1 April is codified as April Fool’s Day—a day for wit, pranksters, and testing your naivety with calendar alertness. 2 April, however, was no laughing matter.
It was the day US President Donald Trump dubbed 'Liberation Day' and brought out a multicoloured board to the Rose Garden and announced to the world a slew of tariffs on allies, trading partners, and adversaries.
While uncertainty is the only the certainty, at times, in Washingtonian politics one thing has remained consistent—tariffs remain a key instrument of both Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 foreign policy.
Spring in Washington means two things: the iconic cherry blossom bloom, and a prognosis on avoiding economic gloom as the world’s finance ministers and central bankers descend onto the capital for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank spring meetings, earning the sobriquet of 'Davos on the Potomac'.
Tariffs and Terror in Tandem
While the 'T' word of tariffs was the biggest threat dominating discourse, another age-old 'T' word—the threat of terrorism—shot through the headlines, momentarily relegating tariffs to second fiddle.
So much so that even the Indian Finance Minister cut her trip short and was summoned back to New Delhi, considering how the picturesque Pahalgam was now marred with massacre.
In 2016, in the aftermath of the Uri attacks, the Indian Armed forces launched elite paramilitary commandos across the Line of Control in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) to eliminate terror infrastructure, codifying these retaliatory responses as “surgical strikes”.
In a conversation I had with Lt Gen Deependra Singh Hooda (retired), the architect in uniform of those strikes, he touched on a new precedent that had been set in New Delhi: India wouldn’t take such asymmetric warfare lying down.
Pahalgam to Precision Strikes: India Hits Back
Almost a decade later, the Indian military forces carried out Operation Sindoor on 7 May—missile strikes on nine terror sites in Pakistan and PoK, aimed at targeting groups under the auspices of the Pakistani military establishment.
New Delhi didn’t mince its words and its homilies, excoriated Islamabad and Rawalpindi’s long-held Janus-faced duplicity in “death by a thousand cuts”, and stated that the targets were to dismantle terror infrastructure.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme with time. Reports emerged of continuous strikes on targeted installations, drones being sent from Pakistan, and aircraft allegedly shot down—there was even one hyperbolic claim about a port being bombed.
It’s difficult to read the tea leaves during most geopolitical events, let alone in the shifting sands of conflict, where the fog of war is further thickened by the twin forces of misinformation and disinformation from both countries’ media, which too often eschew journalistic ethics and act more like shills.
The tea leaves perhaps pointed to the Balakot strikes of 2019, but many would have hoped and prayed that it didn’t end with “tea memes” from the Pakistani social media accounts, pertaining to capture of Indian Air Force pilot Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman.
Mayday is a call sign for danger, and the month of May indeed spelled precarious omens of two-nuclear adversaries squaring off. One thing is certain, the spectre of war was drastically raised, as India attacked deeper into Pakistan since 1971 war, an act unseen even during the Karil War of 1999.
Washington’s Role: Then and Now
Back then, both Islamabad and New Delhi went nuclear, prompting global concerns and forcing then US President Bill Clinton to make phone calls and trips to both countries, pushing for a détente and a clarion call for peace.
That was in the last millennium when much was different. For starters, India and Pakistan were hyphenated, India’s economy wasn’t the allure of the world, Islamabad remained “a more robust ally” of Washington, 9/11 hadn’t taken place yet, and most importantly, Washington’s worldview was more interventionist and less isolationist.
An initially reluctant Washington soon played peacemaker this time, stepping in to announce an immediate ceasefire and temporary end to hostilities. Both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Shehbaz Sharif took to the airwaves, lauding their armies, with PM Modi also excoriating Islamabad’s use of terror as proxies and stating unequivocally that talks on trade remain incongruous when terror receives haven.
For now, a ceasefire, as another conflagration adds to the tumultuous eight-decade relationship that commenced with a bloody partition and, most recently, saw the use of ballistic missiles.
From Bus Diplomacy to Dogfights
In 2022, when India and Pakistan turned 75 years, I chronicled their journey and said it was time to reflect on Stephen Cohen’s book and prophecy of “shooting for a century”, where India and Pakistan were destined to play the merry-go-round of skirmishes and stalemate.
I wrote that one of the main kernel problems in the larger eight-decade imbroglio of India and Pakistan stems from the fact that neither side agree on history—from Partition to Kashmir, which Islamabad continuously cites as the unfinished business of Partition.
India-Pakistan diplomacy remains a quintessential case of two steps forward, three steps back.
This isn't merely rhetoric, but can be traced to from 1999, when the late Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee took a bus to Lahore and signed the Lahore Declaration at the Minar-e-Pakistan, a potent symbol of Pakistan’s founding and a move aimed at reassuring skeptics in Pakistan that India accepted the post-Partition reality.
The ink had barely dried when Pakistan’s then Army Chief, the infamous Pervez Musharraf, was hiding in subterfuge, plotting to take over the Kargil heights.
Despite the betrayal at Kargil and Musharraf’s subsequent coup as the new man-in-charge, Vajpayee extended yet another olive branch by inviting the now President Musharraf to India for the historic Agra Summit. Hope soon gave away to hostility with the Parliament attacks of December 2001, post the 9/11 era, with groups long linked to elements within the Pakistani establishment. Operation Parakram and a tense stand-off ensued.
Echoes of Cohen’s Prophecy
The hint to understanding India-Pakistan relations lies in book titles, ironically not on the subject. The title of former US Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul’s book, From Cold War to Hot Peace, is apt to describe India and Pakistan's relationship, although the book is about the US and Russia's relations.
While “Cold War” is hackneyed, the term “hot peace” more accurately captures this uneasy equilibrium, an eerie silence in a horror film, waiting for something to happen. So, while peace “existed”, it was only until things ended with a bang: the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, resetting relations to a new nadir.
PM Modi’s elevation to the highest political office in the land, saw him make Vajpayeesque overtures. He invited his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif to his swearing-in ceremony, an unexpected outreach. In 2015, Modi made an impromptu stopover in Lahore on his return from Kabul, signalling an intent to build personal rapport over political rivalry.
Insert that cliché of history repeating itself. This was followed by the Pathankot airbase attack in early 2016, followed by the Uri attack and India’s riposte with surgical strikes.
The Balakot airstrikes in 2019, a subsequent aerial dogfight, and the capture of Indian pilot Varthaman only deepened the chasm.
One key point to note was in 2019, while relations were to hit another low with India’s revocation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir, it was the first time where Islamabad was more irate reacting to New Delhi’s actions than vice-versa.
Since August 2019, there have been no High Commissioners in either capital—marking the longest such freeze since India suspended ties after the 1971 war, only resuming them in 1976.
History reminds us that we will be here again, since Islamabad and the military establishment of Rawalpindi have long used proxies for nefarious gains in Kashmir.
New Delhi now not only has an acquisitions advantage with its relations with the United States through the US-India TRUST and US-India COMPACT initiatives, but its economic coffers are 11 times Islamabad’s coffers, which finds itself beholden to the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) loans.
Four wars have already been fought—including the first Kashmir war in 1947—and now, this latest conflagration brought back fears of the last two decades.
This time, it was with sufficient upgrades: fighter jets of Chinese, Israeli, French, Russian, and American make. The use of autonomous warfare and drone technology may mitigate immediate risk of losing aerial manpower, but accentuates death and destruction with precision strikes.
Cohen’s prophecy is looking more and more likely. Even though he’s moved on from this world, this is one prophecy he would still wish wouldn’t come to fruition.
(Akshobh Giridharadas is based out of Washington DC and writes on diverse topics such as geopolitics, business, tech and sports. He is a two-time TEDx and Toastmasters public speaker and a graduate of the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy. He tweets @Akshobh. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)