Pakistan's terror playbook exposed, Global South calls out its double standards

WHEN 26 civilians were massacred in Kashmir’s Pahalgam on April 22, 2025, it sent shockwaves across the country. But what has followed since then may mark a turning point in how the world, particularly the Global South, responds to terrorism, particularly when it comes to state-sponsored acts of it.

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For decades, India has sounded the alarm about Pakistan's use of terrorism as an instrument of state policy, especially in Jammu and Kashmir. And quite often, its warnings were met with scepticism, diluted in diplomatic language, or lost in the geopolitical noise of the broader South Asian region. But the brutality of the Pahalgam attack, and the growing evidence linking the perpetrators to Pakistan-based groups, along with shifting geopolitical dynamics, seems to have brought a considerable change in that conversation.

More significantly, India's response this time was also swift and multipronged. Under Operation Sindoor on May 6-7, it launched a precise and calibrated military retaliation targeting terror infrastructure across the Line of Control (LoC) in Pakistan Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (POJK) and mainland Pakistan. The military operation was accompanied by its diplomatic offensive, which has been very methodical and effective, as the changing discourse about terrorism reflects. The culmination of these efforts was on full display at the 2025 BRICS Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where the Global South bloc issued an unambiguous condemnation of a terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir, naming both the incident and its nature, which is remarkable.

The BRICS declaration stated it "condemned in the strongest terms the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on April 22, 2025, during which 26 people were killed and many more injured,” and reaffirmed a collective commitment to fighting terrorism "in all its forms and manifestations, including the cross-border movement of terrorists, terrorism financing and safe havens.”

This was not just a diplomatic cliche and marks a quiet but significant pivot in the emerging world order, where the Global South bloc is finally calling out double standards on terrorism and doing so with rare unanimity.

A shift in global norms