Indian Politics & Policy Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2018 | Page 28

India’s Ways of (Non-) War: Explaining New Delhi’s
Forbearance in the Face of Pakistani Provocations
were actively planning military strikes
or—more importantly—that they were
dissuaded from doing so by Pakistani
nuclear weapons, which would signal
weakness and set a bad precedent. 185 As
Robert Jervis writes, “to project an image
of high resolve and preserve their
bargaining power for future confrontations,
states have an interest in minimizing
the extent to which others believe
that they were influenced by their
adversary’s threats, especially threats to
use nuclear weapons.” 186 What analysts
sometimes forget is that it is equally
difficult to “prove” that nuclear deterrence
“did not work” during a particular
conflict episode. Nuclear deterrence
is a psychological process wherein one
side’s capabilities and signaling work in
often subtle ways on the perceptions,
fears, and ambitions of the other side’s
most important actors. What we are left
with, then, is to assess the plausibility of
deterrence having “worked.”
Generally speaking, the effects of
nuclear deterrence on Indian behavior
since 1998 have been twofold. First, the
option of a major conventional military
invasion of Pakistani territory (not Pakistani
Kashmir) is no longer feasible
for Indian decision makers. This is a
stark contrast with South Asia’s pre-nuclear
era, when New Delhi launched
substantial ground attacks on Pakistani
soil during wars over Kashmir in 1965
and Bangladesh in 1971. The implications
of this change can scarcely be
overstated. What it means is that the
punitive option that would best leverage
India’s overall advantages in material
power over Pakistan, a war of attrition
employing India’s greater military and
economic resources, has been removed
from the Indian strategic toolkit. Second,
Indian planners are acutely aware
that any substantial military response
to cross-border provocations raises the
possibility of an escalation spiral that is
fraught with peril and might lead to nuclear
war. As a consequence, they have
been forced to choose options that have
little or no chance of triggering a process
of escalation to conventional, and
then possibly nuclear, war. Thus, India’s
abiding strategic dilemma in South
Asia’s nuclear era is that any military offensive
robust enough to compel Pakistan
to change its behavior runs the risk
of nuclear retaliation, while Indian military
strikes that are certain not to provoke
a Pakistani nuclear response, or an
escalatory spiral that might lead to such
a response, are unlikely to change Pakistan’s
behavior.
During the 1999 Kargil crisis,
India responded forcefully after the
discovery of Pakistani intruders on its
side of the LOC in Kashmir. 187 However,
India’s military forces had strict
orders from the political leadership to
carefully limit their operations to the
Indian side of the LOC, despite the fact
that more aggressive operations across
the LOC would have empowered the
air force and army to disrupt Pakistani
supply lines and shortened the conflict.
One source says that Pakistan made
four distinct nuclear threats toward India
in an attempt to deter New Delhi
from escalating the conflict. 188 Moreover,
each side repositioned its ballistic
missiles, raising concerns across
the border. These signals seem to have
worked: numerous analysts “concur
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