Operation Sindoor and the 2025 India Pakistan Conflict: Strategic Escalation and Regional Stability
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21015/vtess.v14i1.2408Abstract
The 2025 India-Pakistan crisis, operationally known as Operation Sindoor by India, is the most far-reaching military engagement between the two nuclear-armed nations in the last 50 years. In response to the April 22, 2025 Pahalgam terrorist attack which killed 26 civilians in Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir, India, on the evening of May 6-7, 2025, fired precision missiles and air strikes into 9 militant infrastructure targets in Azad Kashmir, controlled by Pakistani forces, and the Punjab province of Pakistan. During the next 88 hours, the two countries were involved in a historic-level of exchanges that involved over-the-horizon aeronautical conflict, drone warfare, and standoff missile attacks, the largest aeronautical conflict on the subcontinent in modern history. The article also discusses the strategic aspects of the Operation Sindoor in terms of the changing policy of deterrence of India, the pre-escalatory factors that dictated the four-day war, the counter operations of Pakistan and geopolitical consequences on the stability of the region and the world as a whole. Based on the escalation theory, deterrence theory and the concept of compellence, the study concludes that Operation Sindoor represents a paradigm shift in the strategic posture of India, that of reactive restraint into calibrated assertiveness. The article also evaluates the ceasefire of May 10, 2025 and its frail sustainability, and examines suggestions to diplomatic architecture to curb future crises in one of the most unstable nuclear neighborhoods in the world.
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