The lingering animosity between India and Pakistan, rooted in the traumatic partition of 1947, continues to cast a long shadow over South Asia. Terrorism, employed as a tool of low-intensity conflict by Pakistan, has persisted for decades. Neither the Indo-Pak wars of 1965 and 1971 nor the Kargil conflict in 1999 succeeded in altering the deep-seated hostility. Former Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s historic 1999 Lahore visit, intended as a goodwill gesture, was met not with reciprocation but betrayal — culminating in the Kargil War. Similarly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unscheduled Lahore stopover in 2015, driven by courtesy and diplomacy, was followed by the 2016 Pathankot attack. India’s precision strikes — whether the surgical operation in Uri (2016) or the Balakot airstrikes (2019) — were bold assertions of its right to self-defence. Yet, they have not yielded the desired strategic shift. The recent targeted massacre of Hindu tourists in Pahalgam is another gruesome chapter in Pakistan-sponsored terror. India’s retaliatory strikes on terror camps within Pakistan-administered territory are lawful and proportionate acts of defence — not declarations of war. Pakistan’s denial of these camps’ existence renders its outrage over their destruction hypocritical at best.
