Washington: India, for nearly a decade, had been gradually shedding the rhetoric of strategic restraint, with its cycle of responses to major Pakistan-based terrorist attacks, including Uri in 2016, Balakot in 2019, and Pahalgam in 2025 revealing an unavoidable reality, renowned international analysts reckoned on Saturday.
John Spencer, the Executive Director at the US-based Urban Warfare Institute and Lauren Dagan Amoss, an international academic expert on India’s foreign and security policy, argued that limited and predictable retaliation against cross-border terrorism has not deterred attacks; rather, it has enabled them.
According to the experts, restraint, once assumed to be stabilising — had become strategically risky; its predictability enabled militant groups to plan the next attack, while shattering the belief that terrorism could be contained below the threshold of interstate conflict.
“After observing the planning, execution, and aftermath of Operation Sindoor, the conclusion is clear. India has crossed a doctrinal threshold. It is no longer a state that responds to terrorism with calibrated warnings or waits for international partners to validate its choices. It is building a new operating logic rooted in coercive clarity and a willingness to act first when its citizens are threatened. Operation Sindoor did not create this shift. It revealed it,” Spencer and Amoss wrote in an article titled ‘The End of Old Assumptions: What India’s New Security Paradigm Actually Looks Like’ which Spencer shared on X.
“Strategic restraint was designed to prevent escalation with Pakistan. In practice, it did the opposite. Terror groups backed by Pakistan’s security agencies exploited the firebreak between terrorism and state aggression, assuming India would avoid decisive retaliation or cross-border action. Limited responses produced predictable patterns. Predictability invited more violence,” the article added.
According to the experts, India’s counterterrorism doctrine has evolved, treating proxy groups as instruments of state policy. They noted that India’s zero-tolerance policy now targets not only acts of terrorism but also the networks that enable it, with the wider ecosystem surrounding terrorist groups considered as a legitimate set of targets.
“A final dimension is often overlooked. China is the silent second audience for India’s choices. Signals meant for Pakistan carry an implied message for Beijing. India’s interception of Chinese-origin PL-15 air-to-air missiles and its successful defeat of Pakistan’s Chinese-supplied air defence systems during Operation Sindoor provided valuable intelligence on Chinese weapons design and vulnerabilities. India’s new deterrence logic is built for a two-front environment in which actions in one direction have consequences in the other,” the experts stated.
“What emerges is the picture of a state transforming under fire. India is not becoming reckless. It is becoming coherent. It is aligning doctrine, public expectations, defence industrial capacity, and geopolitical messaging around a single principle. Security must be achieved by India, not granted through outside mediation or constrained by outdated assumptions,” they further mentioned.
(IANS)
