From Dossiers To Deterrence

For decades, India's response to cross-border terrorism followed a familiar script: an attack, outrage, a dossier of evidence handed to Islamabad, and a plea to the international community to lean on Pakistan. That script has been torn up. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar's blunt words in the Lok Sabha this week - that ties with Pakistan can only progress in an "environment free of terror, hostility and violence" - were not diplomatic boilerplate. They were a statement of a strategy that has already been operationalised on the ground.

The shift is visible in what India now does, not merely what it says. After Pulwama in 2019, India withdrew Pakistan's Most Favoured Nation status and slapped a 200 per cent customs duty on Pakistani goods - an economic signal that business as usual was over. But the more consequential change has been the willingness to use hard power directly. The surgical strikes of 2016, the Balakot air strikes after Pulwama, and most recently Operation Sindoor following the Pahalgam massacre mark a doctrine in which terrorist infrastructure inside Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir is treated as a legitimate target, not a line India dare not cross. This is deterrence by demonstration rather than deterrence by protest note.

Placing the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance after Pahalgam extends this logic into a domain Pakistan has long treated as untouchable. Water was supposed to be insulated from politics under a 1960 treaty that survived three wars. By suspending it, India has signalled that no bilateral arrangement is exempt from the consequences of state-sponsored terrorism - a message aimed squarely at Rawalpindi's General Headquarters, not just Islamabad's civilian Government. None of this means diplomacy has been abandoned. DGMO-level contact, pre-notification of missile tests, and the exchange of nuclear-installation lists show that back-channel and institutional mechanisms continue to function even amid near-total estrangement. This is deliberate: India is not seeking permanent hostility, but it has stopped pretending that talks alone can substitute for consequences.

The message to Pakistan is unambiguous - the choice of when this relationship changes lies with Islamabad, not New Delhi. As long as terrorism remains, in the Government's words, "an instrument of state policy", India has made clear it reserves the right to strike at targets of its choice, at a time of its convenience. Practically, Pakistan must realise that the era of dossiers and demarches is over.