In Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first televised address to the nation since the April 22 Pahalgam massacre, the focal point of interest was his counter to US President Donald Trump’s bombast earlier in the day about leveraging trade to force a ‘full and immediate ceasefire’. Modi punctured the claim, saying that retaliatory action under Operation Sindoor against Pakistan’s terror and military infrastructure had only been paused, adding that future decisions would depend on Pakistan’s response. If the post-Uri surgical strike in 2016 and the Balakot air strike in 2019 had created new parameters for India’s response to terror attacks, Operation Sindoor signalled the policy’s latest “benchmark”, the PM underlined. It has three prongs. One, in the event of any future terror attack, India would go after the roots of the outfit in Pakistan that is responsible for it. Two, the country has zero tolerance for nuclear blackmail. And three, India would not differentiate between the government sponsoring terrorism and the masterminds of terrorism. This, Modi asserted, was the “new normal”.
The bit about nuclear blackmail was also directed at Trump, as he and a few other world leaders had become uneasy amid claims of Pakistan considering a strategic response. Word had gone out that a meeting of the National Command Authority, the apex body on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, had been called. This sent the global community into overdrive and Trump later claimed credit for averting a nuclear flashpoint. A similar drama was enacted in the wake of the Pulwama attack and the Balakot counterstrike in 2019, but India and the then Trump administration showed steel by staring Pakistan down.
In another snub to Trump, who claimed he could mediate on Kashmir, Modi said there could be only two points on the agenda for any future India-Pakistan talk—terrorism and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. What was left unsaid was that, on this, India would not be dictated to. International mediation goes against the grain of the 1972 Simla agreement and the 1999 Lahore declaration, which explicitly abjure any third-party role in the bilateral dispute. Given the way the current round of diplomacy is shaping up, we should keep an eye on any impact it might have on the US-India trade deal that is in the works.