A month after the most significant India-Pakistan crisis in this century, which once was threatening to spiral out of control, there is a ceasefire that has held even while both countries have just completed a round of public diplomacy exercise to shape global opinion in favour of their rival narratives. 

Both countries are projecting the four-day hostilities as a military triumph - India thinks that Pakistan has been taught a lesson it won't forget, destroying not just targeted "terror camps" but also strategic airbases; Pakistan thinks that it has levelled India in conventional warfare, downing some of their expensive fighter jets and forcing India to negotiate a ceasefire under American pressure. 

A realistic assessment

Taking a realistic and objective view, and in the light of available facts, what did four day hostilities achieve and what does the future hold? After bombastic talk from political and media loudmouths about Pakistan being hammered into submission, a more rational introspection has revealed that India did make deep penetrative strikes against Pakistan and damaged many of its key air bases and command and control centres in retaliation for Pakistani drone and missile targeting its military infrastructure. This followed India's punitive strikes on May 7 against "terror bases" in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Pakistani Punjab, that risked taking the conflict beyond the disputed Kashmir into a wider swathe of Pakistan.  

India said it had notified Pakistan after the strikes that these were focused, measured and non-escalatory and that Pakistani military establishments had not been targeted. It was also reiterated that any attack on military targets in India will inevitably invite a suitable response.

India may have lost upto five combat aircraft on May 7-8, though certainly not as many as Pakistan alleged. India's Chief of Defence Staff, General Anil Chauhan, said in rare media interviews in Singapore on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue  that India made "tactical mistakes" in the beginning of the conflict, because of which it lost some aircraft - he said "absolutely incorrect" to suggestions that six aircraft were downed but confirmed no figures - but said these were rectified and as a result India hit back strongly that forced Pakistan to negotiate a ceasefire. Questions are being naturally asked as to why it took so long for India to clarify the loss of aircraft, and that too on foreign soil, when social media has  been abuzz with rumours and speculation from the time images of downed Rafales surfaced on credible media platforms, only to be withdrawn under official pressure.

Battle of narratives 

Muscle-flexing jingoism aside from both sides - more from India while Pakistan has been more defensive -  the world has seen the four-day conflict quite differently. With Indian television media converting their studios to war rooms and abandoning all semblance of objectivity and fairness and making little differentiation between facts and fantasy, international South Asia watchers were left to sift official facts from media fiction masquerading as gospel truth.

There was no doubt India's media briefings, headed by Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and flanked by a Muslim and Hindu military officer, were more structured, and strategically aligned with its military and diplomatic objectives. In contrast, Pakistan's briefings were more reactive and lacked the proactive engagement observed in India's communication strategy  which effectively utilized both traditional and digital media to project its side of the story on the operations. 

A Stimson Center Working Paper on the four-day conflict May 7-10, based on "available evidence", surmised that both had their reasons to opt for the ceasefire, though both gave different versions of how it came about.

"....Pakistan’s sense that it had struck back and proven its point—was enough for Pakistan to opt to halt the crisis. Pakistani interest is evident in the persistent DGMO calls. Yet, if India truly felt that it had a decisive military upper hand, New Delhi could have opted to press forward. Perhaps it even deliberated doing so. Yet India, too, apparently calculated the political advantages of further strikes were not worth the continued persistence of a costly and dangerous crisis. Both sides accepted the US-facilitated ceasefire."

Conflicting ceasefire claims

How did the ceasefire come about so suddenly when rival military operations were apparently at their peak? While US President Donald Trump first announced the ceasefire and sought to take credit for defusing a potentially dangerous situation in a region that the West calls a "nuclear flashpoint", India stoutly denied any outside brokering or mediation and insisted that the ceasefire happened on Pakistani pleadings (Modi said Pakistan "begged for a ceasefire"), since India was militarily in a position of dominance.

Pakistan not only thanked the US but also Saudi Arabia, UAE, China and Turkey for bringing about the truce and highlighted the danger of nuclear escalation if the Kashmir problem was not resolved, making it clear that it sought international mediation in resolving the dispute which India insists can only be resolved bilaterally. India has made it clear it has no desire to talk with Pakistan now and would prefer as some called "strategic distancing" from its western neighbour. 

Diplomatic war

A month after the ceasefire, the government has ostensibly made little headway in identifying the five terrorists, leave alone bringing them to justice. These gunmen, presuming they were from across the border as the government has said, apparently had travelled at least 250 km undetected from the Line of Control to reach Pahalgam undetected, indulged in the wanton massacre before fleeing without being unchallenged in any way in a union territory that is said to be teeming with security forces, from army, paramilitary to state police. Those who survived the killings said that no security forces came to their help when they were fleeing the scene and they were left to their own devices. Weeks after the sole focus continues to be on extracting maximum political mileage out of the military strikes and influencing global opinion against Pakistan as an "exporter of terrorism".

The government sent seven delegations of 59 MPs to 33 world capitals to explain the Indian perspective and influence global opinion on the conflict and why India had chosen to launch Operation Sindoor. The capital cities the delegations visited were carefully chosen by the Ministry of External Affairs, of being either permanent members of the UN Security Council, or who are either present non-permanent members or elected to serve the next term as non-permanent members who each serve two years by rotation. Interestingly, despite having a declared "Neighbourhood First"  policy, no South Asian nation was on the MPs itinerary although one would have thought that their economic and strategic interests would be directly impacted by hostilities by South Asia's two largest nations. Were they not considered important enough?

Pakistan also dispatched delegations, though not as many as India, that only visited five capitals, and projected the country, according to Foreign Policy, "as an innocent and peaceful actor and India as an aggressor".

But as Michael Kugelman, South Asia expert at Foreign Policy, echoed the views of many international diplomats and observers as to "why India and Pakistan feel the need to wage this battle of narratives at all", especially India which is "adamant about not wanting international involvement in India's bilateral disputes".

Is peace a chimera? 

Hours after the killings, scores of Kashmiris were rounded up on the suspicion of being local collaborators of the terrorists, whose identity is still not known, and homes of many Kashmiris were demolished or destroyed with explosives on the charge that they harboured militants. These included homes of people who were once allegedly associated with the militancy, most of them without notice as their occupants, including women and children were huddled into nearby mosques, and this has only enhanced local resentment and increased Kashmiri alienation, including the fact that many Kashmiri students in the rest of the country were targeted for what happened in Pahalgam.        

While a section of Indians believes that Pakistan has been taught an adequate lesson and will think twice before supporting or promoting any further act of terrorism in India, others think that, given the kind of retributive statements seen on social media from the anti-India outfits in Pakistan, and the presence of Pakistani military officials at the funeral of terrorists killed in the Indian missile assaults, Pakistan may weigh in the cost-benefit factor to 'bleed' India again sooner than later.

So if another terror attack happens, will India launch another deep-strike operation with all the attendant risks of escalation? And how long can the tit-for-tat actions continue with the loss of soldiers and civilian lives and homes and attendant costs of military armoury and infrastructure destruction at a time when economic growth and dwindling jobs need all the attention?

Kolkata-based peace evangelist O P Shah, who has been working to promote peace and amity between India and Pakistan for over three decades and also visited Jammu and Kashmir over a hundred times by his own admission in the cause of bridging misunderstandings and promoting harmony, feels that there is no option for both countries but to talk to sort out their differences, if not a modus vivendi, as a continued state of conflict will only deepen the mistrust and alienation between the two people and countries. Quoting Lord Ram to say that war is the biggest enemy of mankind and one can bring about truth and justice without resorting to war, Shah says that peacemongers like him don't lose hope and this was perhaps the best time in "changing the whole scenario of the subcontinent and have the best of relations between the two countries".

(The writer is a veteran journalist and editor who is currently director, Society for Policy Studies that runs South Asia Monitor)