Trapped by the Neighbourhood: India’s Strategic Autonomy and the New Logic of War

International politics, inescapably, is also the story of ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’. Those on the side of ‘war hawks’—individuals, leaders, and nation-states—are prone to encourage armed, internecine conflicts or even escalate ongoing ones, and advocate what is called ‘predatory foreign policy’, with the usage of heavy military force to solve conflicts. Their domination-impulse is high and they gleefully glorify war. For them, the liberal doctrine that promotes the harmony of interests and peace fails to capture the real conflicts present in global conflicts, and, therefore, they stress on war as real for the ‘final solution’. Hawks either are or are seen as cozying up with militarist, authoritarian, autocratic and anti-democratic regimes.

Conversely, doves are those who are pacifists, focused on prioritising peaceful resolutions, diplomacy and cooperation over war and military conflict. They rely quite heavily on the assumption of an underlying ‘harmony of real interests’.

The surprise ceasefire between India and Pakistan, supposedly pushed by US President Donald Trump, which he claims and has mentioned several times by now, has given the ‘doves’ a big sigh of relief. The conflict was on the brink of a very dangerous turn but, thanks, to the ceasefire, the nations moved forward towards peace. Politics has this uncanny inclination towards war, and peace is then expected to be the logical endgame, either in the short or long run.

India was determined to strike back at the camps of terror in Pakistan to avenge the dastardly attack on Hindu tourists in Pahalgam, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated that India would hit her enemies inside their territories. And, of course, India was well within her ethics and rights to take prudent retaliatory action. The actions of Operation Sindoor—a series of precision strikes at nine suspected terrorist sites in Pakistan and Pakistan Occupied Kashmir— were, nevertheless, emotionally whipped up by ‘war hawks’ to overpower the common sense of war ravages. With two nuclear powers getting close to attacking each other, it seemed the return of total war.

Moreover, with India and Pakistan announcing the cessation of firing, the ‘new normal’ of deterrence was embedded firmly, particularly post the Uri and Balakot strikes. Operation Sindoor was a continuation of the response to counter any act of escalation by Pakistan, and also to demonstrate India’s ability to strike deep and with precision.

India made it clear that henceforth every act of terrorism will be taken as ‘an act of war’, to be met with proportional response by the army, and held the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance. One may reflect, however, on whether the impro­mptu ceasefire has rendered Operation Sindoor rudderless or not. We see that Pakistan’s military infrastructure remains formidable enough to pose a further threat in the future. The military conflict, nevertheless, exposed the new warfare technologies and disinformation systems. It also established the entry of Chinese, Israeli and French weaponry. Earlier during the Indo-Pak conflicts, we witnessed the usage of American and Soviet weapons. Though India hit the centres of terror deep inside Punjab, the surprise, so to say, remains that the terrorists of Pahalgam have not yet been captured. Both India and Pakistan, without risking major devastation, have shown that they couldn’t inflict much damage on each other, but desire to do so, which renders the entire South Asian region a place where peace would remain largely fragile.

Operation Sindoor has managed to underscore one political objective, and that is the prohibitive costs on Pakistan for its support, tacit or otherwise, to terror and to secure the nation. It has also managed to push defence experts and the government to review India’s broader defence capabilities. It is imperative to do the stocktaking exercise to understand how we failed to gather information on the terrorist attack.

In the aftermath of the Kargil war, the Kargil Review Committee (KRC) was formed which suggested bolstering intelligence gathering and shoring up inter-services coordination, but, somehow, India couldn’t take it forward. The India-Pakistan hyphenation is yet again reinstated as we do not see any decisive victory or, for that matter, any clear political objective.

The ceasefire mediation has, of course, considerably reduced India’s strategic autonomy. The US, as history suggests, has never brokered peace on both sides, and India, since the 1949 Kashmir war, has not accepted any form of Western intervention. The Soviets, on the other hand, did intervene by underwriting the Tashkent Declaration in 1965-66. The US intervention in the present case is not only surprising but it also conveys that the power imbalance between the US and India is quite real and impactful.

With the commonsensical view of war, the India-Pakistan conflict can be seen as somewhat of a pathological phenomenon, perhaps a sign of immaturity to reach a consensus on a variety of issues, including Kashmir. Do we blame the international system for this breakdown and malfunctioning of the global order?

States have interests, which, at times, may clash and sometimes the parties may wish to resolve their difficulties by violence. At the time of independence, Nehruvian foreign policy was shaped, quintessentially, by the values rooted in the anti-colonial, nationalist struggle and the non-violence framework.

As one of the crucial architects of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Jawaharlal Nehru designed it to achieve the objectives of decolonisation, peaceful resolution of international disputes, redistribution of global resources to promote economic development and faith in the United Nations in its peacekeeping operations. Certainly, India, despite her violent partition, sought to peacefully maintain Indo-Pak relations.

In contemporary times, neo-conservative governments in India and elsewhere in the world, are hawkish in conceptualising power equations between nation-states. They somehow miss addressing the institutional deficit that they face in the conduct of their foreign policy. India has avoided, whether one agrees or not, asserting its ‘strategic autonomy’, and making the subcontinent a frontline state.

We are not surrounded by friendly nations and that makes us more vulnerable to be dependent on the US and the West in order to counter the China-Pakistan axis. Do we have enough mechanisms of foreign policy apparatus to sustain robust long-term strategic planning? The answer lies in the way we strategically play the game of hawks and doves in the international arena.

(Views expressed are personal)

Tanvir Aeijaz teaches public policy at Delhi University

This article is part of Outlook’s 1 June 2025 issue, 'Gated Neighbourhood', which examines the state of diplomacy, media, and democracy in the wake of the ceasefire. It appeared in print as 'Of Hawks And Doves.'