India and Pakistan engaged in a military conflict between May 7-10 following a terrorist attack in the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir on April 22, which killed 25 tourists and a local pony handler. India subsequently suspended the India-Pakistan Indus Waters Treaty, which governs the sharing of waters of the Indus River between the countries. It then launched strikes on Pakistan on May 7 in order to target terrorist infrastructure it believed was responsible for the April 22 Pahalgam attack.
While the precise nature of the link between the terrorist attack and the Pakistani state are not known, a report from the Brookings Institution states that “the Pakistani military has allowed a welter of militant and terrorist groups to operate largely unimpeded on its soil…the patterns of state cooperation with these groups are strikingly visible, but the details of any single operational partnership are often difficult to trace.”
After four days of fighting, India and Pakistan agreed to a ceasefire — which the United States claimed to have brokered — on May 10. Much ink has been spilled about what the conflict reveals about India’s and Pakistan’s military capabilities, though much of what happened is still opaque, clouded by the fog of war, or misinformation and disinformation.
What is known is that India demonstrated clear, but not overwhelming, military superiority over Pakistan, as would be expected on the basis of its size, military spending, and economy. In particular, India demonstrated it had the technological capability to strike targets all over Pakistan with precision and to defeat Pakistani missiles and drones.
On the other hand, Pakistan performed better than expected, particularly on the diplomatic and military fronts: it shot down several Indian aircraft, while preventing any country from taking India’s line in condemning it. Even countries that India has cultivated close ties with, such as the United States and Japan, took balanced stances. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump equated India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, despite the long, warm relationship between Modi and Trump.
These developments have clear geopolitical and strategic implications for India. They do not necessarily reflect poorly on India’s long-term trajectory of economic and military growth: these will continue to deliver benefits to India’s position. Nor are they a condemnation of Modi’s multilateral diplomacy. But multilateralism and nonalignment have their limits. Just as India is not willing to completely throw in its lot with another country or alliance, likewise, no other country has an incentive to go all in with India (except, perhaps, Israel). Despite Pakistan’s intransigence, other countries are not willing to equate it to Gaza — which can be bombed at will without much consequence — because it is still a functional, sovereign nation-state. More importantly, there are other countries that further their geopolitical agendas by weakening India and strengthening Pakistan, particularly China and Turkiye, both emerging great powers, like India, in the new 21st century world order. Sino-Indian rivalry is not a new feature of the modern international system, but Türkiye’s position should not be surprising either, as it is a modern manifestation of the Ottoman Empire’s history of political and cultural interference in the affairs of the subcontinent.
India now faces the problem of de-hyphenation again, the idea that India and Pakistan should not be linked in global discourse. Immediately adjacent to this problem is its geopolitical position in both South Asia and the world. India believes that it is a major power, entitled to respect and deference in its own backyard, and with its own neighbors. Outside involvement and outside offers of mediation and negotiation between India and Pakistan insinuate two things. First, India is not the regional hegemon in South Asia, one that is entitled to call the shots locally. Other countries can get involved in India’s backyard and pursue their own interests rather than defer to India’s.
Second, mediation implies that India and Pakistan are roughly peer states, equal, if not in power, in moral and diplomatic terms, which runs counter to India’s narrative that it is a responsible power, while Pakistan is little more than a state sponsor of terrorism. Third-party mediation would also be more likely to produce equal outcomes, which would essentially advantage Pakistan, as the smaller and weaker state. This also implies that India does not have the power to impose its preferred outcomes on Pakistan, especially in regard to the Kashmir issue. The United States would find it problematic if China attempted to mediate between it and Canada in some dispute, because that would be an unwelcome intrusion into another powerful country’s geopolitical sphere, and because that would imply that two countries are being put on an equal basis, when in reality, one has a population and economy several times the size of the other. If India cannot clearly assert itself as the regional hegemon in South Asia, it will be harder for it to act as a world power on a larger stage. It is not playing at the level of the U.S. or China.
Recent events thus demonstrate that India has a lot of work to do, not only in the realm of image management, but in continuing to build up both its hard and soft power, so that it can achieve its goal of becoming an overwhelming hegemon in South Asia. On top of that, it must improve its ability to support rivals of China and Turkiye in a manner similar to the way they supported Pakistan. It must also resolve some of the issues that are inherent in its strategy of nonalignment by maximizing ties with countries that are favorable aligned toward it, such as the U.S., France, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Japan, while deemphasizing ties with countries that are simply not going to help it much, including Iran, Turkiye, and China. Russia is the only significant liminal case.
Despite strenuous efforts on India’s part to avoid antagonizing China, such as by framing the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue as not “standing against something or somebody” and opposing a closer military grouping, India has failed to stem China’s geopolitical opposition to it. There is likely little India can do on this front, short of completely casting its lot in with China and capitulating to Chinese interests, so it should be taken as a given that China will naturally view the only other Asian giant as a rival that ought to be weakened, whether by supporting Pakistan by selling it advanced weapons, controlling the flow of water into India, or by disrupting Indian manufacturing. This is just the nature of the world, of matsyanyaya (fish eat fish), of the Chinese idea that two tigers cannot inhabit one mountain (一山不容二虎). India should acknowledge this, stop playing coy, proceed accordingly, and transcend domestic squabbles revolving around language, caste, and whatnot. India should also maximize the benefits from its relationship with the U.S. by framing its geopolitical problems clearly in these terms.
As the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) noted in its 2025 Worldwide Threat Assessment 2025, India views “China as its primary adversary and Pakistan [as] an ancillary security problem.” Recent geopolitical events have borne this out to be true, and it is clear that Pakistan and China are working closely together. For India to be a great power, to achieve security and dominance regionally, and respect globally, it must measure up to China, by growing its economy, strengthening its military, and enhancing its diplomatic clout. The Pakistan issue will solve itself on its own as India pursues the goal of achieving parity with China, or at least a higher level of national strength.