Narendra Modi’s India hangs on the precipice of calamity constantly goading South Asia to the edge by ever-more brazen provocations against Pakistan. Asad Rahim Khan debunks the reasons behind such brinkmanship in a blistering column in Dawn on May 10, 2025: a toxic brew of Hindutva ideology, internal politics, and a failure to resolve the festering wound of Kashmir. Modi’s lifelong practice—thanks to violence and polarization a tool to an amassing of power—has taken India and Pakistan to the war precipice more than ever before in a half century. With fighter planes crashing into each other, missiles flying across skies, and the threat of a nuclear Armageddon looming overhead, stakes could not possibly be higher. In the wake of Khan’s incisive reportage in this article, we examine the motivations, consequences, and global ramifications of Modi’s warlike jiggery-pokering.
The Hindutva Plan: Modi’s Ideological Origins
Behind the belligerence of Modi lies the ideology of Hindutva adopted by Veer Savarkar, a politician whom Modi has long venerated. Savarkar publicly admired Nazi Germany’s answer to its “Jewish problem” and in 1938 wrote to India to do the same with its “Muslim problem.” This toxic ideology—reducing a religious minority to an existential threat—has propelled Modi’s politics in the past three decades. From the pogroms against Muslims in 2002 when he was chief minister to the pogroms against Muslims in Delhi in 2020, Modi has used violence fueled by polarization to augment his power. His constituency is galvanized by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its associated groups and repays violence fueled by polarization on the polls.
Savarkar’s terminology is expressed in modern times in Modi’s policy towards Kashmir. The abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy in the year 2019 was a constitutional sleight of hand but a considered exercise of population engineering. By stripping the state of its autonomy, flooding it with settlers and subjecting it to a harsh lockdown, Modi sought to dilute its Muslim population—something Savarkar might have called “solving the Muslim problem.” However, as Khan chronicles, nobody consulted the Kashmiris. The recent Pahalgam attack, a militant response to decades of oppression, was a manifestation but consequence of the self-inflicted wound of a country. Having ignored the cause, Modi outsourced the problem to Pakistan and escalated the tension to a boil.
The War Machine: Modi’s Political Arithmetic
Modi’s response to every Kashmir crisis is by a readymade script: deflect, demonize, and militarize. The Pahalgam attack witnessed India firing missiles into Pakistan, threatening to contaminate its water channels and carrying out “Operation Sind-named, curiously named after the vermilion dot on a married Hindu woman’s forehead.” According to Khan, it’s a recurring pattern in Uri (2016), Pulwama (2019), now Pahalgam and on scant evidence to justify actions leading to a war between two nuclear-armed nations. Modi’s attacks on Pakistan are unsubstantiated but serve a purpose on a local level: mobilize his rabid base. Peace is political anathema to Modi. Every election cycle requires a crisis and each casualty is election fodder.
This policy has brought South Asia to its most dangerous level in decades. Fighter jets now rumble in the air and air raid sirens—whooshy reminders of a bygone age—haunt a generation. Indians’ military aggression has, however, exposed the limitations of Modi’s bluster. In a stunning rebuff, Pakistan’s air force using Chinese jets shot down five Indian warplanes, including a precious Rafale, in a defensive operation. The victory, confirmed by CNN, Reuters and French intelligence, humbled India’s military bosses and sent shockwaves around defence markets. As Khan tartly expresses it, “Operation Sindoor” was quickly turned into “Operation Duckshoot” as Pakistani pilots outwitted India’s million-dollar war machines.
Global complicity and local consequences
Modi’s warmongering has been under the cover of a non-interfering diplomacy of indifference. The West had long staked all on India as a counter to China and has looked on as it slid into authoritarianism. Khan quotes the US Vice President JD Vance’s derisive comment—”None of our business”—as characteristic of such indifference. The post-1945 global order already breaking down with conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine has no guardrails. Defence contractors of the West who had queued up to sell arms to India are now seeing their prized asset shot down by Chinese tech and remoulding the global war economy overnight. Its own attempts to shape the narrative have also failed. Its suicide drone attempts on Pakistani cities and its propaganda on the internet—full of fake news, rape threats, and pornography—haven’t had an impact on global public perception. Even The Economist, usually Pakistan-critical, wrote about India’s “self-defeating repression” in Kashmir at the center of the issue. War hawk journalists such as Barkha Dutt in Indian media struggled to spin losses as such, with the melodrama on a “moonless night” by Dutt inciting more contempt than sympathy. Pakistanis instead responded with stoicism, lamenting martyrs such as seven-year-old Irtiza Abbas Turi while finding Hindutva’s toxic talk unconvincing. Their jokes, memes, and appeals to defensive restraint were indicative of a humanity Modi’s politics lacks.
The Nuclear Threat: Playing with Fire
Modi’s escalationist tactics borrowed straight from the Israeli playbook are based on the theory of trying to control chaos as a strategically desirable thing. As a US defence official had warned, however, “Anyone who presumes to control escalation on using nuclear weapons is literally playing with fire.” Both nations are nuclear-armed and cannot afford to do so. Khan believes the entirety of Modi’s life—that from the Gujarat conflagration to the Delhi killings—is about him living by playing with fire. Pakistan as “the Muslims who got away” is the ultimate provocation to him and to his project: a state which does not submit.
The more tragic aspect of the war is the human toll. Pakistanis, faced with neo-fascism on their border and global apathy, have rallied around their flag with grievance against censorship and tone-deaf leadership from their own state. They’ve mourned their dead without emulating India’s demonization of children. Their own peace calls, even during war, starkly contrast with Modi’s call to polarize. As Khan has written, “Where this throughline stops is Pakistan,” a country unafraid to resist.
A Way Forward?
Modi’s wars are not merely a headache for Pakistan but threaten global stability. The world has to realize the cause of the conflict lies in the oppression of Kashmir by India and not a sideshow. Sanctions, diplomatic pressure, and a neutral probe into Pahalgam might force India to examine its policies. The West and America in particular have to rethink unconditionally supporting India to avoid encouraging more of Modi’s adventures. Pakistan has to remain in the defensive mode while ramping up a call for peace using its recent battlefield success as a bargaining chip to pursue diplomacy.
As long as India assuages Kashmir’s hurts and moderates its nationalist aggression, the region will remain a powder keg. Modi’s politics has a means of thriving on chaos but at a price–at lives, stability and the ever-present threat of a nuclear holocaust–that the world cannot pay. Let us remember, as Khan’s column does, how Pakistanis demonstrated humanity could endure even its nadir. The question is: will the world learn its lesson before Modi’s flames consume us all as well?
