Shabir Ahmad
In the early hours of May 7, Indian armed forces executed Operation Sindoor, striking and destroying nine terrorist camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) and mainland Pakistan.
The government framed the operation as delivering justice for the victims of the 2025 Pahalgam terror attack. Yet the military action and accompanying official briefing reveal a far more ambitious strategic shift.
Rather than treating Pahalgam as an isolated incident, New Delhi has explicitly linked it to two decades of Pakistan-backed terrorism on Indian soil, beginning with the 2001 Parliament attack. By broadening the causal framework, India has moved beyond episodic responses to a sustained policy of holding Pakistan accountable for the infrastructure and groups that enable repeated attacks.
A comprehensive accounting of Pakistan’s terror ecosystem
The official narrative deliberately catalogued the long history of operations by Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), and Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) — all UN-designated terrorist organisations. Indian strikes hit key facilities, including JeM’s Markaz Subhan Allah in Bahawalpur, LeT’s Markaz Taiba in Muridke, and HM’s Mehmoona Joya in Sialkot.
This approach undercuts Islamabad’s familiar playbook: distancing itself from “Kashmiri resistance” proxies such as The Resistance Front (TRF) while shielding core LeT and JeM terror capabilities. The briefings have also highlighted Pakistan’s track record of shielding figures like terrorist Sajid Mir, a key 26/11 Mumbai attack planner. Pakistan’s shifting claims — first declaring him dead, then “arresting” him under FATF pressure — illustrate a pattern of tactical compliance without genuine crackdowns.
By targeting both temporary launch pads and permanent headquarters across the Line of Control and the International Border, India has signalled that it no longer accepts the distinction Pakistan tries to maintain between “freedom fighters” and state-sponsored terrorists. The message is clear: the entire ecosystem — wherever it operates — is now fair game.
Calibrated but deeper strikes: Terror infrastructure, not military targets
Operation Sindoor maintains the doctrinal line India established in the 2016 surgical strikes and the 2019 Balakot airstrike: India will hit terrorist targets across the LoC and into Pakistan proper, but will not deliberately strike Pakistani military installations. The Ministry of Defence reiterated that “no Pakistani military facilities have been targeted.”
This distinction preserves escalation control and keeps the conflict at the sub-conventional level for now. Yet the scale has markedly increased. While the 2016 operation focused on PoK camps and the 2019 strike hit a JeM facility in Balakot, Sindoor reached deeper into Pakistani territory on both sides of the LoC/IB divide. The operation demonstrates India’s growing capacity and willingness to conduct coordinated, high-impact strikes far from the border.
Signalling restraint while puncturing deterrence
Official statements described the operation as “focused, measured and non-escalatory,” aimed at reassuring both domestic and international audiences that New Delhi does not seek full-scale war. However, the strikes have fundamentally altered the deterrence equation. Pakistan’s threats in the preceding weeks have been exposed as bluffs, at least in terms of their ability to prevent Indian retaliation.
Operation Sindoor represents a maturing Indian counter-terrorism strategy: proportionate in its restraint yet decisive in execution, historical in its framing, and expansive in its geographic reach. It rejects the cycle of outrage followed by inaction that Pakistan has long exploited. By treating terrorism as a continuous campaign rather than a series of discrete incidents, India has placed the onus squarely on Pakistan to dismantle the infrastructure it has nurtured for decades.
Whether this reset leads to genuine behavioural change in Pakistan or to a dangerous new spiral remains to be seen. For now, India has demonstrated both the will and the capability to impose costs that previous responses could not. The coming days will test whether Pakistan understands the changed reality — or chooses to test it further.
