In the latest of a series of articles assessing recent hostilities between India and Pakistan, Syed Ali Zia Jaffery says that India’s approach to signalling since May has centred a willingness to exercise force that invites “uncontrollable escalation up to the nuclear level“. The views expressed belong solely to the author of the article and do not necessarily reflect their government’s position, any affiliated institutions, or that of BASIC.
In a recent book chapter for the Center for Security, Strategy and Policy Research (CSSPR), I argued that, since the termination of the May 2025 crisis, India has upped its rhetoric vis-à-vis Pakistan. Doing so is ostensibly part of India’s compellence signalling – the deliberate use of statements to legitimise the use of force to compel the adversary to take certain actions against its will. Recently, Indian officials, including the Chief of the Army Staff, General Upendra Dwivedi, have ramped up such signalling, arguing that India would abandon restraint altogether if it determines that Pakistan is allegedly abetting terrorism. Apart from making the already precarious situation more volatile, remarks like this could lead to a significant erosion of restraint in South Asia. There are several reasons why this might be the case. BASIC’s 2024 report Crisis Prevention and Management in South Asia: Mutual Confidence, Risk, and Responsibility provides a useful framework to assess them.
The report argues that both sides are confident about the other side’s capacity to show restraint during a crisis, ensuring that neither is forced to choose between humiliation and escalation to the nuclear level. Closely tied to this is the assertion that the shared fear of nuclear war has contributed to creating this confidence. These enunciations from the Indian Army Chief, especially when coupled with the equally provocative rhetoric coming from the civilian leadership, will reduce Pakistan’s confidence in India’s restraint. Pakistani decision-makers could rightly conclude that, in a future crisis, India may try expanding the scale and scope of its military operations to higher rungs on the conventional ladder of escalation. Resultantly, crisis stability will become fragile.
India would have the same anxieties if the Pakistani leadership were to engage in such rhetoric. This is evidenced by New Delhi’s strong reaction after Pakistan’s Army Chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, said Islamabad would give a decisive response to Indian aggression going forward.
The report also identifies other sources of restraint. One of them is the idea of “intimate enmity”. At its core is the geographical proximity between the two countries. The report contends that it contributes to devising more restrained policies. Evidence from the last two crises, however, suggests that intimate enmity has not encouraged or engendered restraint. If anything, India’s crisis behaviour and post-crisis signalling have ignored the geographic and emotional peculiarities of the India-Pakistan dyad. In his address, delivered right after the Washington-brokered ceasefire came into effect, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said every act of terrorism will be construed as a declaration of war. Months later, he also asserted, while referring to Pakistan, that India is not scared of anyone’s nuclear threats and “instead enters the enemy’s home to strike”.
Taken together, these two pronouncements point to India’s willingness to use excessive force against Pakistan going forward. Therefore, it is reasonable to argue that India is less perturbed about engaging in intense hostilities with its nuclear-armed neighbour and believes that escalation dominance is achievable. This opens the door to uncontrollable escalation up to the nuclear level.
Additionally, face-saving narratives and outsourcing escalation control are dubbed key sources of restraint identified in BASIC’s 2024 report. Face-saving narratives give room to warring parties to show something to their public back home, saving them from humiliation. By repudiating Pakistan’s agency and portraying it as a docile actor, India is contributing to shrinking the space for building face-saving narratives, which in any event should not be exaggerated as to their importance in de-escalating past crises. For example, there is no evidence to suggest that the May 2025 crisis was terminated due to face-savers.
Therefore, it will be harder to achieve face-saving outcomes. This might contribute to increasing violence during crises, especially if other sources of restraint were to also erode. Concomitantly, India insists that Pakistan was forced into agreeing to a ceasefire because of India’s military actions, not US mediation. This position is an attempt to signal to Pakistan and the international community something very dangerous and erroneous: “India entered and exited the May 2025 crisis on its own terms”. In other words, by denying Washington’s mediatory efforts, New Delhi is trying to signal to multiple audiences that it can fight a nuclear-armed Pakistan until it succumbs. Simply put, India wants its audience to believe that it can militarily compel Pakistan while also controlling escalation without any US assistance. However, such signalling, which also appears to be both escalatory and ambiguous, appears to be an Indian effort to create what Thomas Schelling dubbed “threats that leave something to chance” (“shared risk” of disaster). Pakistan, on the other hand, has repeatedly lauded US President Donald Trump for playing an instrumental role in saving millions of lives. This reflects Pakistan’s correct reading of South Asia’s nuclear landscape.
This dissonance between Islamabad’s and New Delhi’s openness to third-party mediation calls into question the restraining effects of outsourcing escalation control. This is why scholars like Dr Rabia Akhtar have long maintained that establishing bilateral mechanisms for escalation control is absolutely paramount. In a May 2025 piece in The Conversation, Dr Nicholas Wheeler and I proposed the establishment of a hotline between the two premiers. This argument was predicated on the lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis that was resolved peacefully 63 years ago. However, it is important to recognise that direct communication between Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy was successful only because both understood the catastrophic repercussions of unbridled escalation. This kind of shared understanding is missing in South Asia.
Quite menacingly, India’s post-Operation Sindoor signalling does not inspire confidence in the country’s understanding of nuclear risks in South Asia. Also, as the May 2025 crisis highlights, some all-important confidence-building measures (CBMs) are ineffective as far as controlling escalation across multiple domains is concerned. That being said, their positive role in reducing nuclear risks and avoiding accidents during peacetime cannot be ignored.
Such signalling risks the outbreak of yet another multi-domain, technology-centric crisis between the two countries. Pakistan will anticipate a greater application of force by India, compelling it to reorient its retaliatory strategy. The fog of war will be thicker, not least because of a greater use of emerging and disruptive technologies (EDTs). All of this, coupled with growing voices against restraint and third-party mediation in India, will make escalation all the more difficult to control. As a result, the chances of miscalculation will only increase. Therefore, it is necessary for India to review its approach to signalling. Compellence signalling would not be effective against a nuclear-armed, conventionally strong country like Pakistan. Threatening to use more force against Pakistan will achieve neither compellence nor deterrence. It will only weaken both crisis and deterrence stability, leading to the further erosion of strategic stability.
Absent reassurances, threats to use force do not create coercive effects. Therefore, apropos of signalling, resolve has to be balanced with restraint. India’s current approach to signalling is only conveying this to Pakistan: “we are certain that you instigate terrorism in our country and we will use greater force to ensure that you stop doing that”. Pakistan denies such allegations and has presented evidence of India’s role in perpetrating terrorism in the country. Therefore, this kind of signalling will only enhance the prospect of unmanageable escalation. Both India and Pakistan cannot afford to be in such a milieu. Hence, it is time for India to rethink its signalling strategy.
Syed Ali Zia Jaffery is Deputy Director, Center for Security, Strategy and Policy Research, University of Lahore, and Associate Editor, Pakistan Politico. Ali was a Visiting Fellow at the Stimson Center, Washington, DC. Ali regularly writes on strategic issues for national and international publications, to include Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Routledge, South Asian Voices, The National Interest, The Atlantic Council, Asia-Pacific Leadership Network (APLN), CSIS, The Diplomat, Dawn, and 9DashLine, among others. Ali is an alumnus of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Nuclear Proliferation International History Project’s Nuclear History Boot Camp. He is also an alumnus of the International School on Disarmament and Research on Conflicts (ISODARCO). He often shares his perspectives on major strategic developments on national and international media. His research interests lie in the fields of nuclear deterrence, strategic stability, and geopolitics. He teaches undergraduate level courses on foreign policy, national security, arms control and disarmament, and non-proliferation. He was also a Graduate Research Assistant at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.