Indian Politics & Policy Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2018 | Page 22

India’s Ways of (Non-) War: Explaining New Delhi’s
Forbearance in the Face of Pakistani Provocations
consequences.” At the same time, Adm.
Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff (JCS), was in Islamabad
meeting with President Zardari
and COAS Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Rice
then traveled from India to Pakistan,
where she met with Zardari, Kayani,
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani,
and Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood
Qureshi. 139 Immediately after the Mumbai
attacks, India had demanded that
Pakistan apprehend 20 high-profile
terrorist suspects and extradite them
to India for trial. 140 Rice and Mullen
complemented that message by urging
their Pakistani interlocutors to aggressively
investigate and bring to justice
those responsible for the carnage, with
Rice adding that there was “irrefutable
evidence” that Pakistani nationals were
involved in the massacre. 141 Days later,
U.S. Sen. John McCain, visiting Islamabad
after talks in New Delhi, warned
Pakistani leaders that India “would
be left with no choice but to carry out
surgical strikes against” targets linked
to the Mumbai attacks unless Pakistan
cracked down on terrorist elements. 142
In sum, U.S. crisis-management priorities
in early December were to convince
New Delhi not to respond militarily
to 26/11, and to “get the Pakistanis to
cough up people and clamp down [on
terrorists].” In response, Islamabad—
which denied any connection to the
Mumbai tragedy—went through the
motions of arresting 22 LeT members,
banning LeT affiliate Jamaat-ud-Dawa
(“Society for Proselytization”—JuD),
and putting LeT/JuD leader Hafiz Saeed
under house arrest. But, there was “no
systematic crackdown on LeT’s infrastructure
and apparatus in Pakistan.” 143
A week after the LeT attacks, it
looked as though the danger of a major
crisis had been contained. An Indian
diplomat emphasized to his counterparts
in the U.S. embassy in Islamabad
that “India has issued no war warnings
to Pakistan and had not mobilized its
forces.” 144 Indian Foreign Secretary
Shivshankar Menon subsequently told
U.S. diplomats that “India, in the wake
of the Mumbai attacks, had consciously
not built up troops on the border, as
it had following the 2001 attack on its
Parliament.” 145 New Delhi did, however,
put on hold the “Composite Dialogue,”
a diplomatic process begun in 2004
that had generated some momentum
in attempting to resolve a number of
India–Pakistan political conflicts. As
U.S. diplomats in New Delhi explained,
“the Mumbai terrorist attacks deeply
angered the Indian public. This time,
in addition to the reactions against Pakistan,
Indians directed a new level of
fury at their own political establishment,
which they feel failed to protect
them.” The “public’s anger pushed”
Prime Minister Singh to “shelve” the dialogue.
146 In a forceful speech in Parliament
on December 11, Singh described
Pakistan as the “epicenter of terrorism,”
warned that Indian restraint should not
be “misconstrued as a sign of weakness,”
and demanded that the “infrastructure
of terrorism” in Pakistan be “dismantled
permanently.” But, the bulk of the
prime minister’s speech focused on the
necessity of domestic security reforms
and improving future efforts to prevent
attacks. 147 Generally speaking, New
Delhi’s “focus was primarily on domes-
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