Pakistan has taken a raft of measures in case India decides to actually act on its overplayed hand of launching an attack following its judge-jury-executioner role after the Pahalgam attacks.
The most significant of these is to close of sections of airspace over its two largest cities - Karachi and Lahore - for eight hours a day during the month of May. It has also stopped tourists from entering Neelam Valley, which has a major road that is right opposite a large part of the Line of Control there. Other than that, it has ordered seminaries in the region to close for the next ten days and also received assurances from owners of hotels, restaurants, guest houses and marriage halls that in case of any hostilities their establishments will be at the disposal of the military.
As for India, it hasn't yet received any public support from any friendly country for its stated goal of 'teaching Pakistan a lesson', and in fact the world's sole superpower has now publicly said that it wants Pakistan as well as India to de-escalate the situation. This means that it is in no mood to see a war break out between two nuclear-armed neighbours.
Inside India, the delusions that dictate a mindset that you can atttack and "annihilate" a country that possesses nuclear weapons continue, fuelled by a media which thrives on bouts of hyper-patriotism and delusions of grandeur.
India continues to blame Pakistan for the Pahalgam attacks. It continues to do so without offering a shred of evidence, other than verbally repeating, ad nauseam, that the attackers were traced back to cities inside Pakistan. This ‘evidence’ has yet to be presented at any forum so far, and even the mainstream Indian media, which passes off anything that Indian intelligence and the military feed it as fact has yet to show any such ‘evidence’.
The Indian military must be more aware of the ground realities, and these relate chiefly to the fact that like India, Pakistan is also a nuclear-armed state and that nuclear-armed states do not engage in a war among themselves
The reason for that is simple – there is no such ‘evidence’ and India knows that as well. And that explains why it has continued to ignore Pakistan’s sensible suggestion that a neutral and independent investigation be launched in the April 22 attack and which the Government of Pakistan would cooperate with. That India refuses to even consider this as an option only reinforces the view that either it has something to hide or that it has already decided to use Pakistan as a scapegoat for the attacks.
The questions that need to be asked of the Government of India and its intelligence agencies continue not to be asked, certainly not by the Indian media or its various political parties, barring perhaps a couple of political leaders. However, when most people ask these questions inside India, the response from the BJP and its supporters is usually to first question their loyalty to India, and then ask them if they are sympathisers of Pakistan, and so on.
Basic questions like how the attack took place far away from the Line of Control in an area that is reached only by foot or horseback, and how the attackers reached their armed and undetected in a region with hundreds of thousands of regular Indian army soldiers, continue to be ignored. Of course, it is far easier to just blame the imagined enemy, and in India’s case, that’s Pakistan.
Moving to the present, the question that’s on everyone’s mind would have to be whether India will attack Pakistan, even a limited foray, and if it does, when? The answer to that is that this is something only the Indian government can answer – perhaps it knows that it has overplayed its hand and has now pigeonhole itself into a tight spot where it feels that to appease its votebank, it will have to do something. Having said that, it has failed to win any support from even its closest allies for any possible retaliation to Pakistan’s imagined ‘involvement’ in the Pahalgam attack.
Meanwhile, the Indian military must be more aware of the ground realities – and these relate chiefly to the fact that like India, Pakistan is also a nuclear-armed state and that nuclear-armed states do not engage in a war among themselves because each side knows that the outcome and level of such an engagement is not in one’s hands and matters could easily spiral out of control – and that’s not a situation you want to have when one option is to just press the nuclear trigger.
Regardless of what happens in the next few weeks, Pakistan has conducted itself maturely and sensibly. India, on the other hand, has shown itself to be an immature and childish state, acting on its most base of instincts and ignoring basic rules of law and evidence in conducting its affairs with the outside world. It has also sent a terrible message to potential investors in India – that they should reconsider investing in a country that uses the option of war with a nuclear-armed nature as a political strategy.