India-Pakistan Controlled War?

From ‘all-out war’ to ‘controlled war’, India has changed gear in its military response to Pakistan-sponsored terrorism

- Lt Gen Subrata Saha (Retd)

As young officers in the Indian army in the late seventies, we learnt that the Line of Control (LoC) is a zone of NWNP (No war no peace). Over the years we saw the scenario change into ‘forever at war’, as India got embroiled in fighting a hybrid war waged by Pakistan, using jehadis as proxy. The hostility manifested as terrorist actions, gun duels along the Line of Control, Border Action Teams (BAT), propaganda, indoctrination, radicalisation of the population and soon. several new coinages came into the lexicon to describe the state of affairs—fragile peace, situation simmering, pot boiling and so on; semantics for justifying and tolerating abnormality as the ‘new normal’.

For too long, India has fought this proxy war with two self-imposed limitations. First, geographical i.e. the Line of Control is the ‘Lakshmanrekha’. Second, the type of force i.e. fight primarily with the army, CAPF (Central Armed Police Forces) and state police. Employ weapons only up to a certain calibre. India, unlike several other countries, has not used air power and artillery for counter-terrorist operations. So inviolable was the ‘Lakshmanrekha’ that even in a situation like the Kargil war we chose to uphold the sanctity of the ‘Line of Control’.

In a significant departure from this position of restraint, post the September 2016 attack on the army base in Uri, India decided to shed the first limitation. It took the war across the Line of Control to strike at some forward launch pads used for infiltrating terrorists by their handlers in Pakistan. In responding to the Pulwama attack, India chose to shed the second limitation on the type of force. India retaliated on February 26 with surgical air strikes at the sprawling Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) training camp in Balakot.