and wholly necessary subject for discussion.

But precisely because water is becoming securitised, some channel for dealing with it will eventually be necessary.

So, quo vadis India’s Pakistan policy?

First, credible deterrence must obviously remain. The reward for terrorism is not dialogue, nor can Pakistan be permitted to assume that nuclear weapons provide immunity for proxy war.

Second, India’s substantive, long-term advantage lies not in repeated military confrontation, but in its own economic, technological and institutional strength. A prosperous and confident India is the most powerful and undeniable answer to Pakistan’s capacity for disruption.

Third, crisis communication must be preserved. Hotlines, discreet diplomatic contacts and military-to-military communication are not evidence of weak policy. Between nuclear neighbours, they are elementary instruments of national security that must be operative.

Fourth, engagement should be selective rather than comprehensive. Water security, disaster management, climate resilience, humanitarian questions, limited trade, consular matters and regional crises where interests coincide offer possible areas for functional contact. Such contact does not spell reconciliation.

Track II initiatives also have a limited but useful role.

They should neither pretend to substitute for governments nor revive the sentimentalism sometimes associated with people-to-people diplomacy. Their value is simply in preserving human and intellectual connections during periods when official relations are frozen.

A relationship conducted exclusively by armies, intelligence agencies and television studios is unlikely to become secure.

This was also the reasoning behind my recent suggestion of a women’s caucus between India and Pakistan. The proposition was never that women possess some mystical immunity from nationalism or conflict. History plainly says otherwise. It was to expand participation so as to enable humanitarian, social and generational issues to enter conversations otherwise dominated by inherited security orthodoxies.

The endgame

Ultimately, however, the larger question for India to answer is this: What is the endgame?

It cannot realistically be the annihilation of Pakistan. Geography, nuclear weapons and elementary prudence rule that out. Nor can India wait passively for Pakistan to implode. Fragile states can become more dangerous, not less.

The objective is for Pakistan to be deterred from terrorism, constrained from damaging Indian interests, but progressively drawn into a more predictable equilibrium.

That requires patience, firmness and a clear conception of an idea of South Asia that is an integer where destinies cannot be subdivided or partitioned.

India today is stronger than at any previous moment in this relationship. Strength must expand strategic options, not narrow them. A confident power retaliates when necessary and communicates when useful without confusing either action with weakness.

Geography never negotiates. India and Pakistan will remain neighbours despite the deep enmities that cast their long shadows in the twilight zone between us.

The true test of statecraft is therefore not whose anger lasts longest. That is easy.

It is whether we can conceive of durable political outcomes that benefit the unknown and unnamed Indians and Pakistanis who continue to struggle for better tomorrows.

Peace is not the relinquishment of vigilance. Properly understood, it is its most difficult companion.