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04-05-2025
Bureau Report + Agencies
NEW DELHI/ ISLAMABAD: Last week’s deadly militant attack in Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir, which claimed 26 civilian lives, has reignited a grim sense of deja for India’s security forces and diplomats.
This is familiar ground. In 2016, after 19 Indian soldiers were killed in Uri, India launched “surgical strikes” across the Line of Control, the de facto border between India and Pakistan, targeting militant bases.
In 2019, the Pulwama bombing, which left 40 Indian paramilitary personnel dead, prompted airstrikes deep into Balakot, the first such action inside Pakistan since 1971 sparking retaliatory raids and an aerial dogfight and before that, the horrific 2008 Mumbai attacks, a 60-hour siege on hotels, a railway station, and a Jewish centre claimed 166 lives.
Each time, India has held Pakistan-based militant groups responsible for the attacks, accusing Islamabad of tacitly supporting them, a charge Pakistan has consistently denied.
Since 2016, and especially after the 2019 airstrikes, the threshold for escalation has shifted dramatically. Cross-border and aerial strikes by India have become the new norm, provoking retaliation from Pakistan. This has further intensified an already volatile situation.
Once again, experts say, India finds itself walking the tightrope between escalation and restraint, a fragile balance of response and deterrence. One person who understands this recurring cycle is Ajay Bisaria, India’s former high commissioner to Pakistan during the Pulwama attack, who captured its aftermath in his memoir, Anger Management; the Troubled Diplomatic Relationship between India and Pakistan.
“There are striking parallels between the aftermath of the Pulwama bombing and the killings in Pahalgam,” Bisaria told me on Thursday, 10 days after the latest attack.
Yet, he notes, Pahalgam marks a shift. Unlike Pulwama and Uri, which targeted security forces, this attack struck civilians, tourists from across India, evoking memories of the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
“This attack carries elements of Pulwama, but much more of Mumbai,” he explains.
“We’re once again in a conflict situation and the story is unfolding in much the same way,” Bisaria says.
A week after the latest attack, Delhi moved quickly with retaliatory measures; closing the main border crossing, suspending a key water-sharing treaty, expelling diplomats and halting most visas for Pakistani nationals who were given days to leave. Troops on both sides have exchanged intermittent small-arms fire across the border in recent days.
Delhi also barred all Pakistani aircraft, commercial and military, from its airspace, mirroring Islamabad’s earlier move. Pakistan retaliated with its own visa suspensions and suspended a 1972 peace treaty with India. (Kashmir, claimed in full by both India and Pakistan but administered in parts by each, has been a flashpoint between the two nuclear-armed nations since their partition in 1947.)
In his memoir, Bisaria recounts India’s response after the Pulwama attack on 14 February 2019. He was summoned to Delhi the morning after, as the government moved quickly to halt trade, revoking Pakistan’s most-favored-nation status, granted in 1996. In the following days, the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) imposed a 200% customs duty on Pakistani goods, effectively ending imports, and suspended trade at the land border at Wagah.
