The Pakistan Analysis: An Audit of India’s Foreign Policy Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, 2014–2026

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India’s foreign policy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been defined by the doctrine of strategic autonomy. It is a deliberate effort to preserve decision-making independence by avoiding binding alignment with any single great power. In practice, this has meant diversifying partnerships across the United States, Russia, the Gulf states, and the Indo-Pacific region. Engagements have been calibrated to Indian interests rather than to alliance obligations. The government has also resisted external pressure to take sides in conflicts not directly bearing on Indian security. The approach has been widely noted as sophisticated, if occasionally, uncomfortable, to a multipolar international order.

As an outlier, India’s policy towards Pakistan occupies a distinct position. Rather than the studied flexibility characteristic of the Modi-era approach, the Pakistan relationship has been managed through a markedly different metric of intense political signalling, a demonstrated willingness to conduct overt military operations across the Line of Control, and a sustained effort to isolate Pakistan diplomatically on the question of state-sponsored terrorism.

This paper undertakes an audit considering three questions. First, has the Modi-era Pakistan policy achieved its publicly stated objectives — deterring cross-border terrorism, imposing reputational and diplomatic costs on Islamabad, and reshaping the strategic calculus of the Pakistani military establishment? Second, should this policy be understood as a doctrine — institutionalised, reproducible, and durable beyond the present leadership — or as a position: coherent and identifiable, but contingent on political will and personal authority? Third, has the policy as practised expanded or narrowed India’s future strategic options?

The findings presented here are qualified but pointed. On the first question, the record is mixed. India has demonstrated real operational capability and political resolve. Yet its broader objectives have fallen short. Deterrence has not demonstrably held; diplomatic isolation of Pakistan has been unsuccessful; and there is a credible case that political signalling has, paradoxically, strengthened rather than weakened the Pakistani military’s domestic position by providing an external Indian threat around which to consolidate.

On the second question, this paper argues that the government’s policy is better understood as a position than a doctrine. It has been consistent and recognisable as a reflection of the preferences and political style of the current leadership rather than the operation of institutionalised strategic logic. On the third question, the domestic political embedding of the policy, its integration into electoral messaging and public nationalism, has created structural constraints that limit the space for recalibration, weaken internal institutional review, and may foreclose options that a future government would otherwise wish to retain.

This paper situates itself within the tradition of strategic audit associated with K. Subrahmanyam, which holds that rigorous, dispassionate examination of policy outcomes is not a challenge to national interest but a precondition for serving it. The analysis that follows is directed at the policy, not the party that has pursued it.

Strategic Autonomy as an Objective

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.

This paper treats strategic autonomy as a standing national interest and examines how the Modi-era approach has performed against it. The current phase has relied more heavily than its predecessors on leader-centric diplomacy and the personalised projection of foreign policy. Consequential announcements are made from political platforms rather than Parliament or ministerial briefings, a style that has raised tempo and projected resolve, but whose institutional durability beyond the present leadership remains untested.

India has not published a National Security Strategy, nor articulated a formal doctrine translating strategic autonomy into standing institutional procedure. What exists is a recognisable style of statecraft: flexible, leader-driven, and often tactically effective. Pakistan is where the limits of that style become most consequential. A position can be forceful when domestic rewards for visible resolve are immediate. A doctrine requires more: instruments that are institutionally durable, mutually reinforcing, and effective over time, and that do not narrow the state’s future options faster than they secure its present objectives.

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 — one this paper aims to avoid.

Image Credit: ORF Online

India’s Pakistan Policy: An Audit

Policy towards Pakistan under the Modi government has been organised around four explicit objectives: deterrence of cross-border terrorism through credible and visible punitive action; the international diplomatic isolation of Pakistan; strategic signalling to the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment intended to raise the costs of proxy violence; and the unambiguous communication to the Indian public that the state’s posture has fundamentally changed. Each objective is government-stated and document. Therefore, each is a legitimate subject of audit.

I) Deterrence: Capability Demonstrated, Strategic Effect Uncertain

The strongest credit of the current policy is that it has demonstrated India’s willingness to impose visible military costs following 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 operational sense, a posture has 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 sufficiently costly as to alter the pattern of strategic injury over time. On that stricter test, the record is less conclusive. Major attacks have continued despite cross-border strikes. The Red Fort bombing of November 2025 — which killed twelve civilians at one of Delhi’s most securitised sites, within six months of Operation Sindoor — makes it difficult to claim that the doctrine has produced reliable prevention of strategically salient violence.

The most serious defences of the deterrence record deserve engagement rather than dismissal. The first holds that deterrence should be judged not by the disappearance of attacks but by changes in their scale, frequency, or form. That is an intellectually legitimate position. Yet the size and character of the attacks under review make it difficult to characterise the residual violence as merely marginal. The second defence is counterfactual: visible retaliation may have prevented attacks of greater severity. The reasoning has force, but it cuts both ways. Pakistani strategic analysts have consistently argued that Islamabad’s restraint, where it has operated, was shaped primarily by India’s nuclear posture and by Pakistan’s own internal costs — not by conventional Indian retaliation. If mutual deterrence at the nuclear level was already operative, the claim that conventional strikes add measurable marginal deterrence requires independent evidence, not appeals to the counterfactual. The third defence is temporal: deterrence accumulates through repetition and resists immediate assessment. Yet twelve years is not an insubstantial period, and a policy that requires an open-ended horizon before its effects can be evaluated implicitly concedes that near-term claims of strategic success should be made with greater restraint.

The declaratory shift that accompanied the Pahalgam attack sharpens these concerns. Publicly defining a future 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. Publicly articulated red lines can strengthen credibility in the short term by reducing uncertainty about resolve. However, they also generate self-binding effects. Once announced, they increase the domestic and political penalties attached to restraint, ambiguity, or de-escalatory adjustment in future crises. They reduce India’s room for manoeuvre when evidence is incomplete, attribution is contested, or escalation management requires discretion. In a theatre defined by proxy violence, deniability, and rapid escalation risk, that loss of discretion is dangerous.

There is also a question about the distribution of costs. The doctrine is premised on imposing damage on terror infrastructure and its sponsors. Yet many of its most visible burdens are borne elsewhere: by military and paramilitary personnel required to sustain a high-readiness posture; by civilians in exposed border regions; by diplomatic bandwidth consumed in recurring crisis management; and by a state whose strategic attention is repeatedly drawn toward managing shocks rather than shaping the environment. This does not mean the doctrine has been without effect. It means the observable distribution of costs does not yet clearly correspond to the theory of harm on which the doctrine justifies itself.

The fairest finding is a limited one. The policy has demonstrated operational reach, political resolve, and a willingness to deny cost-free provocation. What it has not demonstrated with equal clarity is that these attributes have produced a durable deterrent effect. Capability has been shown; strategic outcome remains uncertain. That distinction matters directly to the doctrine-versus-position inquiry. Demonstration of will is more susceptible to personalisation than the production of stable strategic effect. On deterrence, the record is stronger on posture than on institutionally validated outcome.

II) Diplomatic Isolation: Objective Unmet, De-Hyphenation Weakened

The diplomatic component of the policy is more readily auditable because the relevant outputs are public, declaratory, and externally observable. The government’s stated objective has been explicit: international isolation of Pakistan, measured through global condemnation of Pakistani terror sponsorship; FATF grey-listing or equivalent financial censure; explicit international endorsement of Indian counter-terror responses; and, critically, the preservation of de-hyphenation: the principle that India should be engaged on its own terms, not persistently framed as part of a paired South Asian problem.

Measured against those indicators, the post-Operation Sindoor record is not favourable to the isolation claim. India deployed substantial diplomatic instruments: all-party delegations visited thirty-two countries and the European Union; bilateral channels were suspended; a large public diplomacy effort was mounted. 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 restore Pakistan to the grey list. No major strategic partner publicly endorsed Operation Sindoor by name. A subsequent US–China Economic and Security Review Commission report characterised Pahalgam as an “insurgent attack” — a framing described in Indian commentary as a significant diplomatic setback.

The failure is sharpest on de-hyphenation. For two decades, successive Indian governments had worked to ensure that major powers did not manage India as part of a conjoined border problem. Operation Sindoor visibly disrupted that positioning. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s parallel calls to Delhi and Rawalpindi; President Trump’s public characterisation of the conflict as “that fight for 1,500 years“; the announcement of a US-brokered ceasefire between the two states: each of these produced observable re-hyphenation. The very crisis that was intended to demonstrate Indian resolve and Pakistani perfidy was processed by the dominant external actor as a bilateral conflict requiring mediated settlement.

The subsequent trajectory of Pakistan’s external standing sharpens the point. Within the year following Operation Sindoor, Pakistan underwent a systematic and internationally visible rehabilitation. It received a USD 1 billion IMF disbursement during active conflict with India. The US Central Command chief described Pakistan publicly as a “phenomenal partner“. The army chief, Asim Munir, was elevated to Field Marshal — an unambiguous signal of domestic military consolidation — and received a high-visibility White House reception. President Trump referred to Field Marshal Munir as his “favourite field marshal” and “an exceptional human being.” Pakistan nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in brokering the May 2025 ceasefire. Both gestures signalled an operational American–Pakistani channel of a depth unseen since at least 2011.

By April 2026, Pakistan had positioned itself as a channel for US-Iran de-escalation, hosting direct talks in Islamabad and receiving public acknowledgement from both parties. The contrast with India’s position in the same diplomatic conjuncture was explicit in External Affairs Minister Jaishankar’s remark, made in the context of an opposition critique of Indian diplomatic marginalisation: “Hum unki tarah dalali nahi kar sakte“ — we cannot broker like them. The word dalal, closer in register to “tout” or “middleman” than to the neutral English “broker”, is a term of contempt. Its deployment was intended domestically to reframe Pakistan’s mediation role as undignified hustle. Its effect, however, was to make explicit what the external record had already established: that the two South Asian states had, in the space of a year, exchanged positions in the international architecture.

Image Credit: Al Jazeera

The analytical question is why. A tempting but insufficient explanation is American fickleness or the idiosyncrasies of the Trump administration. Both are present; neither is adequate. The more durable explanation was offered by former National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon: states act in their interests, and Pakistan has systematically cultivated instrumental utility in CENTCOM’s counter-terrorism operations, in cryptocurrency diplomacy, in the broader geometry of US–China competition. India, by contrast, has configured its Pakistan diplomacy around the narrative of victimhood and perfidy, investing diplomatic energy in condemnation-seeking rather than interest-shaping.

The distinction matters. Condemnation-seeking attempts to move states by moral pressure; interest-shaping attempts to alter their calculations of advantage. The former is what the current policy has been configured to do. The latter is what the Pakistani state, understanding its structural weakness, has set itself to do; and, in the period under review, done with considerable effect.

There is a deeper structural tension here that bears on the doctrine question. A policy of overt retaliation inevitably 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 coexist tactically for a time. 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 treat India without reference to Pakistan. On this count, the audit points in a clear direction. The policy has not operated as a doctrine capable of aligning military signalling, diplomatic method, and long-term de-hyphenation. It has operated as a forceful position with internally contradictory objectives.

III) Signalling to the Pakistani Establishment: The Second-Order Problem

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

The Pakistan Army and particularly the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate’s structural position in the political economy derives, in substantial part, from its claim to manage an existential threat from India. The civil-military balance in Pakistan is not fixed; it has oscillated between periods of civilian assertion and periods of military consolidation, and that oscillation is sensitive to the salience of India in Pakistani public discourse. High salience favours military consolidation; low salience creates space for civilian assertion. This is not a peripheral observation, it is the mechanism through which the signalling objective may be operating in reverse.

The empirical record following Operation Sindoor is at least consistent with that concern. Reporting across a range of Pakistani political tendencies converged on the observation that the strikes unified fractured domestic political forces, consolidated Field Marshal Munir’s standing, and strengthened the Army’s position within Pakistan’s constitutional order. If each visible Indian retaliation simultaneously raises the domestic standing of the institution most invested in hostility toward India, the long-run effect of the policy becomes analytically ambiguous. The instrument may generate tactical coercive value while reproducing the adversary’s preferred domestic structure. That ambiguity is precisely the kind of second-order problem a doctrine must confront institutionally. It cannot be resolved 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 effects into a durable strategic design.

IV) Domestic Political Embedding and the Accountability Asymmetry

The domestic dimension of the policy is not incidental to the doctrine question, it is one of its clearest markers. Beyond merely acting against Pakistan, the government has communicated that action to domestic audiences in a highly visible, politically saturated register. Naming practices, briefing formats, and the public staging of resolve suggest that foreign-policy signalling and domestic political communication have become more tightly fused than in earlier periods.

That fusion matters because of audience costs. Once a foreign-policy posture becomes politically load-bearing domestically, it is no longer judged solely by its strategic effects abroad. It becomes part of the government’s political capital. Recalibration then 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. Domestic expectations begin to shape what responses are treated as viable in future crises, and the operative question shifts 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 distinction is important. Institutionalisation broadens state capacity by converting practice into method. Politicisation frequently narrows capacity by making retreat, ambiguity, or recalibration costlier than they would otherwise be. Domestic entrenchment can mimic doctrinal durability while in fact being its opposite: it makes 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 of April 2025, no publicly reported review committee had been empanelled as of the writing of this paper. Following the Red Fort bombing of November 2025, the same. It is not being argued that the state conducted no internal inquiry. Service-level assessments and investigative processes are part of the normal administrative response. The current pattern appears more lopsided: 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. 

The asymmetry that has emerged is highly relevant to the doctrine question. A doctrine requires more than the repetition of response. It requires an architecture through which each crisis updates the state’s method, through which failure is examined, incorporated, and corrected. Without that architecture, visible retaliation risks remaining narrative rather than doctrine: a repeated display of resolve unmatched by equally visible institutional correction. Where external attribution is public but internal accounting remains partial or routine rather than structural, the doctrine risks becoming performative. It may continue to generate immediate political effect; its institutional credibility, however, erodes each time an attack recurs.

Image Credit: Japan Times 

Aggregate Finding: The Modi-government has a Position, Not a Doctrine

Across all four objectives, the pattern is consistent. India has demonstrated genuine operational capability and political resolve. It has established, credibly, that major provocations will carry visible costs. Those are not trivial achievements. But the record examined here does not sustain the broader claims associated with the current posture.

Deterrence remains operationally demonstrated but strategically uncertain. Diplomatic isolation has not been achieved, and de-hyphenation, a hard-won and genuinely valuable asset of Indian foreign policy, has been materially weakened. The signalling directed at Pakistan may have reinforced rather than eroded the Pakistani military establishment’s domestic position. Finally, the domestic political embedding of the policy has raised the cost of recalibration while reducing the visibility of the institutional review that a serious doctrine requires.

The distinction between doctrine and position is not semantic. A doctrine is institutionalised, reproducible, and durable beyond the leadership that produced it; it aligns its instruments, accounts for second-order effects, and subjects itself to internal correction. A position can be forceful, coherent, and politically effective while remaining contingent on personal authority, high domestic salience, and the continued absence of the kind of institutional self-examination that makes strategic methods improvable over time.

India’s Pakistan policy, as this audit reads it, is the latter. That finding does not impeach the objective it serves — strategic autonomy remains a sound and settled national interest. Nor does it deny the genuine resolve and capability the policy has demonstrated. What it does suggest is that the instrument, as currently configured, is better understood as an expression of political will than as a doctrine capable of producing durable strategic effect. Resolving that gap between posture and outcome, between visible resolve and institutional design, between immediate political effect and long-run strategic credibility is the work that remains to be done.