Operation Sindoor’s unintended reckoning

‘A year after Operation Sindoor, the Modi government still brandishes it as a signal that terrorism traced to Pakistan will be punished. It would have us believe that this is India’s new military doctrine. The claim has political force.

Yet wars are not judged by intent alone, but the balance of power they create in the aftermath. By that measure, Operation Sindoor looks less like a strategic success than a costly misadventure that exposed the limits of India’s military and diplomatic power. For Operation Sindoor revived Pakistan’s relevance and gave China an unexpected advertisement for its weapons.’

The operation began after the Pahalgam massacre of April 2025, in which twenty-six civilians were killed in Kashmir. India immediately blamed Pakistan-linked militants and struck targets across Pakistan and Pakistan administered Kashmir on the night of 6 and 7 May.

New Delhi intended to hit terror infrastructure, keep escalation below the nuclear threshold, and demonstrate that the old restraint after major terror attacks had ended. In that narrow sense, the strike achieved visibility. It showed that India was willing to use force in the heartland of Pakistan despite nuclear risks. But the battlefield quickly slipped beyond the neat script of calibrated punishment.

Pakistan responded militarily and, more importantly, survived and succeeded politically, diplomatically, and psychologically. Before the conflict, India enjoyed not just a larger economy and a larger military, but also a deeply entrenched perception of conventional superiority.

That perception mattered. It shaped diplomacy, deterrence, media narratives, and Pakistan’s own sense of vulnerability. Operation Sindoor punctured it. Whether Pakistan shot down two, five, or more Indian aircraft remains contested.

But even limited confirmation from India’s senior military officials and several outside officials that Chinese made Pakistani aircraft brought down Indian jets, including at least one Rafale, was enough to alter the strategic conversation. A country presumed to be outmatched had shown it could impose visible costs.

This is the central military lesson India should not evade. Conventional superiority is not a slogan. It must be proven across sensors, missiles, electronic warfare, command networks, quality of fighter jets, pilot training, and information discipline.

India may have hit Pakistani air bases and military infrastructure later in the conflict. It may have adapted after initial losses and used long range precision weapons effectively. But in modern conflict, the first images and first claims shape the global story. India’s silence created a vacuum. Pakistan filled it.

China amplified it. The world noticed not India’s declared punitive precision, but the possibility that Chinese platforms and Pakistani tactics had successfully challenged India’s airpower.

Pakistan did not need to prove every claim beyond doubt. It needed only to cast doubt on India’s presumed air dominance. Operation Sindoor therefore did not establish uncontested asymmetry, as BJP supporters argue. It revealed contested asymmetry.

India remains militarily stronger in arithmetic aggregation, but Pakistan demonstrated that strength on paper can be blunted by new weapons, networking, Chinese support, long range missiles, and a carefully managed escalation strategy.

The diplomatic consequences have been no less uncomfortable for India. Washington was closer to India, the Gulf was more pragmatic, and Islamabad was weighed down by debt, political instability, and insurgency. After Sindoor, Pakistan did not become powerful, but it became useful again.

Donald Trump repeatedly claimed credit for the ceasefire, publicly inserted himself into the crisis, and treated Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir as a consequential interlocutor. For India, which insists that Kashmir and India-Pakistan tensions are bilateral matters, this was a diplomatic setback. The crisis meant to show India’s action reopened space for outside mediation talk.

Munir gained from this. Pakistan’s army, battered by domestic criticism before the conflict, recast itself as the defender that had stood up to India. The general’s global profile rose, especially in Washington’s highly personalized diplomacy under Trump. Pakistan also positioned itself as a useful actor in the West Asia and around Iran and Gulf security. This may not be a durable strategic revival, but it weakened India’s claim that Pakistan no longer matters. Modi wanted to punish Pakistan. He helped Rawalpindi recover attention it had lost.

The China angle is even more consequential. Pakistan has long depended on Chinese arms, but Operation Sindoor has deepened the military and intelligence fusion between the two. China provided Pakistan with real time support and used the crisis as a live laboratory for its weapons against Indian systems.

For Beijing, this was low-cost strategic learning. It did not have to fight India directly. It could watch Indian responses, test Chinese platforms, assess Western aircraft, and gather lessons for a possible future conflict in the Himalayas or the Indo Pacific.

For China’s defence industry, the gains were immediate. The J-10C entered global debate not as an untested Chinese fighter but as an aircraft associated with combat success against India and its French fighter jets. AVIC Chengdu’s revenues and share prices surged, and interest in Chinese aircraft grew among states seeking cheaper and reliable alternatives to Western systems.

Even if Pakistan’s claims were inflated, perception did the work. Defence markets are shaped by narrative as well as performance. A single contested battle can become a sales pitch. India, by launching an operation that allowed Pakistan and China to showcase their systems, unintentionally boosted the prestige of the military ecosystem it should be trying to contain.

This does not mean India should have ignored Pahalgam. No government can remain passive after such a cold-blooded massacre. The question is not whether India had a right to respond. The question is whether Modi’s chosen highly-politicised response improved India’s security.

A punitive strike that triggers aircraft losses, strengthens Pakistan’s military narrative, draws Trump into mediation claims, deepens China-Pakistan cooperation, and raises Chinese fighter stocks is not a clean success. It is a warning about the difference between tactical action and strategic outcome.

The deeper danger is that both India and Pakistan may now believe escalation can be managed. India has announced a new normal in which terrorism will be treated as an act of war. Pakistan believes rapid retaliation can internationalise the crisis and force intervention.

Both sides have learned that drones, missiles, standoff weapons, and information warfare can be used under the nuclear shadow. It lowers the threshold for the next confrontation and compresses decision time for leaders already trapped by domestic divisive nationalism.

Operation Sindoor should therefore be remembered not as a triumphant doctrine but as a stress test India failed to fully control. It exposed serious gaps in intelligence, air combat preparedness, strategic communication, and diplomatic anticipation.

It showed that China is not a distant third party but an active force multiplier. It showed that Washington under Trump cannot be assumed to privilege Indian sensitivities over Pakistani utility. Above all, it showed that performative toughness can produce strategic embarrassment.

A year later, the ceasefire holds, but little else does. The Indus Waters Treaty remains suspended, diplomacy is frozen, and public opinion on both sides has become more militarized. Modi wanted Operation Sindoor to announce India’s arrival as an unrestrained regional power. Instead, it revealed a harsher truth.

Power is not measured by the bravado to strike first. It is measured by the ability to shape what happens after. On that front, Modi’s misadventure gave Pakistan a narrative, China a market, Trump a stage, and South Asia a more dangerous future.

Ashok Swain is a professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University, Sweden. More by the author here