'Rash and reckless' Neither side can afford war but it threatens to spiral

The uneasy calm that had settled over India and Pakistan in the past two weeks was swiftly shattered in the early hours of yesterday morning.

- Hannah Ellis-Petersen

In the days that followed the deadly attack that killed 25 Indian tourists and a guide in Kashmir in late March, the Indian government made it clear it held Pakistan responsible – and it intended to avenge the deaths.

Meanwhile, the Indian public – horrified by accounts that tourists had been targeted and shot for being Hindu – were angry. Newspaper columns and nightly discussions on TV news channels rang with calls for the prime minister, Narendra Modi, to take decisive action against Pakistan and "teach them a lesson" once and for all.

But a fortnight after the attack, with no clear impending action or military mobilisation in sight, some had wondered whether India really intended to retaliate. "What is going on?" asked one senior military analyst on Tuesday. By 1am yesterday, that question was answered.

In highly coordinated air and drone strikes, Indian missiles hit nine targets, both in the part of the Kashmir region administered by Pakistan and in Pakistan's Punjab province. It was the first time since the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war that India had fired missiles into Punjab.

India said it had struck at "terrorist infrastructure": camps and madrasas that were connected to the two main Islamist militant groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, which have been behind some of the deadliest terrorist attacks in India over the past three decades. It emphasised it had not taken aim at any Pakistani military bases or weaponry.

The strikes also took place entirely from Indian airspace, an apparent lesson from its last confrontation with Pakistan in 2019, when an Indian military aircraft was shot down over Pakistan and its pilot taken captive.