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. (The secretary promptly switched his X account to private, to shield himself and his family from a barrage of invective.)
That any cease-fire was necessary was a surprise and a letdown for Modi’s base, which had expected a swift victory based on a combination of misinformation and what was likely an overestimation of India’s military strength and operational superiority. Such illusions should have been punctured during the conflict, when Pakistan downed at least two Indian jets and unleashed drones and missiles that matched Indian capabilities. In the first week of May, India launched nine air strikes into Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
Past skirmishes with Pakistan had allowed Modi to construct a triumphalist narrative of strength that played to his domestic audience. A 2019 air strike into Pakistan helped propel him to reelection for a second term with an enhanced majority. But this latest exchange had a far less satisfying denouement: an uncertain military outcome and a diplomatic embarrassment, in the eyes of Modi’s nationalist base.
Trump made a bad situation worse with another Truth Social post less than a day after the cease-fire announcement, in which he offered to mediate the Kashmir dispute. Mediation is a delicate subject in India because of the country’s bruising colonial experience; it is often equated with an assault on Indian sovereignty. The 1972 Simla peace agreement, signed between India and Pakistan after a war the previous year, stipulated that all disputes between the two countries be addressed bilaterally—language long understood as a bar to third-party mediation. American diplomacy played an important role in tamping down previous conflicts over the territory in 1999 and 2019, but President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, respectively, were careful not to trumpet their interventions in those cases.
Trump’s pronouncements immediately led to a volley of criticism from India’s opposition parties and independent voices, which began comparing Modi unfavorably with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi: She delivered a decisive victory in the 1971 war with Pakistan despite frosty relations with President Richard Nixon. A newspaper owner in Modi’s home state of Gujarat was arrested for making the comparison.
In remarks delivered at the White House two days after the cease-fire announcement, the U.S. president further gloated about stopping a potentially nuclear conflict that could have killed millions of people.
That evening, Modi addressed India in a prime-time speech for the first time since the conflict began. Absent was the measured restraint that might have lowered the temperature after such an unnerving conflict. Instead, Modi told the public that India’s military offensive had brought Pakistan to its knees to beg for a cease-fire. He reaffirmed India’s position on retaliatory military action as a response to terror attacks, declared that he had called Pakistan’s nuclear bluff, and warned that he had not abandoned the military operation but merely suspended it. Modi followed these prime-time remarks with another belligerent speech the next day, belittling Pakistan’s military capabilities when he visited an Indian air base.
The bellicosity of these two speeches, at a time when the cease-fire was still tenuous, seemed to reflect Modi’s need to appear muscular in the face of public criticism and after being undermined by Trump’s swagger. (Trump would recount his role in ending the conflict several more times during his Middle East trip, with each new utterance compounding the domestic problems for Modi.)
But if the prime minister’s aggressive demeanor played well to his domestic base, it also alienated a number of India’s South Asian neighbors. Many of these governments worry about the Modi regime’s propensity for bullying, and not one has spoken in favor of India’s military actions. Last week Modi’s government, normally intolerant of its political opposition, conscripted it into a campaign for damage control: It put together delegations of representatives from all of the country’s political parties, with the intention of sending them to foreign capitals to make India’s case.
The crisis and its aftermath have demonstrated how India’s national security has become almost entirely captive to burnishing the personality cult of its leader. The result is a country that comes across to others as at once boastful about its growing power and prickly about criticism of its human-rights record.
A few hours before the cease-fire came into force, the Indian government fine-tuned its new counterterrorism doctrine, classing incidents of cross-border terrorist violence as “acts of war.” Any such attack, the policy makes clear, will incur an Indian-military response.
The timing of the announcement suggests that Modi seeks to overshadow the end of the fighting with a display of strength and a deterrent warning. But the doctrine may be just as apt to make conflict between India and Pakistan more likely and recurrent, rather than less, as it raises the stakes of any skirmish—particularly after this last four-day conflict, which passed previous thresholds of violence between the nuclear-armed rivals.
In the past, India prided itself on being a responsible power that respected human rights and international law—an island of stability in a volatile region. Modi’s embrace of Hindu nationalism and his tilt toward authoritarianism have since stained the country’s reputation for pluralism and democracy. Now they are leading the Indian prime minister to lean into a military adventurism that could make him a danger to the entire region.
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