Surprised and shocked on Kashmir by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Pakistan has unleashed a series of aggressive moves to keep India - and its own people - guessing. Pakistani ministers like Sheikh Rashid have even given a time for the next India-Pakistan war: October–November, 2019. Whether this is a motormouth going off the rails or part of orchestrated psy-ops by Pakistan's spy agency ISI remains to be seen.
 
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has suggested not-so-subtle nuclear blackmail, saying the conflict can escalate into a nuclear confrontation, in which no one will win. Even apparently rational diplomats like the former High Commissioner to India, Ashraf Jahangir Qazi, has backed all-out insurrection in Kashmir, quoting from UN resolutions supporting the right of self-determination. 
 
Many would say Imran's pitch for a display of solidarity with the Kashmiris - 30 minutes every afternoon on Friday - is as much to save his own skin in the face of a huge opposition backlash to convince the world that Pakistan will not take Modi's reorganisation of Kashmir lying down. Imran's desperation to involve the global community indicates he is short of options.
 
The military option is surely not one of them because a bankrupt nation with an empty treasury and a Prime Minister's Office incapable of paying electricity bills can barely support a full-scale war with a more powerful neighbour. Imran asked this question to the opposition, indicating it was not an option, so Rashid may just be chest-thumping.
 
A huge terror strike like Mumbai 2008 is also not much of an option - it would provoke retaliatory strikes and spring the FATF blacklist on Pakistan, which its tottering economy can ill afford.  So commando manoeuvres on the border - from Gujarat to Kashmir - again maybe just a diversion, a decoy plan to take India's attention away and keep the world on tenterhooks. The test launch of the Ghaznavi missile would serve much the same purpose - nuclear sabre-rattling to scare the world. 
 
Pakistan's only real option is to provoke large-scale communal conflict simultaneously in states like Gujarat, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Assam and Kashmir, which can spread to other regions. That can be blamed on the ruling dispensation's 'anti-Muslim' policies, against which many voices have been raised in India.  ISI may provoke such riots by a series of diabolical moves, using Indian surrogates like the remnants of Indian Mujahideen or the Bangladeshi JMB, whose cadres have mostly fled to India after the crackdown in Bangladesh. What they would bank on is the gullibility of the Hindu right and its instant tendency to hit back against Muslims. 
 
Surgical strikes are a great option when exercised against Pakistan but a huge liability if used against the country's own minorities. Israel, now India's role model in fighting terror, has always ensured there is no adverse fallout on its Arab populations in the West Bank or Gaza in the event of a terror strike. The Jews know their tough state will hit back against the actual terrorists and not innocents.
 
Explosions in temples and mosques in the same city simultaneously, select assassinations or widespread butchery of cows in front of temples and pigs in front of mosques - literally anything that can provoke a riot in India may be the one last option of the ISI and Pakistan army.  Vigil along the coast and along the LOC, on our southern maritime region, with many nuclear plants close to the shores, and in the air is important, but it is much more crucial to watch out for a possible riot-provoking rumour on social media, a pig head in front of a mosque or a cow head in front of a temple.
 
Nobody knows better than Modi what a huge riot can do to the national image.  Despite much public discomfort in the post-370 (Article 370 of the Indian Constitution) abrogation lockdown, Indian authorities have by and large controlled violence, both by protestors and retaliatory action by security forces. Congress president Rahul Gandhi had to back off from his impulsive claim of much violence in Kashmir. 
 
With huge deployment of security forces in Kashmir and now in Assam in the rundown to the National Registser of Citizens publication, other states may be targeted by the new social media-driven rumour technology. 
 
Imran's sudden effort to internationalise Assam's NRC process - and deliberate mischief to project all exclusions as those of Muslims - and his tirade on "RSS goons unleashed in Kashmir" gives out the intention. Provoke a riot, in which a lot of Muslims die, and blame the RSS-BJP for it.  For India's ruling dispensation, this is a huge challenge of inner restraint and organisational control, as big as the challenge on the coast or the LoC.
 
Ashok Dhar's recent book, "Kashmir as I see it," quotes his one-time Dubai based Pakistani colleague, Akhtar Zaidi, as saying that there is no love lost for Kashmiris in Pakistan. In the words of Zaidi, a Punjabi Muslim, "What love of Kashmiris? They are living in a fool's paradise. Frankly speaking, they will be third-class citizens in Pakistan. My friend, we all know Kashmiri women are beautiful. We will marry them. The men will work for us as our employees, as all business will be in our hands," is what Zaidi's friend told Dhar at the Karachi Gymkhana during his first visit to Pakistan in 1998. 
 
(The writer is a veteran journalist. He can be contacted at sbhaum@gmail.com)