Dr Sahibzada Muhammad Usman

The short but decisive India-Pakistan war of May 2025 once again exposed the hollowness behind India’s claims of military superiority and strategic dominance in South Asia. India initiated hostilities under the pretext of the Pahalgam attack, launching “Operation Sindoor,” a reckless display of militarism aimed at intimidating Pakistan and projecting an inflated sense of regional hegemony. Yet within four days, Pakistan demonstrated that despite economic pressure and numerical asymmetry, it retains a resilient, credible and rapidly deployable defensive and retaliatory capability. Far from coercing Pakistan, India’s aggression resulted in the opposite effect: Islamabad not only neutralised India’s initial strikes but also responded with precision operations that undermined the core of India’s narrative of invulnerability. The war reinforced a truth India has repeatedly failed to absorb: Pakistan may be smaller in size, but it remains strategically unyielding.

Pakistan’s achievements during the conflict were far more significant than many analysts anticipated. India, with a defence budget exceeding $70 billion and a force strength nearly triple that of Pakistan, expected a clean demonstration of technological superiority. Instead, Pakistan’s swift mobilisation, seamless dispersal of air assets and its calibrated retaliatory strikes displayed a level of operational discipline that New Delhi could neither predict nor counter. Pakistan lost no critical infrastructure, retained full command integrity and maintained uninterrupted military communications despite Indian attempts to degrade them. More importantly, Pakistani strikes targeted Indian military assets with precision, signalling that any attempt by India to shift the regional balance through brute force would be met with equal, if not greater cost. For a nation consistently portrayed by Indian media as militarily inferior, Pakistan’s performance was a categorical rebuttal to India’s exaggerated self-image.

The post-war situation has also turned decisively against India’s expectations. Instead of emerging as a victorious power capable of dictating terms, New Delhi now finds itself entangled in sustained tensions along the Line of Control, forced to maintain high alert levels at enormous financial cost. Pakistan has responded not with fear but with strategic resolve, increasing defence allocations despite fiscal pressures. This sharp prioritisation underscores Pakistan’s clear recognition that deterrence is not optional when facing an adversary willing to escalate for political optics. India, meanwhile, continues to pour money into an overextended military machine with little strategic return, widening its own fiscal deficit and overstretching its forces. The reality is that India’s aggressive posture has not secured stability; instead, it has created a perpetual state of insecurity for its northern command, where Pakistan demonstrates nightly that the ceasefire will hold only on terms of parity, not submission.

 India’s increasingly confrontational posture is not born of genuine strategic confidence but of domestic political desperation. New Delhi’s rhetoric on “reclaiming” Pakistani Kashmir is less a foreign policy strategy and more a propaganda tool engineered for domestic audiences. These statements lack military feasibility and expose India’s leadership as reliant on inflammatory language to mask internal political failures, economic mismanagement and rising public discontent. The war of May 2025 showed that India cannot sustain even a four-day escalation without international pressure forcing it back to the negotiating table. Yet its leaders continue to grandstand about territorial fantasies that have no basis in operational reality. Pakistan, for its part, has adopted a consistent doctrine: respond proportionally, maintain deterrence credibility and refuse to allow India’s domestic political theatre to dictate regional stability.

The Bihar elections of 2025 further highlight India’s reliance on anti-Pakistan populism rather than substantive governance. The victory of the BJP-led alliance in Bihar, celebrated by New Delhi as a domestic mandate for its aggressive foreign policy, merely reveals the dangerous polarisation within India’s political fabric. Instead of addressing poverty, unemployment and governance deficits in one of India’s poorest states, the ruling party weaponised national security narratives and anti-Pakistan rhetoric to mobilise sentiment. This internal political opportunism makes India a uniquely unpredictable neighbour, where foreign policy is subordinated to electoral convenience. Pakistan must therefore understand that India’s hostility is driven not by strategic necessity but by political theatrics constructed to distract from domestic failures.

Pakistan’s preparedness for future conflicts, however, is shifting in a direction that puts India’s long-term ambitions at risk. Despite severe economic challenges, Pakistan is allocating resources strategically, focusing on force multipliers rather than wasting funds on bulk purchases that offer little real advantage. Investments in integrated air defence, drone warfare and precision-strike capabilities have already narrowed the operational gap between the two countries. The US-approved upgrades to Pakistan’s F-16 fleet significantly enhance Pakistan Air Force’s situational awareness and survivability, further complicating India’s air superiority assumptions. Pakistan recognises that it cannot match India rupee-for-rupee, but it also knows it does not need to. Deterrence rests on credibility, not symmetry, and Pakistan has repeatedly shown that it can impose unacceptable costs on India if provoked.

 Perhaps the most consequential developments are the structural changes within Pakistan’s military command. The establishment of a more unified command architecture, with extended tenures for service chiefs and the creation of a Chief of Defence Forces model, strengthens operational continuity and strategic coherence. Unlike India, where political interference in military affairs has increased, and service coordination remains fragmented, Pakistan is moving toward a streamlined, joint-force structure that enables rapid decision-making during crises. This modernisation enhances Pakistan’s ability to manage multi-domain warfare, from cyber to air to conventional ground operations. It also sends a clear signal to India and to international observers: Pakistan’s defence institutions are evolving into a more integrated, stable and strategically focused apparatus. Far from weakening civilian control as critics claim, these reforms ensure that Pakistan can respond to aggression with unity of command and clarity of purpose.

 In contrast, India’s military reforms remain stuck in bureaucratic inertia. Its much-touted theatre command restructuring has been repeatedly delayed, its defence procurement plagued by corruption allegations and its indigenous production targets falling short. While India tries to project dominance, Pakistan has quietly built a more adaptable and efficient military posture, one that proved effective in May 2025 and will continue to be so in future contingencies.

The 2025 war revealed a fundamental truth: India’s aggressive ambitions exceed its actual capabilities, while Pakistan’s resilience far surpasses India’s assumptions. Pakistan emerged from the conflict not weakened but strengthened, politically, militarily and strategically. India, despite its size, was reminded that coercion cannot alter geopolitical realities, nor can propaganda compensate for operational shortcomings. The stability of South Asia depends not on India’s loud proclamations of supremacy, but on Pakistan’s measured, disciplined and resolute commitment to deterrence. And as long as Pakistan maintains this posture, India will continue to find that intimidation is not a viable strategy against a nation that refuses to bow.