NEW DELHI: Former chief of defence staff Gen Anil Chauhan (Retd) on Saturday warned that Pakistan’s new defence pacts could give Islamabad “some kind of an overconfidence” and push it into “some kind of a miscalculation again”, even as he said India’s relationship with China cannot be held hostage to “only boundary issues”.
Pakistan would remain “a major security concern”, with terrorism and proxy war central to its strategy, Gen Chauhan (Retd) said at the annual GB Pant memorial lecture in the national capital. China, he added, posed “an absolutely different and more long-term and comprehensive challenge”.
Pakistan’s nuclear weapons had provided “a degree of static stability at the apex level” while inducing instability lower down, reflecting the classic stability-instability paradox, he said.
“The idea of Pakistan has been to reduce space for conventional operations and expand the space for sub-conventional operations, that is, terrorism and cross-border activity.”
Non-state actors provided Islamabad deniability, while degrading individual terrorist networks was not enough.
“Even when a particular terrorist network is degraded, the enabling ecosystem, that is, the ideology, the recruitment system, the finance, training, propaganda and state support, can be recreated,” he said.
The answer was credible deterrence, demonstrated through the surgical strikes, Balakot and Operation Sindoor.
“Deterrence must operate across the spectrum. India must be able to raise the cost of proxy war,” he said, adding that Operation Sindoor and keeping the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance could force a behavioural change in Pakistan.
India put the 1960 treaty in abeyance after the Pahalgam attack last year. Last week, the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled that it remains fully in force and that abeyance has no standing in its text. India, which did not participate in the proceedings, rejected the award as null and void.
The new pacts, Gen Chauhan warned, could cut the other way. Pakistan signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement with Saudi Arabia and Turkiye last month, under which an armed attack on any one of the three is treated as an attack on all. It followed the Saudi-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement signed in September last year.
On China, the former CDS, who demitted office recently, struck a more nuanced note, with his remarks coming a week before the BRICS summit in New Delhi, which Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to attend.
India and China were “two major Asian powers, large economies and civilisational states” that cooperate in some areas while competing in others. “The future of Asia, I believe, will depend substantially on how India and China manage” it, Gen Chauhan said.
His assessment of Chinese backing for Pakistan has also been more cautious than that of some serving officers. Deputy Chief of Army Staff Lt Gen Rahul R Singh said in July last year that Pakistan received “live inputs” from China during the fighting and that Turkiye aided its drone attacks.
Gen Chauhan (Retd), in contrast, said last month that 70 to 80 percent of Pakistan’s inventory was Chinese-origin, making the presence of Chinese equipment manufacturers a routine contractual obligation, while real-time intelligence-sharing was difficult to establish.
The frontier, however, remains unsettled, with differing perceptions along the boundary, infrastructure build-up and force multipliers creating “the possibility of friction and escalation”.
This requires “vigilance, credible capabilities, clear agreements and consistent adherence to them”, he said.
He welcomed the two additional military hotlines in the Eastern and Middle sectors and two more senior-commander meeting points agreed during NSA Ajit Doval’s talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing last month.
