Operation Sindoor: As India strikes at Pakistan’s beating heart of terror, will it set new normal?

Just like the Balakot airstrike called out Pakistan’s nuclear bluff, Operation Sindoor has brought a paradigm shift in the India-Pakistan relationship.

With strikes in Pakistan’s Punjab’s Bahawalpur and Muridke, India has struck at the beating heart of terrorism’s soul in Pakistan.

The nine sites that India struck are spread across the length of northeastern and eastern Pakistan and cover around half of the country.

The strikes were not against any one entity but against three of the biggest Pakistan-based terrorist groups: Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), and Hizbul Mujahideen. The LeT and JeM witnessed their headquarters being struck by India with JeM chief Masood Azhar losing at least 10 members of his family.

To grasp the gravity of Indian strikes, consider the fact that headquarters of Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba have been attacked , which were not even attacked in 2019 when 49 Indian soldiers were killed in the Pulwama attack, says Yusuf Unjhawala, a geopolitics scholar at the Takshashila Institution.

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Unjhawala tells Firstpost, “Pakistan’s Punjab is the beating heart of Pakistan’s terrorism movement. Bahawalpur is also the home of Pakistani Army’s 31 Corps. By bombing the Jaish headquarters at Bahawalpur, India has demonstrated the ability to bomb the headquarters of the corps headquarters as well. Similarly, Muridke is next door to Lahore, which is the seat of the Punjab’s politics. As Punjab is Pakistan and Pakistan is Punjab, a strike at the doorstep of Lahore is a huge deal.”

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While what happens next is up to Pakistan, what is indeed in India’s hand now is whether Operation Sindoor would become a one-off instance of India imposing costs on Pakistan or a new normal where India would impose costs so severe that Pakistan would be forced to reduce the frequency of its attacks.

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‘India has to set a new normal’

To be sure, India cannot impose assured deterrence on Pakistan as it is a country driven by a jihadist national ideology — as argued in this article . As Pakistan was founded as an artificial nation just out of opposition to India in the name of religion, a religious war on India has been its national ideology since inception.

Instead of imposing deterrence, which is impossible, India’s approach over the past decade has been to impose costs and set a new normal after every major misadventure from Pakistan.

After the Uri attack in 2016, India publicly acknowledged cross-border ground attacks. After the Pulwama attack in 2019, India struck Pakistan-proper for the first time since 1971. Similarly, after the Pahalgam attack, India has not just hit Pakistan-proper but hit half the country — and struck on the beating heart of the country.

India should make such responses a new normal, says Unjhawala.

“The question that the Indian leadership has to address is whether Operation Sindoor-like response should be the new normal. I believe it should be. India has to respond to incidents with even fewer deaths than Pahalgam with cross-border strikes so that Pakistan knows that there is no acceptable number of deaths. Pakistan has to know that there would be a cost to its actions. India would need to set a new normal where Pakistan is assured of swift and strong retaliations at critical locations in case of acts of terror inside India,” says Unjhawala.