After nearly eight decades of enduring the strategy of ‘a thousand cuts’, India must respond with its own strategy of poisoning the sources of power of the Pakistani Army.
NEW DELHI: Ever since the Pakistan Army sent its soldiers disguised as “tribesmen” to attack India in Jammu and Kashmir soon after the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the question of establishing deterrence against an ideological enemy has worried India.
This question has been further muddied by subsequent wars which led to Pakistani defeats, in 1965, 1971, and in Kargil, and yet it is impossible to deny that the Pakistani military state has sought to effectively alter the narrative and project a victory. The only place the Pakistani establishment could not do this was the actual breaking up of Pakistan after the Bangladesh independence war in 1971. Even in 2019, when India defied hitherto established red lines of crossing into Pakistani territory to hit terror camps after the attack in Pulwama in Kashmir by the terrorist group Jaish e-Mohammed headquartered in Pakistan, the Pakistani air retaliation, which also involved the capture (and subsequent return) of an Indian pilot, gave Pakistan a face saver.
For many in India, the fact that India had crossed what had been considered a “red line”—going inside Pakistani territory to attack—would signal to Pakistan about its determination to fight terrorism at all costs. And this would convince Pakistan to move away from its strategy of harbouring and using Islamist terrorist groups and using them to further the proxy war against India. The abrogation of Article 370 and the complete constitutional integration of Jammu and Kashmir with the Indian state gave an irreversible sense of closure to many in India.
In the years that followed a semblance of normalcy dawned on the Jammu and Kashmir region with tourist arrivals of up to 1.6 million in summer 2024. In areas of downtown Srinagar where dusk meant eerie emptiness, and the Indian flag could never be seen, countless tourists and coffee shops opened under the sway of giant Indian Tricolours.
But after Covid and incessant political and economic crisis in Pakistan (the country’s most popular leader, Imran Khan, is still in prison) has made the country’s military establishment desperate. It is often said that while in other countries, nations have a military, in Pakistan, the military has a nation. Not least because, through a host of companies, the Pakistani military establishment has an interest in, and extracts rent from, every aspect of the perpetually indebted Pakistani economy which just took its 26th loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The Pakistani Army now faces an economy that, while sometimes showing a spurt of activity, is in all probability hopelessly crippled by debt and inflation. And yet it must keep shelling out billions of dollars for armaments ($11 billion at last count) each year. India already spends eight times that amount and the gulf between the Gross Domestic Products of the two countries has grown to around eleven times. There is no way that in any foreseeable future that Pakistan could ever hope to match India for military spend or economic heft, but that is not acceptable to the Pakistani Army, which exists to perpetuate a sense of parity with India and without its claim on Kashmir, it would have no reason to exist.
This is why, at a time of dire economic crisis, a few weeks ago the Pakistan Army chief, Asim Munir once again described Kashmir as their “jugular vein” and framed the India-Pakistan contestation as a war “against Hindus and Hindu India” (even though as many Muslims live in India as in Pakistan, while Pakistan has steadily eliminated its Hindu population through murder, forced exile or forced conversion). The Pahalgam attack that came soon after Munir’s speech—and had terrorists check the faith of tourists before killing them—showed that the Pakistan Army is determined to ignite relations again. The Pakistan Army is also desperate because of internal strife—its hold on Balochistan is increasingly tenuous and the Baloch rebels ever more emboldened. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa too, matters are slipping out of hand with the Tehreek e-Taliban Pakistan back in action. Its relations both with Afghanistan and Iran are volatile. There was a desperate need for the Pakistan Army to do something to strengthen their legitimacy. Therefore, the oldest trick in their book—a terrorist attack on India, and a return to the Kashmir theme.
The ongoing war, yes, it is now clearly war, has many lessons for India. It is showing, for instance, how weak the Pakistan Army really is and how feeble their ability to continue a prolonged conflict. Barring some weapons given by the Chinese and the Americans, the Pakistan Army does not have the capacity to fight a protracted war and their continuous talk of using nuclear weapons is a ruse, a bluff that has now been called. The truth is that the Pakistani generals would never risk their financial empire that they have built for decades—a nation whose economy exists to fuel the luxuries of the armed forces and a bunch of inept, hopelessly out-of-touch feudal politicians who have no choice but to do the army’s bidding.
But it has also shown that with Chinese and Western support—note the latest IMF loan tranche has come to Pakistan in the middle of this war—will mean that the Pakistan Army will continue to have deep nuisance value and will never give up its terrorist assets. Both China and parts of the West see Pakistan as a convenient tool—to fight inconvenient battles, to keep stumbling India’s path, and even to test out the efficacy of their weapons without any collateral damage. Therefore, this support is unlikely to entirely disappear. Though, as it happened with China, as India grows stronger, becomes the third largest economy from the fourth largest, crosses GDP of $10 trillion, the costs of offending India will keep growing, and India should ensure that these costs keep rising. For instance, it must immediately impose economic costs on Turkey and Azerbaijan who have supported Pakistan in this war—a mere pressure that will stop Indian tourists from going to those countries and curtailing goods and services will have an impact. This will grow exponentially as India grows richer and militarily more independent with its own well-developed military industrial complex.
What should India do in such a situation? In 2019, I had written about India’s “Shishupala Doctrine” based on the story of Shishupala who had a boon from Krishna that he would be forgiven one hundred sins. And yet, Shishupala could not stop committing his 101st transgression which led to his decapitation by the Sudarshan Chakra, the divine discus. I had argued that Pulwama represented that 101st transgression which had led to Prime Minister Modi crossing the red line of attacking Pakistan inside its territory. But even that has not led to long-term deterrence.
I am now arguing that there will be no such thing as deterrence below the nuclear threshold which will hold for a long period of time between India and Pakistan until the Pakistani state fragments under internal pressures. India must be prepared for a long period of periodic heavy military collisions. And therefore, it must adopt a new strategy based on the old Sanskrit adage, jalam visravayet sarmavamavisravyam ca dusayet (the waters of wells of the enemy must be poisoned and polluted). This line is sometimes credited to Kautilya, the strategist given credit for authoring the Arthashastra treatise, but its exact source is uncertain. But the moral is extremely clear.
Pakistan’s Achilles Heel is not its weakening military alone; it is its economy. India must consistently impose greater costs on Pakistan. Water is one key way this can be done and the process has already started. The Indus Water Treaty is a by-product of goodwill—and this must be impressed upon Pakistan. Each time there is a limited war, Pakistan goes through immense economic drain—already fuel sanctions have been imposed in its major cities. An attack by India that disrupts the Karachi port would immediately lead to shortages and inflation. Every infrastructure—military or civilian—destroyed in conflict with India is far more tough for Pakistan to rebuild than India.
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a former Pakistani Prime Minister, had built a doctrine of “bleeding India through a thousand cuts”, and after Bhutto was deposed and killed in a military coup, the man who took charge, General Zia-ul-Haq, built on this idea. Even though Bhutto gave words to the strategy, it could be argued that Pakistan has been using this method ever since the first conflict as soon as two separate countries were created. Using terrorists in an asymmetric war is a critical part of this doctrine. To counter this, India must now adopt a strategy of “poisoning the wells”; in ancient India, “vishkanyas” or women masters of venom were deployed to toxify important infrastructure and assets (including human beings) of the enemy—especially at the weak spots—to cripple their strategic power projection and limit their influence. Pakistan has countless such weak spots—from its economic failure to its dependence on remittances, to its water and fuel scarcity, inability to domestically create weapons, and growing secessionist movements. Each of these can be used at a regular basis to keep Pakistan on the boil—this would not only frustrate Pakistan, but would also cripple its main sponsor China which hopes to use it for its own goals, and to attack India. India does not have to fight a calamitous war with Pakistan, nor does it have to worry about the use of nuclear weapons. It only has to keep weakening, and tiring out, Pakistan, a country where almost every person in decision making or elite position has a dual citizenship. As they tire of the conflict and they see their assets eroding, the Pakistan elite will flee in numbers larger than ever. The truth is, such is the condition of Pakistan that a lot of its people are also entrapped by the machinations of the Pakistan Army, the feudal politicians and the Islamists. They too want a better life but are unable to access this in Pakistan. Therefore, they will leave. This emptying of Pakistan at the top will inevitably mean more and more of the control slipping into the hands of radical Islamists—who already have significant control within the armed forces. There shall come a day when there would be no choice but to de-couple the Pakistani state from its nuclear weapons. This is not something that will happen in a day but the manner in which Pakistan is tottering, that day is not far. Even China which claims to be Pakistan’s ironclad brother fears that such an implosion would send radical Islamists into Xinjiang. India needs to now play this long game of adding venom to every wound of Pakistan—after nearly eight decades of suffering the “thousand cuts strategy”, it is time to reverse it.
* Hindol Sengupta is a historian and professor of international relations at the O. P. Jindal Global University.