This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘India and Pakistan, what now?’
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Gideon Rachman
Hello, and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times.
This week’s podcast is about India and Pakistan. My guest is Sushant Singh of Yale University. The fighting last week between India and Pakistan was the most intense military confrontation between the two countries for decades. But a ceasefire has now been declared, so, can the peace hold in south Asia?
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Vikram Misri voice clip
The director-general of military operations of Pakistan called the director-general of military operations of India at 15:35 earlier this afternoon.
Gideon Rachman
That was the Indian foreign secretary Vikram Misri, announcing a ceasefire between India and Pakistan on May 10th.
Vikram Misri voice clip
It was agreed between them that both sides would stop all firing and military action on land and in the air and sea, with effect from 17:00 hours Indian standard time today.
Gideon Rachman
The original spark for the fighting was a terrorist attack which killed at least 26 Indian tourists in Kashmir on April 22nd. India accused Pakistan of harbouring the terrorists, and on the 7th of May, India fired missiles at Pakistan. The two sides exchanged fire with civilian casualties on both sides until a ceasefire was called.
There’s much that remains unclear about this short war. What real damage did the two sides inflict on each other? What was the role of the United States in helping to bring about the ceasefire? And what lessons have both sides learned?
To help me untangle these issues, I consulted Sushant Singh, who’s written some excellent analysis for foreign affairs. I started by asking him whether the situation is now stable.
Sushant Singh
As of now, Gideon, the situation is pretty stable. We are speaking on Tuesday evening, India time, and there’s been no firing for last couple of days. But I would also add, Gideon, that this is an illusion of stability, because what we are witnessing, you know, is very high (inaudible) rhetoric from both sides, which clearly sets the stage for even more perilous future crises, if that were to happen between India and Pakistan.
Gideon Rachman
Yes, because I mean, from a distance, one of the striking things to me is that both sides seem to be claiming victory.
Sushant Singh
That’s a good thing, Gideon, because if both sides can claim victory and both sides can go happy from this conflict, from this situation, and the people of both countries feel happy about it, that’s a wonderful thing. But what my bigger worry, Gideon, is that while both sides are claiming victory, they are also learning vastly different lessons from this crisis.
If you remember the Cuban missile crisis, one of the big things was that both the Soviet Union and the United States learned the same strategic lessons as a nuclear weapon state. In this case, India is learning a very different lesson. India is saying that our missile strikes have pushed Pakistan back and brought them to their knees. And Indians are saying that this is the new normal, that they have established that they can hit inside the Pakistani heartland in places like Lahore, Karachi, Rawalpindi, (inaudible) the city, we can go and do it anytime we want. And we will continue to remain in this operational mode irrespective of what the situation is until terrorism stops between the two countries.
Pakistan, on the other side, sees this as a success of its nuclear brinkmanship in a certain sense. And the robustness of its military response, which brought out the US intervention, as you mentioned in your introduction, they believe this re-established deterrence with respect to India, and India was forced to accept the ceasefire. So, clearly, they have both learned different lessons, and that means that the next confrontation will be at a higher realm of the escalation ladder between the two countries.
Gideon Rachman
OK, well let’s just go back a bit because in fact the two sides don’t even, as I understand it, fully agree on what actually happened. So what did India hit and what did Pakistan hit in return, as far as we know, and what kind of casualties were sustained?
Sushant Singh
On the night of 7th of May, Indian Air Force jets hit nine places inside Pakistan. Nine places which they called terrorist training sites or terror infrastructure associated with all the terror groups — not just in Pakistani Kashmir, but also in Pakistani mainland, in the heartland of Pakistan, very close to Lahore and other places, which was pretty surprising and pretty bold. This has not happened since 1971 that India has actually hit those places. Those places were successfully hit. But in the bargain, what the Pakistanis claim, that when the Indian Air Force was trying to hit those places, they brought down five Indian fighter jets. Indians have neither accepted nor refuted that claim. The Indians have thought that losses are part of any conflict. And so they would probably . . . that’s the only acknowledgment that we have heard from India.
Then over the next couple of days, there were minor exchanges of drones . . . drone swarms going from both sides. India is claiming that they had hit air defences at Lahore. Pakistani is saying that we have not done anything, but India is saying they have shot down Pakistani drones. Then, on early Saturday morning, the Indians actually launched massive missile strikes on some Pakistani air bases. The exact number of Pakistani air bases that were hit is not exactly known, but the number varies from four to seven to eight air bases. And these are prominent air bases. One of them was in fact, Rawalpindi, which is very close to Islamabad. If you’re landing in Islamabad, it is probably that airport that you landed at because it is a dual-use airport. And that is the one which is very close to the nuclear command authority. And the satellite imagery which is available clearly shows that some of the runways were damaged by this missile attack.
And most likely, the missile that had been used by India is a joint Indo-Russian production — the BrahMos missile, which is essentially an indigenous missile. It’s a missile which Indians have used here in conventional mode but the Pakistanis claim can also be used to deliver nuclear payloads, which makes the situation slightly complex.
In response, on Saturday Pakistan tried to launch attacks on some 16 Indian bases. The Indians claimed that all those attacks were foiled; their missiles, their drone attacks were brought down by India’s air defence. Although in some of the bases, at least four air bases, some damage was caused. But by that afternoon, the two director-general of military operations had spoken. And that evening, as you mentioned earlier, a ceasefire was established. That is where the score is.
If I were to put it in boxing terms, Gideon, round one clearly seems to have gone to Pakistan, because if they have successfully brought down five Indian fighter jets, that’s clearly round one to them. And round two, where the Indians hit the missiles on prominent Pakistani air bases, that was round two to India. And the next few rounds, if they had gone on, we don’t know what would have happened. So it’s a kind of a stalemate, it’s a kind of a . . . something which has been abruptly stopped, a boxing bout which has been abruptly stopped in my view.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah, and I was watching all this from Washington, where the initial reaction of the US was none of our business. I think JD Vance almost used exactly that phrase.
JD Vance voice clip
The president has said is we want this thing to de-escalate as quickly as possible. We can’t control these countries, though. Fundamentally, India has its gripes with Pakistan. Pakistan has responded to India . . .
Gideon Rachman
Then by the weekend, they’re scrambling to get involved — and Vance and Rubio are on the phone and one of the stories that’s doing the rounds is that they got a bit scared that there was what they call nuclear signalling from Pakistan, that Pakistan was hinting that it might be thinking about using nuclear weapons. Is that true as far as you know?
Sushant Singh
On this day, there’s very little visibility because the nuclear signalling does come from Pakistan, but we cannot be sure whether it was nuclear signalling or something else that the Americans picked up from Pakistan where they were worried about what the Pakistanis were trying to do in terms of some kind of escalation that the Pakistanis were trying. It’s very difficult to say, but of course, nuclear signalling seems to be the most important and the most significant thing that could have probably triggered it, but there is no great visibility on what really happened.
Gideon Rachman
I’m not entirely clear how significant that American intervention was because it’s been talked up quite a lot in Washington and indeed in Pakistan. The Indians don’t seem to particularly want to talk it up or to acknowledge it that much.
Sushant Singh
To my mind, Gideon, it was extremely significant. So even though an agreement or an understanding may have been between the two director-generals of the military operation, the fact that they could arrive at that understanding, that the fact they could talk it out primarily came from these phone calls, which were made by vice-president JD Vance and the secretary of state Marco Rubio to various people, including Indian Prime Minister Modi, Pakistani army chief Asim Munir, foreign ministers, national security advisers, so on and so forth. Without those calls, I don’t think India and Pakistan would have gotten talking and arrived at the understanding that they arrived at.
Of course, President Trump, this is the only success President Trump can boast about because Ukraine is not a success for him, the ceasefire in Ukraine or a peace deal between Israel and Gaza. So this is the one he’s trying to (inaudible) and really highlight it. And that is pretty embarrassing for Mr Modi and his government to be told that the Americans did it. And Mr Modi backed out under American pressure is not something he would like to acknowledge publicly.
Gideon Rachman
So what has the response been in India? Because you said that it’s quite embarrassing for Modi, and I’ve certainly noticed that some of the more hawkish Indian commentators seem rather disappointed that India didn’t keep punching Pakistan, to use your boxing metaphor. But does that dissatisfaction go beyond the kind of class of military commentators?
Sushant Singh
Actually Gideon, the disappointment with Mr Modi accepting a ceasefire, when clearly a large number of Indians were being told that India is actually pummeling Pakistan, cuts across cross-section, beyond former military generals and, you know, very aggressive commentators, to even the political leadership and supporters of Mr Modi. Some of the core support base of Mr Modi have been very disappointed that he accepted this ceasefire. And they’ve been equally disappointed that President Trump seems to have announced it well before the Indians announced it. And the narrative, in a certain sense, has been captured by the Trump administration.
Since then, the Indian government — through background briefings and even Mr Modi’s own address to the country on Monday evening — has tried to dispel the notion, even though none of the information that has been put out by either President Trump or the state department or Marco Rubio has been rebuilt officially by the Indian government. But a lot of information has been fed to journalists to say, no, nothing of this kind is true. We have not considered an inch. Pakistanis came to us begging on their knees. We then accepted it. The Americans have no role to play. We are not gonna listen to Americans. But the fact that Trump made the announcement well before India or Pakistan did, and the fact that he continues to make this announcement that Indians have accepted the ceasefire, has damaged Mr Modi’s public reputation, especially amongst his hardcore supporters.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah, and I would imagine it’s kind of disappointing for Indians in some respects, because, you know, last time I was in Delhi a few months ago, a lot of commentators told me about the special nature of the India-US relationship, saying it was like one of the closest strategic partnerships in the world, if not the closest. And yet here is America maintaining a kind of equidistance between India and Pakistan, sort of saying, you know, almost condescendingly, can you just both stop this, rather than backing up its ostensibly very close ally, India.
Sushant Singh
Oh, absolutely, Gideon. The Indians have believed that the US has their back, and particularly with President Trump, who has been a close friend of Mr Modi. Mr Modi organised two election rallies for him before the election that he lost to Biden. They both call each other as good friends and so on. So it has been very surprising for them. Not just that the (inaudible) is that President Trump has called them out as, or patronisingly, (inaudible) children telling them not to fight.
There are three things there which President Trump did with his Truth Social update that he announced the ceasefire. One is that he put India and Pakistan on the same pedestal and hyphenated them. This is something which the Indians have fought for last two decades, saying please don’t hyphenate us with Pakistan.
Secondly, he almost said that there was a threat of a nuclear assault or the escalation going up into the nuclear domain, where millions of people would have been killed. And this is something which the Pakistanis have always said because this is the only card that they have to play to demand western intervention, to demand international intervention. And that’s something which Trump seemed to have succumbed to in that Truth Social tweet.
And the third thing which Indians have resisted since 1971 is that Kashmir will remain a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan and there will be no third-party intervention. In his update, President Trump very clearly said that I would like to resolve Kashmir and we can meet in a neutral country where all these issues can be discussed. This is clearly something which the Indians find unacceptable and pretty embarrassing for Mr Modi and his government that President Trump even put that out publicly.
Gideon Rachman
And what about the response in Pakistan? I mean, again, the news reports I’ve seen have suggested it’s more jubilant and at least the government there, which is also a nationalistic government, has slightly more control of the narrative. Is that your feeling?
Sushant Singh
Absolutely, Gideon. Pakistanis are elated with what President Trump has said. It has been many years since any American president has said good things about Pakistan. Pakistan, as you know Gideon, has almost become a pariah state over the last few years because of the state of its economy. The politics is a mess, you know, its ties with the Taliban are a mess and especially once the Nato forces moved out of Afghanistan, Pakistan has completely been marginalised, has not been in the spotlight.
For them to see a US president say that I’m willing to resolve Kashmir or I’m willing to talk about the nuclear threat or I think India and Pakistan are both great nations and are out of the same footing, is something which the Pakistanis are loving, which the Pakistani state is loving, and which the Pakistani government is loving. And most importantly, the Pakistani army is loving that, that they believe that they have been diplomatically successful, they have been militarily successful, and that nuclear weapons or the threat of nuclear weapons has come into play successfully to bring the US into this and put India under pressure.
They couldn’t have asked for a better thing in this bargain, the only thing better could be if President Trump continues pressing India to come to the negotiating table and start talking to Pakistan, which I think Indians will resist tooth and nail, even if President Trump were to try that.
Gideon Rachman
And what about, again, it’s a very difficult thing to pin down by its nature, but Pakistani involvement in the original terrorist incident. You know, the Indians are absolutely adamant that these are terrorists who are not only based in Pakistan but linked to the state. What do you think the Pakistanis are thinking about that?
Sushant Singh
So Pakistan has clearly denied any direct linkage to the terror attack, to the killing in Pahalgam. But you know, Gideon, there are two ways to look at it. One is, you know, if you were to look at direct Pakistani fingerprints, whether of the Pakistani ISI chief or the army chief, I don’t think that could be possible. I mean, in any case, India’s up for this time, not provided any evidence whatsoever about what has gone on in Pahalgam.
But the general sense within India is, because Pakistan has created this enabling environment by providing moral, diplomatic, military, political support to these gunmen in Kashmir, to these armed militants in Kashmir, a lot of Pakistanis come and fight there within the Indian Kashmir. People believe that even if no direct linkage is there, by creating this enabling environment and by creating this atmosphere and by the kind of speeches that Pakistani army chief was giving up to the week before the attack, they are in some way linked to this attack.
Pakistan, of course, denies this completely; it says it has nothing to do with the attack. This is probably due to the mismanagement of the Kashmir situation by India and particularly by Mr Modi’s Hindu Nationalist government that this has been created and these things have happened. Pakistan is pretty happy that this has essentially meant that the Kashmir issue is again back in the spotlight and the issue has been internationalised once again.
Gideon Rachman
On the other hand, I mean, I guess you described the mood in Pakistan very interestingly, but maybe the jubilation is unjustified because one of the things that India has done is suspend the water treaty between the two countries. How potentially significant is that?
Sushant Singh
That is extremely significant, Gideon, but over a longer timeframe. See, because there are three rivers out of these six from which the water is supposed to go to Pakistan under this treaty, which was signed in the early 1960s and has held good so far. So under that treaty, India actually could not create any water storage infrastructure on these three rivers or dams, which could stop water.
So even now, even if immediately India were to try and stop water to Pakistan, it really can’t do that. What it wouldn’t do now is it won’t share what kind of water is going to come so that Pakistan can irrigate its fields and start growing, start sowing the crops and so on and so forth. But immediately India cannot stop water from going to Pakistan. What India can do is start building infrastructure and these would be big dams, big hydropower plants. They would probably take maybe a decade or more, maybe 15 years, before those dams can come into play and stop the water from flowing to Pakistan, but it is a big political signal which would make Pakistan very uncomfortable that Indians have done that.
Gideon Rachman
And what about, I mean, we talked about the role of the United States in all of this. What about the role of China? Because Pakistan is, some have even described it as virtually a client state of China, financially dependent, dependent on Chinese military aid. How is that relationship looking after this conflict?
Sushant Singh
So, Gideon, this is the most significant part of the conflict, which very few people, other than you, are actually focusing on. You are perhaps the first person who has spoken to me and mentioned China in that sense. But there are two things here. One is, Gideon, almost 81 per cent of Pakistani military equipment is now imported from China. So it’s no longer a western military, it’s almost a Chinese military. So for the first time that we were seeing Chinese military equipment, Chinese weaponry being used against western platforms like Rafale and other platforms that the Indians are using. So a lot of interest was in how the Chinese military equipment, Chinese military technology would hold against these modern western platforms.
So on the first night when the Pakistanis came to have brought down five Indian jets, it clearly seemed to be a success for Chinese missiles, Chinese air force. And I spoke to a couple of experts who told me that it’s just not about the equipment. It seems that Pakistan has been doing a lot of joint training with the PLA air force and they have picked up more techniques, our doctrines, the employment strategies. And they have brought them to the air force, unlike earlier, what they picked up from the western military, Nato air forces. And this is something which has brought a very different kind of approach, a different manner of employment of the air force, which had succeeded on the first night.
But equally important is that when India went and hit the Pakistani air bases with missiles, the Chinese air defence equipment that was being used by Pakistan really did not do well. So one part of this has been (inaudible) of the Chinese military equipment (inaudible) western equipment because this has an effect on a potential Taiwan crisis. This has an effect everywhere else where the Chinese are going to sell military equipment and western countries are going to sell military equipment. That is one part.
The second part is that India, by engaging militarily with Pakistan, India’s attention is drawn away from the China border. Where India had been completely dedicated over the last five years since the border crisis with China began in 2020, India had diverted a lot of its military resources from Pakistan border to China border. Now, obviously, with the military crisis with Pakistan, those resources would have to be redirected to the Pakistan border.
A lot of western countries were looking at India as a counter to China, a military counter to China even, a security counter to China. But now, clearly, India would have to, again, restart focusing on Pakistan and that would allow China to do what it has done. Moreover, diplomatically, China has come out clearly in support of Pakistan. The other country which came out as (inaudible) or as directly in support Pakistan, was Turkey. So China has clearly cast its lot with Pakistan.
Gideon Rachman
Interesting. So just to end, I mean, I hate to sound like Donald Trump under any circumstance, but he did say, you know, these countries have been fighting each other for, I think he said centuries, but they haven’t existed.
Sushant Singh
Thousands of years.
Gideon Rachman
Thousands of years. Yes, thousands of years, but I mean not thousands of years, but there have been several conflicts since partition. The Kargil conflict, I think it was in 1999 and then 2019, and this one again. So, without being dismissive of, you know, people died in all of these confrontations, some might argue that, well, this is just another round of these fighting, and the things will go back to normal. But I think you believe that it’s a little bit more dangerous than that, so explain where you think this leaves India-Pakistan relations now?
Sushant Singh
Yeah, so a couple of things have happened very clearly. One is, as you mentioned, the Indus Waters Treaty and these other diplomatic things. That clearly means that the confrontational baseline, so to speak, has really gone up. It is no longer the confrontational baseline of what it was, you know, three weeks or four weeks ago. Secondly, this constant rhetoric from India that this operation is not yet over, there is no ceasefire, and we will continue to hit Pakistan whenever we want to hit them. And the pressure from the Hindu nationalist base that they spoke about, where they would want Pakistan to be hit constantly. And the Indians are saying, we have called the Pakistani nuclear (inaudible). We don’t think that the Pakistan has the capacity to fire nuclear weapons on us, clearly makes the situation very unstable and very risky.
I’m also worried because Indians use this BrahMos missile and deployed it pretty early. They deployed it at a stage where even diplomatic intervention was not possible from western countries. And perhaps the lesson that they would have picked this time is that the next time when something like this happens, have to probably start at that level directly. Start firing missiles before moving to anything else.
The next time on the escalation ladder, India and Pakistan will be starting at a much higher rung. So that to me means that the nuclear rung depth remains much closer to arriving in that sense. So the crisis will be much faster, much bigger, and much sharper. That is what my big worry from this crisis is. So the resolution of the crisis essentially has not reset in any way. It has only frozen the crisis at this level. And the next crisis would actually start from this rung, not at something, you know, which had been resolved and gone down in normal diplomatic ties, have been established. That’s a big concern and a big risk for south Asia because these are both nuclear weapon states.
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Gideon Rachman
That was Sushant Singh of Yale University speaking from Delhi and ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening and please join me again next week.
