Aparna Pande, and Vinay Kaura
To become the global power of its ambitions, India needs to resist the temptation to view the subcontinent as the totality of its security concerns.
While it will take days, if not months, to find out the details of the April-May 2025 India-Pakistan conflagration, what should be clear to Indian strategists and policymakers is that a country that seeks to be a global power cannot afford the illusion of geographical insularity. India has a unique geostrategic location at the confluence of South, Southeast, Central, and West Asia, and the Indian state needs the ability to focus on challenges on both the continental and maritime fronts. Furthermore, the existential strategic—security and economic—challenge India faces is from China, not Pakistan.
The latest crisis demonstrated this once again, where we saw Indian media, largely television but also social media, fixate on Pakistan instead of looking at the strategic big picture. Treating each provocation from Islamabad as the epicenter of strategic meaning confuses a tactical echo with a structural tremor. The recent military confrontation may stir nationalist fervor and animate political theatre, but to allow it to monopolize India’s strategic gaze is to fall prey to a perilous provincialism.
India stands at a crossroads where its historical grievances intersect with the tectonic shifts of a changing world. In such a moment, the impulse to retaliate—particularly in the face of yet another assault, perhaps a terror attack in Kashmir—carries with it both the allure of resolution and the danger of regression. For it is not the scale of the provocation that matters but the choreography behind it. Responding in kind may satisfy public emotion, but it risks stepping into a design that is not of India’s making.
There is, embedded within the theater of Pakistan’s belligerence, a subtler, more insidious logic. Pakistani army chief General Asim Munir’s goals were both domestic and external.
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