Our senior defence generals have been authorised by our otherwise silent government to confess to two issues arising from events in the 23 minutes that it took (according to National Security Adviser Ajit Doval) to take out nine terrorist camps in Pakistan just after midnight on May 7: first, admitting to “losses”, with the coda that these are inevitable in combat; and second, noting “tactical errors” in the first round, made good in the second. What has not yet been revealed is the scale and type of Indian fighter aircraft downed. It is argued that this cannot be avowed while hostilities are on. One can only construe this to mean that with Operation Sindoor declared open-ended, hostilities continue.
Meanwhile, it would seem the “tactical error” lay in flying our fighter aircraft too close to the border to escape being hit by the Pakistan Air Force using Chinese weaponry. And the correction in this “tactical error” lay in flying our aircraft some 100 km away from the border. The question, therefore, arises: why was the threat from flying at the edge of our airspace not accounted for when planning the bombing of Pakistani terrorist infrastructure? Especially as the “tactical correction” merely required our flying further inland. Was it because we underestimated the extent of Pak-China military collaboration? And was this underestimation primarily because we thought we were taking on puny Pakistan, not realising that the Pakistani David had merged into the Chinese Goliath?
If there was, in fact, “underestimation” of Pak-China air and missile power, was this related to our not having had any meaningful contact with either Pakistan or China for years—with Pakistan since the Modi government entered office in 2014, 11 years ago, and without even a full complement of diplomatic mission staff (including High Commissioners and defence attachés) since 2019?
And, with regard to China, little or no contact after their incursion into the Galwan Valley until very recently. Did we know the full extent of Chinese weight in the Pakistani punch and still make the “tactical error” of flying too close to Pakistan? Or was it the lack of persistent conversation with these adversaries that accounted for the gap in our knowledge of Pak-China’s military capabilities that led to our losing an undisclosed number of aircraft, including one or more of Modi’s star acquisitions, the Rafale?
And what is one to make of news reports of the French government having circulated instructions to its envoys, especially those in countries considering purchasing Rafale aircraft themselves, to counter Chinese “propaganda” about the performance of Chinese aircraft and missile platforms vis-à-vis Rafale and Indian missile platforms in the first ever use in actual combat of Chinese JC10 aircraft and Chinese 15 BVR missile platforms?
Why would the Chinese boast to all and sundry of the superiority of their weapons and armaments, including modern electronic and cyberwarfare, if they have no evidence of their performance in the four-day India-Pakistan war, and why would the French need to activate their diplomatic power to remain in the race and not give in to Chinese competition unless they need to brush away the miasma over what transpired to the Rafale?
Patton Nagar syndrome
Perhaps too we were caught in the Patton Nagar syndrome. Readers of my generation will vividly recall that in the 1965 conflict, our tanks were reputed to be as nothing compared to the squadrons of Patton tanks the Americans had liberally offered to Pakistan. But while, technically, the Patton tanks should have out-performed our tanks, poor training and poorer battlefield deployment led to India disabling and even capturing so many Patton tanks that they were later grouped into one location and named “Patton Nagar” for the delectation of Indian visitors. Did we think the same fate would befall the Pakistani airmen piloting the Chinese aircraft and manning their sophisticated missile platforms?
Of course, there was nothing so secretive about the Chinese Aeronautics Corporation based in Chengdu and Chinese military manufacturing capacity, as also the hands-on training of Pakistani pilots and joint exercises, that our Air Force would not have read about and absorbed. The crucial missing element was face-to-face contact with Pakistan and China in the crucial years of the run-up to Operation Sindoor.
Such dialogue, and full diplomatic relations, would have alerted us to Pak-China military capabilities. This is how the US and the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) learned about each other through the most freezing moments of their Cold War—persistent contact with the enemy. We back off.
We seem to be readying for a two-front war. In reality, our military challenge is principally on one front: the Pak-China front across our western border. In earlier wars—such as in 1965, 1971, and 1999—we kept a wary eye on the China front to answer any pincer movement by the Chinese to aid Pakistan militarily. Now, the Chinese presence has shifted to the territory of Pakistan. Chinese experts were actually sitting with their Pakistani counterparts in guiding Chinese-made aircraft and missiles and conducting electronic and cyberwarfare, not just supplying sophisticated military hardware, nor just sitting back, as in the past, to contemplate opening a second front across the high Himalaya.
We need to understand Chinese compulsions to safeguard their single biggest and single most risky international investment: the China Pakistan Economic Corridor. India predicted it would bankrupt Pakistan. Of course, it has—and the Chinese knew it would. But for the Chinese, the investment is well worth the risk because of the opening that it gives them to bypass the narrow Strait of Malacca (where they could be bottled up) to secure straight, easy, and quick access to the Indian Ocean.
To protect this invaluable investment, China has to militarily support Pakistan in any military confrontation with India. Did we adequately factor this in when determining that the appropriate response to Pahalgam was to bomb terrorist buildings and communications in the belief that this would restrain Pakistan from pursuing its decades-old policy of bleeding India with “a thousand cuts”—a policy that has not only failed Pakistan repeatedly over 35 years but given the BJP an immensely effective tool to win elections?
So, while it is, of course, appropriate, and even necessary, to fortify ourselves to militarily take on the Pakistanis and the Chinese separately or together, it is even more important that we open a diplomatic blitzkrieg to make South Asia not tomorrow’s battlefield but tomorrow’s zone of peace. “Uninterrupted and uninterruptible dialogue” is required with both Pakistan and China, especially in view of the total lack of global support for our narrative that hinges on identifying and punishing Pakistan as the fountainhead of terrorism aimed at India and its citizens.
So, even as the fall-out of Operation Sindoor requires military clarity, so too should we not be fooling ourselves over the outcome of our diplomatic offensive. Long before Shashi Tharoor and his cohort departed on their missions abroad, the UN Security Council (UNSC) met two days after the terrorist outrage in the meadow outside Pahalgam. The permanent members with veto powers, who include China, unanimously denounced the ghastly terrorist acts of April 22, 2025. The non-permanent members, who include Pakistan, not only unanimously joined the permanent members in condemning terrorism, they demanded also that the “perpetrators, sponsors, financiers” and others involved in arming and supporting the terrorists be brought to justice.
Pakistan had no hesitation in whole-heartedly endorsing the press release—because the UNSC did not even attempt to name who was behind the horrific killings. Far from indicting Pakistan, the UNSC, in effect, exonerated Pakistan by not naming it or even hinting at it. Efforts by the Indian Permanent Mission to the UN to modify the UNSC stand came to nought. And have remained at nought notwithstanding the heroic endeavours of Tharoor & co, as well as the Prime Minister and his Sancho Panza.
In whichever forum—UNSC, BRICS, SCO, et al.—where India has sought to get Pakistan named so as to go beyond the language of the UNSC press release, no forum has obliged. They have stuck to the language of the UNSC press release that deliberately eschewed naming Pakistan as the perpetrator, sponsor, financier, and supporter of cross-border terrorism in India. Not even Bhutan or Maldives, nor even Mauritius whose Indian-origin Hindu majority has generally supported us, has spoken up for us this time. It has been a resounding diplomatic disaster. Our only overt support has come from Benjamin Netanyahu, a person the International Criminal Court has charged with war crimes and issued an arrest warrant for.
And the winner is…
Indeed, the biggest gainer post-Pahalgam is Pakistan. For not only has Pakistan been protected from inclusion in the Financial Action Task Force’s blacklist, it has also received generous financial accommodation to rescue its flailing economy from both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and, bilaterally, massive financial assistance from both China and the United States. Besides, the self-promoted Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan’s military dictator in an allegedly civil government, has had the unprecedented privilege of being invited to luncheon with the US President in the White House despite not being either a head of state or head of government. The world clearly regards Pakistan as far too important strategically to allow it to fail.
The only strategic way forward is to open diplomatic channels in all seriousness to pre-empt a one-front war against Pakistan and China together on the plains of the Indus by two-front “de-escalation, dialogue, and diplomacy” with Pakistan and China respectively, as our Prime Minister urges on everyone but himself. If, indeed, this is not an “Era of War”, as Modiji has proclaimed, it is time he started talking with our western and northern neighbours, not to confront but to reconcile. Is our non-biological leader on a divine mission capable of sheathing his sword and emerging as a peacemaker in our part of the world? That would truly qualify him to get ahead of his friend, Donald Trump, in the queue lining up for the Nobel Peace Prize.
[Mani Shankar Aiyar served 26 years in the Indian Foreign Service, is a four-time MP with over two decades in Parliament, and was a Cabinet Minister from 2004 to 2009. Courtesy: Frontline magazine, a fortnightly English language magazine published by The Hindu Group of publications headquartered in Chennai, India.]
