Despite the aforesaid overtures from the Modi administration, there was nothing substantive that Pakistan offered to India on matters of security and terrorism. On the contrary, India had to suffer a spate of terror attacks including the Pathankot attack of January 2016 in which four terrorists affiliated with the United Jihad Council, headed by Syed Salahuddin, the leader of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, attacked the IAF’s Pathankot Air Force Station in Punjab.
The reason Pathankot attack is worth mentioning here is that the Modi government, in a bid to improve relations with Pakistan, went so far as to invite the latter to send a team for a joint investigation of this attack.
However, this positive momentum in the relations between India and Pakistan suffered a setback after a terror attack against an Indian Army brigade headquarters near the town of Uri in the Baramulla district of Jammu and Kashmir in 2016, in response to which, India conducted its famous Surgical Strikes across the Line of Control (LoC) inside Pakistan occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK).
This military action was an unprecedented move on part of India, marking the adoption of a more assertive approach by the Modi government toward upholding the country’s territorial integrity and ensuring the safety of its citizens against state-sponsored terrorism.
Ever since, the Modi government has been upping the ante with every major terror incident inside India which had a Pakistani hand behind it. So, in 2019, the IAF carried out the Balakot air strikes as a direct response to the attack on a convoy of vehicles carrying Indian armed forces personnel along a highway in the Pulwama district in the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir.
Also, in August 2019, Modi’s newly re-elected government abrogated Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which allotted a special status to the erstwhile state of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) – the only Muslim-majority state in India– essentially separating it from the rest of the country by law and policy.
“Article 370 sowed the seeds of separatism in the valley which later turned into terrorism. Article 370 spread a myth that the connection between Kashmir and India is temporary,” said India’s Home Minister Amit Shah about the decision to abrogate Article 370, while speaking at the launch of the book ‘J&K and Ladakh Through the Ages’ in January 2025.
The abrogation of Article 370 is suggested by many in India as a decisive step in the direction of retaking PoJK, and with good reason, as mere days before this development, the Indian Army Chief at the time, General Bipin Rawat, on the occasion of the 20th-anniversary ceremony of India’s victory in the Kargil War, said:
“India has the right over the entire Jammu and Kashmir region, including Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK)…Will it be taken back in a political manner or will there be another way, it will be decided.”
Also, while presenting the bill in the Lower House of the Parliament, that is Lok Sabha, to revoke some provisions of the Article 370 and propose bifurcation of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir into two union territories, Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh, India’s Home Minister Amit Shah said:
“Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India. Whenever I say Jammu and Kashmir, PoK comes under it….We can die for it.”
In October 2021, then Air Officer Commanding in Chief (AOC-in-C) of Western Air Command, Air Marshal Amit Dev, made a similar suggestion while speaking to the media at the 75th anniversary of Indian Armed Forces landing at Budgam airport in Srinagar to repulse Pakistani forces from the J&K, which ensured the success of Independent India’s first civil-military operation.
“All the activities which were carried out by the Indian Air Force and the Army (on October 27, 1947) resulted in ensuring the freedom of this part of Kashmir. I am sure that someday, the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir will also join this part of Kashmir and we will have the whole of Kashmir in years to come,” Dev said.
“Entire Kashmir is one, the nation is one. People on both sides have common attachments. Today or tomorrow, history will witness that nations come together. We do not have a plan at the moment, but, God willing, it will always be there because people in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir are not being treated very fairly by the Pakistanis,” he further added.
This year, in March, India’s External Affairs Minister (EAM) S. Jaishankar categorically stated while speaking at Chatham House in London that the return of the part of India’s Kashmir that is currently under Pakistan’s occupation is the only remaining step toward complete resolution of the Kashmir issue.
“Look, in Kashmir, we have actually done a good job solving most of it. I think removing Article 370 was step number one. Then, restoring growth, economic activity, and social justice in Kashmir was step number two. Holding elections with a very high turnout was step number three,” Jaishankar said while responding to a question on Kashmir.
“I think the part we are waiting for is the return of the stolen part of Kashmir, which is under illegal Pakistani occupation. Once that is done, I assure you—Kashmir will be solved,” he further said.
Only a month later, five members of a Pakistan-linked terror organization, The Resistance Front (TRF), carried out Pahalgam terror attack inside India’s J&k which killed 26 and injured more than 20 other people, in response to which, India carried out its ‘Operation Sindoor’ marking the biggest action taken by the country so far against terrorism, and following the success of this action, declared that another Pakistan-backed terror attack would be considered an ‘Act of War’.
In addition to that, the Indian government also launched a diplomatic campaign involving seven multi-party delegations that travelled to 33 foreign capitals after the Pahalgam terror attack and Operation Sindoor. These delegations included current and former lawmakers from across party lines, and some former diplomats.
Some of the lawmakers who led these delegations are known to be among fierce political opponents of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, such as Congress MP (or Member of Parliament) Shashi Tharoor and Asaduddin Owaisi, President of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) and MP from Hyderabad.
Overall, these delegations were sent as part of India’s global outreach program intended to project national unity on the subject of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism and the measures taken by the Indian government to counter this terrorism.
Also important to note here, is that after this recent stand-off between India and Pakistan ended following the call between the DGMOs of the two countries, many in India including experts on geopolitical affairs, leading social media personalities as well as ordinary citizens, considered the cessation of hostilities by India as a missed opportunity to move into the PoJK.
Now, to many outside India this may come across as jingoism and up to some extent, it probably is, however, for citizens of India it is not so hard to imagine their armed forces moving into PoJK and capturing it successfully, considering that the Indian armed forces have already demonstrated this capability twice in the region.
In the 1965 war, the Indian armed forces successfully captured the Haji Pir Pass, a major strategic location 8 kilometers inside the PoJK, which serves as a primary ingress route for Pakistan-trained terrorists to infiltrate into India.
Six years later, in the1971 war, the Indian armed forces managed to move 50-60 kilometers inside what was known as West Pakistan at the time and capture parts of Punjab and Sindh as well as some strategically important villages in the PoJK.
So, overall, not just the current ruling dispensation but the entire polity, together with a large chunk of the citizenry in India appears to have been inching slowly toward retaking the Pakistan-occupied Jammu & Kashmir since past ten years.
Now, retaking PoJK will mean conducting a ground invasion inside this region which will most likely entail attrition-based conflict that may or may not turn out to be long-drawn, as has been witnessed in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Moreover, the population residing in the PoJK is no different from the rest of the Pakistani citizenry when it comes to its hatred for India which has been cultivated and conditioned by the Pakistani establishment through decades of hyper-nationalistic narratives.
In recent years, some instances of dissent from the people residing in the PoJK, particularly in the Gilgit Baltistan region, against the Pakistani government due to poor economic conditions has led some in India to believe that the general public sentiment in that area is turning favorable toward India, however, there really is no way to realistically assess how strong this sentiment is vis-à-vis that of hatred for India.
So, even if the Indian armed forces manage to takeover PoJK, absorbing that region inside India will come with several administrative and security challenges, addressal of which could drain India financially for years after that.
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