Can any responsible leader authorize a conventional military strike, capable of giving a decisive blow to Pakistan, on the assumption that it will not escalate to the nuclear level by accident or otherwise?[1] Wonders Sharat Sabharwal in his book, India’s Pakistan Conundrum: Managing a Complex Relationship, 2020. Logically, no responsible ruler would provoke another nuclear state with such recklessness that could raise the escalation ladder to a nuclear conflict, endangering millions of lives in minutes. However, logic has a tragic history of losing battles to emotions, let alone hate and self-aggrandizing hyper-nationalism.

Given the recent tumult and rather precarious situation between the two nuclear powers of South Asia, India and Pakistan, in the aftermath of Pahalgam, Sabharwal’s book becomes a timely read, calling on Indian policy influencers and decision-makers to make choices that are informed, objective, and rational, based in the regional and global realities. The writing is poised and succulent, often giving an air of a journalistic memoir, as he journeys through his observations and experiences during his stay in Pakistan for eight years as a diplomat.

The book’s primary audience is India, as it intends to suggest a blueprint of practical policy options for the Indian state in managing its relationship with Pakistan. Following the ‘know thy enemy’ mantra, the author divides the book into two sections: the first deals with the hard reality of the Pakistani state as to what it is and what it is not; the second part discusses different pain points in the Indo-Pak relation and how it has evolved over decades, what has worked and what hasn’t, and what are viable policy options for India to pursue.

Sabharwal argues that Pakistan has four major problems: religious extremism, the military, an unstable economy, and ethnic and religious fault lines. He makes a case that Pakistan was founded on an exclusionary religious ideology, hence, the subsequent constitutional accentuation in the form of the Objective Resolution was, in effect, not enough to safeguard the rights of the minorities. He blames the founding fathers for using religion as a foundation for Pakistan, as it planted the seeds for intolerance and extremism. This gave religious parties and clergy considerable power over the policy and constitutional processes, so that a prime minister had to give in to the pressure of the right wing to declare a section non-Muslim. 

India a bogeman for Pak Army

The author argues that religion has been used to legitimize hatred against India, and has led to the myopic view in the collective psyche that India means Hindu and Pakistan means Muslim, reducing the complex and diverse landscape of both polities to mere monoliths. The historical facts pointed out by the author are right; however, if Pakistan had not been founded on religion, would the situation be any different? The dead body of Nehruvian secularism isn’t far from home, and it’s rotten, smelling of nothing but war-mongering, aggrandizing dreams of Akhand Bharat, Hindutva’s puritanical cult, and exclusionary treatment of Muslims and Dalits, to say the least.

Secondly, he argues that the military, the real power center, is at the core of Pakistan’s problems. With a power of veto on major policy decisions, domestic and foreign, the army as an institution exercises considerable control over media narrative, education, and state policy towards India. It takes a major chunk of the federal budget, which has been on a considerable rise since independence, in an otherwise fragile economy that struggles to allocate resources properly. He points to the schism between civil-military relations and argues that the army not only exploits the weaknesses of politicians but also pits them against one another to keep the circus running. Whereas politicians, who know where the real power lies, give in to their opportunism and dance along to the flute. 

He blames the military for using India as a bogeyman for justifying its expenses, because in the absence of a threatening enemy, the elephantine budget will lose its rationality. Sabharwal also says that the public narratives are controlled through education and media, which together instill hatred against India. Meanwhile, the reality is that whether it’s a blame game over interference in each other's domestic affairs, or the four wars that both countries have fought, the national hostility has always been there, sometimes latent, other times apparent, when triggered.

Thirdly, the author has rightly pointed out how Pakistan is stuck in a debt cycle due to economic instability. It has a larger population to feed and manage, along with a large defense budget, making it rely on external patrons for support. Its geostrategic location has been of pivotal use, and it has rented it for dollars to the USA, both in the Cold War and the War on Terror, and is now partnering with China for CPEC. Moreover, Pakistan has been largely reliant on the idea of borrowed growth and has been caught in a dependency cycle with the IMF. Hence, its economy is fragile and has become aid-reliant.

Fourth, Pakistan is a diverse polity with many ethnic and sectarian divisions. Major fault lines have been ethnic sub-nationalist movements that resent the Punjab-dominated state structure, which amounts to a larger chunk of the budget, seats, and military-bureaucracy share that gets to the Punjab by it being home to the largest ethnic group, the Punjabis. He further states that the center’s misgivings and unjust allocation of resources, and the army’s sledgehammer approach in peripheral provinces, have led to the rise of centripetal forces. He mentions the impact of the war on terror on FATA and the rise of the new Pashtun nationalist movement, PTM (Pashtun Tahafuz Movement), in those regions, which is challenging the state hegemony and legitimacy. 

Similarly, Balochistan’s separatist sentiment is on the rise again, especially in the context of CPEC, where they are either excluded or not given enough share in the opportunities that Chinese development might bring. Similarly, he sparingly discusses Sindh, where the muhajir's resentment has almost been contained since the launch of the operation against MQM.

Despite giving an account of all these fault lines, the author does not categorize Pakistan as a failed or a failing state; rather, he states that Pakistan is a dysfunctional state. Something that is strong enough despite its faults. It has the sixth largest nuclear-armed military in the world; however, in terms of domestic service delivery, all pillars of the state are yet to function at their optimal level.

Pakistan's identity crisis

Sabharwal thinks Pakistan’s hostility towards India is rooted in its identity crisis, that it has tried to forge its identity in negation to the Indian identity, which is plural, ancient, and diverse, something that nascent Pakistan lacks. However, he briefly attempts to engage the views of Aitzaz Ahsan and Javed Jabbar, not Benedict Anderson or Partha Chatterjee, on identity construction, only to arrive at how India’s identity subscribes to Nehruvian oneness within diversity from one part of the United India to another. Though a lot can be said on the subject of identity formation in modern nation-states, just to put it out there, Hindustan was never a united empire but rather a fragmented empire with a loose pseudo-federal arrangement (K. Adeney)[2]. Hence, a preponderance of anti-India sentiment might be there and even superimposed by the ruling elite; however, it does not lend credence to the fact that the official identity/nationalism of one diverse modern nation-state is better than the other when they have both been created, or, borrowing it from Hobsbawm, ‘invented’ in retrospect, and imposed from above!

Moving ahead, Sabharwal asserts that these structural weaknesses actively distort Pakistan's posture towards India. Thus, the second half of the book shifts from diagnosis to prescription: What can India realistically do?

In this part, Sabharwal covers moments of halt and progress in Indo-Pak relations and what lessons these events can teach Indian policymakers. For him, the India-Pakistan issues boil down to two core issues: terrorism and Kashmir. Both have fought wars, engaged in an arms race, and tried to leverage their position at different forums internationally.  However, nothing has come of it till today. Rather than engaging in the oft-moralist stance, the author brazenly states that Pakistan uses proxies to keep the Kashmir issue alive, whereas India has annexed its special status through Article 370 and 35-A.

For Pakistan, Kashmir stands central to the Indo-Pak equation, while for India, it is its internal matter, something that Pakistan thinks is an illegal occupation. India, on the other hand, thinks Pakistan is an exporter of terrorism in the region, and its army’s survival and institutional thinking are hell-bent on destabilizing or coercing India through terrorist activities. India has incessantly held Pakistan responsible for the 2001 Indian Parliament attack, the Mumbai attacks in 2008, and the Uri attack, blaming Pakistan for harboring terrorists’ sanctuaries and outfits like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. Various attempts at composite dialogues have failed, as both wanted their issue, Kashmir or terrorism, to get the primacy. In such a situation, India only has limited options to contain, coerce, or even manage the relationship with Pakistan, and no option would help; hence, India should adopt a multi-pronged strategy on varying fronts.

Sabharwal thinks that the persistent thorn in the bilateral relationship has been Kashmir, and given that no side is willing to concede, it's high time that, rather than remain stuck in this situation forever, both states solve it by making the LoC an international border with allowance for travel across the lines. As for terrorism, India shall try to lobby international actors against Pakistan’s terror financing to blacklist Pakistan. However, with Americans still needing Pakistan to manage Taliban Afghanistan, Pakistan might remain on the grey list for the foreseeable future, leaving India with the only option of developing deterrence and counterterrorism capabilities.

Unstable Pakistan not in India's favour

Moreover, the author dispassionately, and maybe even at the behest of disappointing war hawks in India, opines that India and Pakistan are a reality and should coexist and co-prosper together. He argues that an unstable or withered Pakistan is not favorable for India at all, and it is not something India should even try for. Quoting Pakistan’s involvement in Afghanistan for strategic depth, he draws the lesson that a debilitated Pakistan can be a threat to the whole world, not only neighboring India, as warlords and terrorists can get their hands on nukes. Hence, a stable Pakistan favors India the most.

He emphasizes that India needs to change its thinking about Pakistan as a monolith, noting how social media has fostered new perspectives among Pakistani civil society and academics, many of whom now seek normalized relations with India and draw inspiration from its recent economic growth. This means people-to-people engagement can open new ways of engagement, and even if it didn’t work in the past, the future possibility should never be ruled out.

Additionally, India and Pakistan do not trade on a large scale; hence, it cannot be leveraged much, an option that should not be ruled out for the future, as trade can open up new arenas of cooperation. Also, he suggests that weaponizing water to coerce Pakistan is also not viable unless many more dams have been built on the Chenab, and even then, it would cause only limited damage. Pakistan’s water crisis is more of an internal management problem than India is credited for, writes Sabharwal.

Lastly, he maintains that engaging with the Pakistani military to sort out the issues would be a futile exercise, as the institutional change takes time and is slow, while also ruling out the idea of compliance by force. He urges India that ‘indiscriminate tactical attack can lead to a tit-for-tat situation without any positive results for India, to which Pakistan can respond in kind'.

Loss of media credibility

India’s Pakistan Conundrum is a comprehensive and somewhat concrete account of the dynamics of the power and politics in Pakistan. Though one can differ with various minor details, one must remember that the author is a diplomat, a civil servant from India, so the burden of resolving theoretical riddles is not his to carry. However, what he must be applauded for is acknowledging Pakistan's problems, accepting them as a reality, and giving India some practical policy suggestions to not go down the domineering, hawkish lane of coercion through force, while recognizing the military and nuclear capabilities of the other state to avoid nuclear escalation of any sort.

Last, but not least, the author has focused too much on Pakistan and how India can deal with it, whereas the analysis would have been more holistic if Indian domestic politics and electoral sloganeering against Pakistan, the rise of Hindutva, and subsequent saffronization had been taken into account as to what drives India in this relationship. The anti-Pakistan and anti-Muslim hateful rhetoric that Modi and the BJP weaponize begs the question: Is Pakistan the only rogue player in this game? Has India ever planned anything nefarious over the decades? 

It's difficult to talk peace when the whole Indian media, as witnessed in the recent conflict, lost whatever credibility it had left. Hence, coming back to Sabharwal’s original question, when hate overpowers reason and sober strategy, even ‘responsible’ leaders gamble with apocalyptic ends. As did Modi on the night of 7th May with Operation Sindoor. So, emotionally, the answer is yes. Logically, a countdown to mutual annihilation!

(The writer is associated with the BNU Center for Policy Research, Lahore, Pakistan, Views expressed are personal. He can be reached at sarmad.wali@bnu.edu.pk )

* Sharat Sabharwal is a former Indian diplomat who served as Deputy High Commissioner (1995–99) and later High Commissioner to Pakistan (2009–13).

[1] Sabharwal, S. (2020). India’s Pakistan Conundrum: Managing a Complex Relationship. p. 186.

[2] Adeney, K. S. (n.d.). Federal formation and consociational stabilisation: The politics of national identity articulation and ethnic conflict regulation in India and Pakistan. Government Department, London School of Economics, University of London. p. 50.