Recent conflict with Pakistan was ‘clear setback for India’: NYT

The New York Times has described the recent India-Pakistan standoff as “the most expansive combat in half a century,” noting that “strategically, the battlefield stalemate was a clear setback for India.”

“An aspiring diplomatic and economic power, it (India) now finds itself equated with Pakistan, a smaller, weaker country that Indian officials call a rogue sponsor of terrorism,” Times’ correspondents — Mujib Mashal, who is of Afghan origin, and Alex Travelli — wrote in an in-depth dispatch from New Delhi.

Pointing out that Indian forces did manage to inflict some damage at Pakistani air bases, the lengthy dispatch said it followed “only after losing aircraft in aerial face-offs with its longtime adversary.”

“The four-day clash reminded the world about India’s powerlessness to resolve 78 years of conflict” with Pakistan, the Times noted.

“Any act of confrontation plays into the hands of Pakistan, where friction with India has long been a lifeblood,” it said, adding, “Outright military victory is nearly impossible, given the threat from both countries’ nuclear arsenals”.

Citing Interviews with more than a dozen diplomats, analysts and officials, the dispatch said after multiple wars and several failed attempts at solving their disputes, which have shaped the subcontinent ever since Pakistan and India gained independence in 1947, the problem has only grown in complexity.

“The risk of rapid escalation has increased as both sides deploy drones and other cutting-edge weapons on a large scale for the first time,” the dispatch said.

“At the same time, the leadership in each country has embraced religious nationalism, and each has hardened its views of the other, making any conciliatory gesture all but impossible,” the dispatch said, noting India’s shift to strongman, Hindu-nationalist rule has left it boxed in whenever tensions rise, as the right-wing base of Prime Minister Narendra Modi often calls for blood.

“That makes it harder to show the kind of restraint that India displayed in 2008, when terrorists killed more than 160 people in Mumbai — and to see that a war, beyond satisfying immediate political needs, could set back India’s ascent.”

Pakistan categorically denied Indian allegations of its involvement in the attack.

Seventeen years later, the report said, India responded by striking Pakistan militarily, “as part of a larger strategy to squeeze their adversary, including the threat of disrupting the flow of crucial cross-border rivers”.