Vaibhav Vats
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has forged a new counterterrorism doctrine during his decade in power: Any terrorist attack emanating from Pakistan will face a scorching Indian-military response. The policy carries inherent risk, both internationally and domestically.
That it can easily commit India to a spiral of escalation was demonstrated during the exchange of hostilities with Pakistan two weeks ago. On the domestic side, the counterterrorism policy is of a piece with Modi’s effort to project himself as a strongman, which carries its own escalatory risks because it depends on both stoking ultranationalism and keeping it under control.
For four days starting earlier this month, exchanges of fire between India and Pakistan gathered intensity and scope, with the theater of engagement extending deeper into both countries than it had in five decades. At home, Modi had encouraged a climate of heightened emotion among his followers. Pro-government networks and broadsheets portrayed Pakistan as an archenemy that Indian forces would soon vanquish. Media outlets reported, for example, that the port of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and financial capital, had been destroyed—one of many breathless stories that did not turn out to be true.
Then, on the evening of May 10, President Donald Trump announced a cease-fire between the two countries on Truth Social. The American intervention came as a surprise—one that did some damage to the Indian prime minister, who has projected himself not only as a fierce advocate for India’s strategic interests but also as a global statesman deliberating on weighty geopolitical questions, such as the war in Ukraine.
Many of the Indian prime minister’s followers felt that allowing the Trump administration to broker a deal was a humiliation and a capitulation to a foreign power. For that reason, New Delhi did not acknowledge the American intervention in its public statements on the cease-fire, even as the Pakistani side hailed Trump’s role in ending the fighting. Still, right-wing social-media accounts turned on the Modi government and its officials with expletive-laden tirades, many of which assailed the personal life of their intended targets. They attacked India’s foreign secretary as a traitor and doxxed his daughter.
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