Part I of a series auditing Indian foreign policy since 2014

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1. Introduction: The Discipline of the Audit

This paper audits India’s Pakistan policy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi against the objectives the government has publicly set for itself. It does so within a broader inquiry that runs through the paper from the outset: whether the current architecture of Indian foreign policy amounts to a doctrine, or whether it remains a position. That distinction is central. A doctrine is more than a recognisable pattern of conduct. It is institutionalised, reproducible, and durable beyond the tenure, authority, and political instincts of the leadership that first gave it force. 

Since 2014, Indian foreign policy has been described through the language of strategic autonomy, or multi-alignment: the effort to preserve freedom of decision by avoiding durable dependence on any one power bloc. Within that wider framework, Pakistan is an instructive exception. Elsewhere, Modi-era foreign policy has largely emphasised flexibility, diversification, and calibrated engagement. On Pakistan, it has relied far more heavily on overt political signalling, visible retaliation, condemnation-based diplomacy, and public declarations of changed state posture.

The paper therefore asks four connected questions. First, has the government’s Pakistan policy achieved the objectives it has publicly set for itself? Second, have those objectives been pursued through a doctrine or through a position? Third, has the approach widened or narrowed India’s future options? Fourth, have the costs of the approach fallen where its architects appear to have intended, or have they been displaced onto other parts of India’s strategic position?

The argument that follows is dual. The record is strongest on operational capability and political resolve. India has shown that it is willing to retaliate visibly against Pakistan after major attacks, and to do so despite Pakistan’s nuclear status. But the audit is less supportive of the larger claims that have been attached to that posture. The deterrent effect remains uncertain. The objective of diplomatic isolation has not been secured. The signalling effect inside Pakistan may have reinforced, rather than weakened, the military establishment’s internal position. And the domestic political embedding of the policy has increased the cost of recalibration while weakening the visibility of internal institutional review.

Taken together, these findings suggest that the Pakistan policy is stronger as a position than as a doctrine. It is coherent in performance, but thinner in institutionalisation. It has demonstrated will more clearly than method, and posture more clearly than reproducible strategic design.

The paper addresses a policy, not a party. It is offered in the Subrahmanyam tradition of strategic audit, in which rigorous institutional self-examination is understood to be a foundation of national capability rather than its adversary.

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2. Strategic Autonomy and the Question of Doctrine

India has had the same Prime Minister and leading party through three general elections, three United States administrations across Democrats and Republicans, a protracted border crisis with China, three cross-border military confrontations with Pakistan, Eurasia and West Asia wars, and a structural reshaping of the international economic order. This is a long arc for a government’s intended objectives to be compared with observable outcomes, and for the external reception of policy to assume a recognisable pattern. It permits a temporally longitudinal reading of continuity, adaptation, and constraint that shorter assessments cannot provide.

Image Source: The Economic Times

Strategic autonomy is the concept around which the Modi government has organised its foreign policy.

It refers to India’s ability to take positions on international questions without subordination to a single bloc or coalition. Its practical expression has been a deliberately wide-ranging bilateralism: to engage the United States, manage China, cultivate Europe, preserve ties with Russia, deepen relations with Japan, and maintain influence in the neighbourhood and beyond. The government considers autonomy not as abstention from power politics but as simultaneous participation in several directions, with no single relationship permitted to foreclose the others.

As an objective, this is not new. Since independence, and with particular vigour since the end of the Cold War, Indian governments of varied political complexion have sought to maximise independent decision-making in an environment they do not control. The vocabulary has migrated from non-alignment through multi-alignment to strategic autonomy, but the underlying strategic aim has remained recognisable across successive administrations. That continuity is analytically useful because it isolates what is actually distinctive about the current period. The objective is substantially inherited; the instrument is not.

Sustaining that distinction through this paper is a discipline rather than a courtesy. The critique of an instrument is not a critique of the objective it has been designed to serve, and conflating the two is a common failure of foreign-policy commentary. This audit, therefore, treats strategic autonomy as a standing national objective and examines how the Modi-era instrument has performed against it.

The current phase has relied more heavily than its predecessors on leader-centric diplomacy, accelerated political signalling, and a more personified projection of foreign policy. The Prime Minister has become not merely the principal decision-maker, which was always true in large measure, but also the dominant public vehicle through which major external positions are communicated and interpreted. Announcements of consequential positions are increasingly made from political platforms (party rallies, televised addresses, social-media posts) rather than from Parliament or from standing MEA briefings.

This style has delivered clear advantages. It has increased visibility, raised tempo, and allowed the state to project unity of purpose where ambiguity might otherwise have been read as weakness. But those same features create an institutional question. Is the current method sufficiently codified, teachable, and resilient to survive shocks, counterpart instability, or leadership transition? Or does it depend too heavily on the political longevity and personal authority of the present leadership?

On the public record, the answer remains uncertain. India has not published a National Security Strategy. It has not articulated in public a formal doctrine translating strategic autonomy into standing institutional procedure. What exists instead is a recognisable style of statecraft: flexible, leader-driven, highly visible, and often effective in tactical terms. That does not make it incoherent. However, it does mean that the distinction between doctrine and position cannot be assumed away.

Pakistan is where this distinction becomes most visible. A position can be forceful because the political incentives for clarity are strong and the domestic rewards for visible resolve are immediate. A doctrine, by contrast, would need to show more: that the instruments being used are institutionally durable, that they align with one another, that they remain effective over time, and that they do not narrow the state’s future options faster than they secure its present objectives.

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3. The Pakistan Analysis 

Image Source: Business Today

Policy towards Pakistan under the current government has been organised around four explicit objectives. The first is deterrence of cross-border terrorism through credible, visible, claimed punitive condign. The “surgical strikes” of September 2016 following Uri; the Balakot airstrikes of February 2019 following Pulwama; Operation Sindoor of May 2025 following Pahalgam fall under this. The second is the international diplomatic isolation of Pakistan; its exclusion from the respectability afforded to normal international partners. The third is strategic signalling to the Pakistani establishment, intended to raise costs on the military–intelligence complex that is understood to sponsor or permit cross-border terror. The fourth is unambiguous communication to the Indian public that the state’s posture has fundamentally changed.  

Each of these objectives is a government-stated benchmark; each, therefore, is a legitimate subject of audit.

1) Deterrence: capability demonstrated, strategic effect uncertain

The most substantial credit of the current policy is that it has demonstrated India’s willingness to impose visible military costs after major attacks without treating Pakistan’s nuclear status as an absolute barrier to action. 

The Uri attack of 18 September 2016 killed nineteen Indian soldiers; Indian surgical strikes across the Line of Control followed on 28–29 September. The Pulwama attack of 14 February 2019 killed forty CRPF personnel in a vehicle-borne suicide bombing; the Balakot airstrikes followed on 26 February, and an aerial engagement the next day. The Pahalgam attack of 22 April 2025 killed twenty-six civilians, almost all of them Indian tourists, in Baisaran meadow; Operation Sindoor followed on 7 May. During the four-day conflict, Pakistan launched Operation Bunyan-un-Marsoos against Indian installations; aerial engagements involved more than 114 aircraft across both sides in what independent reporting described as the largest beyond-visual-range engagement on the India–Pakistan border on record; a ceasefire was agreed on 10 May.

In that narrow operational sense, a posture has undeniably been established. However,  an audit of deterrence cannot stop at demonstration. It must ask whether the behaviour to be deterred has been prevented, materially reduced, or rendered costlier in a way that alters the pattern of strategic injury over time. On that stricter test, the record is less conclusive. Major attacks have continued to recur. The Red Fort blast of 10 November 2025 killed twelve civilians at one of Delhi’s most securitised sites, within six months of Operation Sindoor. Whatever restraint may have operated, it has not amounted to reliable prevention of strategically salient violence.

Image Source: Firstpost

It is important to engage with arguments in support of deterrence’s success. The strongest defence of the doctrine is that deterrence should not be judged by the total disappearance of attacks, but by changes in their scale, frequency, or form. That is a serious position. Yet the size and character of the attacks under review make it difficult to claim that the residual violence has been merely marginal or lower-order. The second defence is counterfactual: visible retaliation may have prevented larger attacks than those that occurred. The reasoning is legitimate but cuts both ways. Pakistani strategic analysts argue that Islamabad’s restraint, where it has operated, has been shaped primarily by Indian nuclear posture and by Pakistan’s own internal costs, not by conventional Indian retaliation. If mutual deterrence at the nuclear level was already operating, the claim that conventional strikes have added marginal deterrence requires independent evidence, not an appeal to the counterfactual.The third is temporal: deterrence builds through repetition and is not susceptible to immediate assessment. Yet twelve years is not an insubstantial period. If a policy requires a decadal horizon before its effects can be observed, that is itself an admission that immediate claims of strategic success should be made with greater restraint.

The problem has been sharpened by the declaratory shift that accompanied the Pahalgam attack. Publicly defining the next major Pakistan-origin terror attack as tantamount to an “act of war”, and coupling that with an explicit rejection of “nuclear blackmail,” alters the strategic logic of the doctrine. Publicly articulated red lines can enhance credibility in the short term by reducing doubt about resolve. However, it also recognises that such declarations generate self-binding effects. Once announced, they increase the domestic and political penalties attached to restraint, ambiguity, or de-escalatory adjustment. It also reduces India’s room for manoeuvering when evidence is incomplete, attribution is contested, or escalation management requires ambiguity. A doctrine intended to enhance deterrence may therefore also reduce strategic flexibility. In a theatre defined by proxies, deniability, imperfect attribution, and rapid escalation risk, that loss of discretion is not incidental.  

Finally, the doctrine of deterrence is meant to impose damage on terror infrastructure and its sponsors. Yet many of its most visible burdens are borne elsewhere: by Indian military and paramilitary personnel required to sustain a high-readiness posture, by civilians in exposed border regions, by diplomatic bandwidth consumed in repeated crisis management, and by a state whose strategic attention is repeatedly pulled toward managing recurrent shocks. This does not mean the doctrine has been without effect. It means that the observable distribution of costs does not yet clearly match the theory by which the doctrine justifies itself. 

The fairest audit finding, then, is a limited one. The doctrine has demonstrated operational reach, political resolve, and a willingness to deny fully cost-free provocation. What it has not yet demonstrated with equal clarity is that these attributes have produced the durable deterrent effect claimed for them. Capability has been shown. Strategic outcome remains uncertain. That matters to the doctrine-versus-position inquiry because demonstration of will is easier to personalise than production of stable strategic effect. On deterrence, the record is stronger on posture than on institutionally validated outcome.

2) Diplomatic isolation: objective unmet, de-hyphenation weakened

The diplomatic component of India’s Pakistan policy is more readily auditable than its deterrence claims because the relevant outputs are public, declaratory, and externally observable. The government’s stated objective has been explicit: international diplomatic isolation of Pakistan. The operative indicators are well-defined and government-declared:  global condemnation of Pakistan for terror sponsorship; Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey-listing or equivalent financial censure; explicit international endorsement of Indian counter-terror responses; diplomatic exclusion of Pakistan from the respectability accorded normal partners; and preservation of de-hyphenation, under which India is treated on its own terms rather than bracketed with Pakistan. 

Measured against those indicators, the post-Operation Sindoor record is not favourable to the isolation claim. India deployed substantial instruments: all-party delegations visited 32 countries and the European Union, suspension of bilateral channels, and a large public diplomacy effort. 

Yet the principal outputs did not follow.

No G20 state publicly named Pakistan as the sponsor of the Pahalgam attack in the immediate aftermath.

FATF condemned the attack but did not place Pakistan back on the grey list. No major strategic partner publicly endorsed Operation Sindoor by name. A subsequent report by the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission characterised Pahalgam using the term “insurgent attack”, a framing described publicly as an “astonishing diplomatic setback”.

This failure is clearest on the question of de-hyphenation. For two decades, successive Indian governments sought to reduce the tendency of major powers to view India through the Pakistan prism and ensure that India was not persistently managed as part of a paired South Asian problem. Operation Sindoor visibly disrupted that posture. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s parallel calls to Delhi and Rawalpindi during the crisis; Mr Trump’s public framing of the conflict as “that fight for 1,500 years“; the announcement of a “US-brokered” ceasefire between the two: all of these produced visible re-hyphenation. 

This matters not only as a diplomatic setback, but as evidence in the doctrine-versus-position inquiry. A doctrine requires internal alignment among its instruments. Here, the instruments appear to pull in opposite directions. A policy of overt retaliation raises Pakistan’s salience in India’s external profile. A policy of de-hyphenation seeks to reduce Pakistan’s salience in how third parties perceive India. Both can perhaps coexist tactically for a time. But they do not sit easily together as a durable strategic method. The stronger the public claim that Pakistan is the central proving ground of Indian resolve, the harder it becomes to insist that others should treat India without reference to Pakistan.

The subsequent recovery of Pakistan’s external utility sharpens the point. Within the year following Operation Sindoor, Islamabad has undergone a systematic and internationally visible rehabilitation. It received USD 1 billion IMF disbursement during active conflict; was publicly described by the US Central Command chief as a “phenomenal partner“; elevated its army chief to Field Marshal as an unambiguous signal of domestic consolidation of military authority; received a high-visibility White House reception. 

President Trump referred to Asim Munir as his “favourite field marshal” and described him publicly as “a great fighter,” “a very important guy,” and “an exceptional human being”. Pakistan nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the May 2025 ceasefire. Both gestures signalled an operational American–Pakistani channel of a depth unseen since at least 2011.

In April 2026, Pakistan had positioned itself as a channel for US-Iran de-escalation, hosting direct talks in Islamabad and receiving public acknowledgement internationally. During the same West Asia crises, EAM Dr S. Jaishankar made a remark that has, by common consent, come to characterise the moment. “Hum unki tarah dalali nahi kar sakte” — we cannot act as brokers like them. The linguistic choice is worth dwelling on. Dalal, in Hindi and Urdu, denotes a broker — but with pejorative weight, closer to “tout” or “middleman” than to the neutral English “broker.” It is a register of contempt. The word was deployed, in the middle of an opposition critique of Indian diplomatic marginalisation, to reclassify Pakistan’s mediation role not as what it operationally is, diplomatic indispensability to both superpowers, but as what the word connotes: undignified hustle. The utterance’s function was domestic. Its effect was to make explicit what the external record had already established: that the positions of the two South Asian states in the international architecture had traded places.

The analytical question is why. A tempting but facile explanation is American fickleness or Trumpian caprice. Both are present; neither is sufficient. Mr Shivshankar Menon, former NSA offered an explanation: “The world will do what suits their interest. They find Pakistan useful. Pakistan has tried to make herself useful to other people, whether it is in Centcom’s fight against ISIS Khorasan or whether it is the Pakistanis now investing in cryptocurrency which is being pushed by the White House”. And: “Today, due to US–China rivalry and shifting alliances, Pakistan is more useful to global powers“.

Therefore, India must distinguish between condemnation-seeking and interest-shaping diplomacy. The former attempts to move states by moral pressure; the latter attempts to move states by altering their calculations of interest. The former is what India’s Pakistan policy under the current government has been configured to do. The latter is what the Pakistani state, understanding its weakness, has set itself to do. 

Pakistan has, in the period under review, systematically cultivated instrumental utility to multiple major powers. India, by contrast, has configured its Pakistan diplomacy around the narrative of victimhood and perfidy, expecting that the cumulative weight of condemnation would alter third-state behaviour. On analysis and, now, on the record, it has not. States have continued to act on their interests. When those interests aligned with engaging Pakistan, they did. The implication is that Indian diplomatic energy has been expended in the wrong currency because the posture of moral demand is one that countries find costly to accommodate and easy to ignore. For two decades, de-hyphenation policy worked precisely because it lowered the moral demand India placed on third parties and thereby raised the instrumental case for engaging India on its own merits. The current policy, inseparable from its declaratory maximalism, re-raises that demand.

On this count, the audit therefore points in a clear direction. The policy has not operated as a durable doctrine capable of aligning military signalling, diplomatic method, and long-term de-hyphenation. It has operated more as a forceful position with contradictory objectives.

3) Signalling to the Pakistani establishment

The signalling objective is the most conceptually sophisticated element of the policy. It rests on the idea that visible Indian retaliation can alter the calculations of the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment by raising the costs of proxy violence. Assessing that objective requires looking not only at what India signals, but at how that signal is processed inside Pakistan’s political order.

The Pakistan Army, and particularly the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, occupies a position in the Pakistani political economy whose structural durability derives from the claim that Pakistan faces an existential threat from India. The civil–military balance in Pakistan is not a constant but a variable: periods of civilian assertion (portions of the Sharif and Zardari tenures; the 2007–08 lawyers’ movement) have alternated with periods of military consolidation (Musharraf era; the post-2017 era under Bajwa and Munir). The variable is sensitive to the salience of India in Pakistani public discourse; high salience favours consolidation, low salience creates space for civilian assertion.

That is why this objective bears directly on the doctrine question. A doctrine should be able to account for the second-order effects of its own instruments. A position often does not need to; it can settle for immediate signalling value. The available record after May 2025 is at least consistent with the concern that Indian retaliation strengthened the Pakistani military’s domestic position. Announced Indian strikes on Pakistani territory can be presented internally as proof of the threat environment the Army claims uniquely to manage. Indian policy instruments may, in operation, reinforce the very internal distribution of power in Pakistan that India would otherwise have reason to weaken. 

The empirical consequences of Operation Sindoor are consistent with this mechanism. Reports suggest the strikes “appeared to unify fractured Pakistani political forces domestically“, “emboldened” Pakistan, that “the Pakistani military emerged more popular than earlier, and the political leadership saw the need to strengthen the armed forces”. Coverage across a range of Pakistani political tendencies converged on the observation that Field Marshal Munir’s standing, and the Army’s position within the Pakistani constitutional order, were substantially consolidated. 

The audit can identify a real trade-off. If each visible Indian retaliation simultaneously raises the domestic standing of the institution in Pakistan most invested in hostility toward India, then the long-run effect of the policy becomes harder to classify. The instrument may generate tactical coercive value while reproducing the adversary’s preferred domestic structure. That ambiguity is precisely the kind of problem a doctrine must confront publicly and institutionally. It cannot be handled by assertion alone. On this objective, the current policy again appears stronger as a position than as a doctrine: sharper in immediate signalling than in the integration of second-order political effects into a durable strategic design.

4) The domestic political dimension and the accountability asymmetry

The domestic dimension of the policy is not incidental. It is one of the clearest markers of the distinction between doctrine and position. The government has not merely acted on Pakistan; it has communicated that action to domestic audiences in a highly visible, politically saturated way. Naming practices, briefing formats, campaign rhetoric, and the broader public staging of resolve suggest that foreign-policy signalling and domestic political communication have become more tightly fused than in earlier periods.

That integration matters because of audience costs. Once a foreign-policy posture becomes politically load-bearing at home, it is no longer judged only by its strategic effects abroad. It also becomes part of the government’s domestic political capital. At that point, recalibration grows more difficult for two reasons. First, policy adjustment carries not only strategic cost but political cost: a government that has publicly invested in a posture of resolve has less room to revise that posture without appearing to retreat. Second, domestic expectations begin to shape what responses are treated as viable in future crises. The operative question moves from what produces the most advantageous strategic outcome to what satisfies the audience whose expectations the state itself has helped construct. 

Over time, this creates path dependence: not because the policy has been deeply institutionalised, but because it has been deeply politicised. That is an important distinction. Institutionalisation broadens a state’s capacity by turning practice into method. Politicisation often narrows capacity by making retreat, ambiguity, or recalibration costlier than they would otherwise be. In that sense, domestic entrenchment can mimic doctrinal durability while in fact being its opposite. It can make a position harder to abandon without making it more strategically robust.

The accountability record points in the same direction. The Indian state has, across decades, demonstrated an established capacity for serious post-incident review. After Kargil, an authoritative committee was empanelled, reported publicly, identified institutional failures, and helped drive structural reform. After the Mumbai attacks of 2008, the Ram Pradhan Committee reviewed the Maharashtra government’s response; parliamentary committees examined intelligence coordination failures and institutional changes were made. Even the Henderson Brooks–Bhagat report on the 1962 war, never officially declassified, was completed and substantially leaked into the public domain. Comparable reviews exist for operational and institutional failures across decades. This tradition matters because it established a standard: major national-security shocks were not treated only as occasions for external blame and military response, but also as triggers for internal institutional accounting. 

By contrast, after the Pulwama terror attack, per the CRPF’s internal post-mortem, at least eleven specific intelligence inputs had been received and not acted upon. This included the Home Ministry declining a CRPF request to move the convoy by air. Mr Satya Pal Malik, who was Jammu and Kashmir’s Governor at the time, later said the attack reflected the “incompetence” and “carelessness” of the current government, and that he had been asked by the PM and NSA Ajit Doval to keep quiet about lapses. Those are allegations, not adjudicated findings. However, what gives them analytical force is the absence of any comparably authoritative public accounting that settled the matter. 

Following the Pahalgam attack, no publicly reported review committee was empanelled as of the writing of this paper. Following the Red Fort blast, no review.

It is not being argued that the state conducted no internal inquiry at all. Service-level assessments, investigative processes, and security reviews are part of the normal administrative response to such incidents. The concentrated claim is that these are not equivalent to the more demanding standard India has previously applied after major strategic failures. That older standard combined attribution with self-examination. The current pattern appears more asymmetrical: the state is highly public in assigning responsibility outward, but comparatively less public in examining institutional failure inward. On that narrower institutional question, the critique has force irrespective of partisan framing. 

That asymmetry is highly relevant to the doctrine question. A doctrine requires more than repetition of response. It requires an architecture through which each crisis updates the state’s method. Without that architecture, visible retaliation risks remaining narrative rather than doctrine: a repeated display of resolve not matched by equally visible institutional correction. Where external attribution is public but internal accounting remains partial, opaque, or routine rather than structural, the doctrine risks becoming performative. It may still generate immediate political effect, but its institutional credibility erodes each time an attack happens. Therefore, this factor is also positioning alone.

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4. Synthesis: Doctrine or Position?

On operational capability and political resolve, the record is strong. India has demonstrated that it is prepared to retaliate visibly and repeatedly after major attacks. That is not trivial. It marks a genuine change in state practice.

However, the audit’s central question is not whether the government has been active or resolute. It is whether those actions amount to a doctrine. On that question, the Pakistan case yields a more restrained answer.

A doctrine should align means and ends across instruments. Here, the instruments often work at cross-purposes: visible retaliation raises Pakistan’s salience while de-hyphenation seeks to lower it; signalling to the Pakistani establishment may also strengthen its domestic narrative; domestic political embedding raises the cost of recalibration without improving strategic flexibility; external attribution is highly visible while internal learning is less so. These are signs of a method not yet fully reconciled with itself.

A doctrine should also widen the state’s future option space. The Pakistan analysis shows the opposite tendency is more visible. Public red lines increase self-binding effects. Domestic audience expectations narrow response menus. Diplomatic re-hyphenation complicates future efforts to handle Pakistan as a second-order bilateral problem. If a policy reduces the range of instruments available to its successors faster than it secures durable outcomes in the present, it is behaving more like a position than a doctrine.

Finally, a doctrine should be durable beyond its architect. The Pakistan case suggests a policy heavily dependent on the political authority, communicative style, and centralising tendencies of the present leadership. What has been institutionalised most successfully is not a transparent body of doctrine, but a pattern of highly visible state performance. That can be sustained for a time. It may even prove effective in particular crises. But a pattern that depends on its current custodian is, by definition, not yet a fully formed doctrine.

The fairest conclusion, then, is not that India lacks a Pakistan policy, nor that the policy has been without effect. It is that the Modi government has constructed a forceful and politically resonant position on Pakistan, parts of which may in time harden into doctrine, but which at the period under review remains only partially institutionalised. It is stronger on demonstration than codification, stronger on resolve than on reproducible method, and stronger on political coherence than on strategic durability.

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5. Implications 

That conclusion has two implications. The first is analytical. The Pakistan file should not be read only as an argument about success or failure. It is more usefully read as a test of institutional form. It reveals where the government has succeeded in changing visible state behaviour, and where it has not yet translated that behavioural change into a durable doctrine.

The second is practical. If India wishes to convert the current position into doctrine, the task is not to become less firm. It is to become more institutional. That would require clearer articulation of strategic purpose, better alignment among instruments, restoration of visible post-incident review, greater tolerance for calibrated ambiguity, and a diplomacy oriented more toward shaping interests than demanding endorsement. Until then, the Pakistan policy will remain significant, forceful, and auditable, but better described as a position than as a doctrine.