'There's a lot of sense in what Prime Minister Modi did, but the Indian government has to be really prepared for a really sharp escalation spiral.'
Addressing a rally in Bikaner, Rajasthan, on Thursday, May 22, 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said India will not be deterred by nuclear threats and if there is a terrorist attack, India will give a befitting reply.
Which raises the question, just how long will the tense peace on the India-Pakistan border last?
Political scientist and South Asia expert C Christine Fair, who has written multiple books on the Pakistan army and terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Tayiba, spoke to Rediff's Utkarsh Mishra on the dynamics of India-Pakistan relations.
"The next conflict is going to escalate even quicker than this crisis escalated," Fair says in the concluding segment of a two-part interview:
So, what is the way for a lasting peace in Kashmir, particularly, and between India and Pakistan generally?
Well, I don't see a lasting peace in Kashmir. It's not in the (Pakistan) army's interest that there'd be a lasting peace in Kashmir.
And India has its own problems with the way it's pursuing so-called peace in Kashmir. More than anything, the Indian government has alienated Kashmiris.
To some extent, but not completely, the actions of the Indian government have been driven by the Pakistani insistence upon using terrorism in the Valley.
Like the very oppressive security grid, that's necessary to suppress insurgency. Obviously, not every attack can be pre-empted.
I was in Kashmir a couple of years ago. I had a pretty long trip. The Kashmiris will tell you that they're oppressed, but the tourism was back and they were making money. When there's terrorism in the valley, tourists don't come and they don't make money.
So, the Kashmiris themselves are of two minds about the security grid.
The grid puts a wedge between the Indian State and the Kashmiris, and Pakistan calls that a victory. Because then it can say, look, here's Lashkar-e-Tayiba, here's Jaish, and they are fighting to liberate these oppressed Kashmiris.
So, it's unlikely that you're going to see a permanent peace in Kashmir.
What strategic interest does the US still have in having good relations with Pakistan?
When Pakistan's defence minister says that they have been doing this 'dirty job of supporting terrorists' for the US?
That was a bunch of disingenuous nonsense.
The Pakistanis began the jihad in Afghanistan in 1973, under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The Americans had nothing to do with it.
In fact, the Americans didn't start funding that jihad until 1982 after (Ronald) Reagan came to power and got the sanctions that the (Jimmy) Carter administration levied on the Pakistani State for nuclear proliferation removed.
Ultimately that evolved into the Pressler Amendment in 1985.
(Note: Pressler Amendment mandated that the US president annually certify that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear device to receive US military and economic assistance.)
So, this idea that the Pakistanis have been waging jihad at the behest of the United States is simply a canard.
They were doing this on their own time and their own dime because they perceived it to be in their national interest.
In fact, the seven main mujahideen groups were formed before the Soviets even crossed the Amu Darya on Christmas of 1979.
Since it was said, and since a lot of Indians have made a lot of hay over it, I really want to push back on the absurdity of the statement.
To your original question, what interest does the US have in good relations with Pakistan? I think right now there's not a good motivator.
The war in Afghanistan is over. We lost it in good measure because of Pakistani support to the Taliban. The US has these perduring interests. These perduring interest include the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme; and anything that supports that, like the economic viability of the Pakistani State, will always be a US interest.
But the vicissitudes of politics are something that's less of interest to the United States unless it sees a direct line to the security of the State itself.
But the relations are not as good as they were in the time of, say, the Kargil War, when Bill Clinton could manage Nawaz Sharif...
No, we did not have good relations with Pakistan during Kargil. If you recall, Pakistan was heavily sanctioned. Those sanctions were not removed until after 2001.
So, I don't know why you think that we had good relations with Pakistan.
Pakistan was under very heavy sanctions. The only sanctions that it hadn't been under were the additional layer of sanctions that we would put on Pakistan after Musharraf seized the government.
Do you think that the Pakistan army's propaganda in the last few days was an attempt to draw parallels between the Kashmir conflict and the Palestinian struggle against Israel?
Because right now, the world is divided over Israel's war in Gaza. While the US is standing resolutely behind Israel, as it does.
So, there is a kind of schism in the world right now, and they were hoping to benefit from that?
If that's what they were attempting to do, it would obviously not have any impact upon the United States. The United States has appallingly supported every act of genocide that the Israeli State has committed.
I'm going to answer the question a little bit differently.
Both India and Pakistan's media engaged in appalling nonsense.
If I had listened to Arnab Goswami, I would have believed that Karachi had become now a part of a Mumbai suburb.
The Indian media was insufferable. The Pakistani media was insufferable. And both populations came out of this conflict, very poorly informed.
You had shared President Trump's post on X praising India and Pakistan for the ceasefire, saying you 'couldn't stop laughing'. Why?
First of all, it's not true that the US wasn't doing anything before the Nur Khan airbase (was) attacked.
(US Secretary of State Marco) Rubio had been engaged in counterpart negotiations. Tulsi Gabbard was also engaging her counterparts,
We have to understand this structurally, every time there's a new presidency, with the exception of Biden, who had been the vice president for eight years, there is no depth on South Asia.
We don't even have an Indian ambassador. The Assistant Secretary of State nominee Paul Kapur hasn't been confirmed.
So, there's really no one of consequence in the government that has any knowledge about India and Pakistan. And that's going to be true for any new president. It was true for George W Bush, when 9/11 happened. He had no South Asianists that he could call on.
Trump had a paucity of talent. But, unlike other presidents who picked his -- unfortunately, it's always been a he so far -- cabinets based on expertise, Trump picked his cabinet based upon people who do chaaploosi (sycophancy).
So, we don't have a very good cabinet. And Marco Rubio, such as he is, is also playing the role of the national security advisor. So, in the best of circumstances we don't have a very good bench on South Asia.
But nonetheless, Marco Rubio was engaging both sides.
And to the extent that Trump negotiated peace, he was pushing on an open door. Both sides wanted an off ramp.
What Trump subsequently did was he basically pushed the talking points back to pre-Kargil (times). He rehyphenated India and Pakistan. He re-legitimised the Kashmir dispute.
He said that India and Pakistan had agreed to have a full range of scope conversations at a neutral location. There is no way the Indians would have agreed to that. There is simply no way.
And he has doubled down on that talk despite Indian demurrals.
So, you know, the India-US relationship is structurally on solid ground, but there's obviously some surface tension because of the things that Trump keeps saying and keeps pushing on international fora.
At some point the Indian government will also start pushing back. Because the current dispensation represents an ideology that has long criticised Nehru for taking the Kashmir issue to the United Nations and agreeing to the 1948 ceasefire.
So, the message that Trump wants to give right now is really difficult for them politically.
Correct. But the Indians are kind of a Trump whisperer. They kind of know that he's a clown and that he says a lot of things that are not true and that they don't have to hang on every word of Trump.
I'll also give this government credit where credit's due, in that they (know) this will probably pass, and there are bigger fish to fry in the Indo-US relationship than Trump's silly talking points.
India's military responses to Pakistan have escalated over time -- surgical strikes happened in 2016 after the attack in Uri.
Then in 2019, there were airstrikes in Balakot after Pulwama. Now missile strikes targeted sites within Pakistan proper.
And the way PM Modi has declared that India will respond in kind to every terror attack, how do you see the situation escalating if there's another terror attack in India?
That's the issue. It's going to escalate even more quickly than the current crisis.
And I think India has learned some wrong lessons.
If India thinks that it has deterred Pakistan, it is very, very mistaken.
India can respond to a terror attack as it chooses to do. There's a lot of sense in what Prime Minister Modi did, but the Indian government has to be really prepared for a really sharp escalation spiral.
The next conflict is going to escalate even quicker than this crisis escalated.
So, someone needs to build in an off ramp pretty early on.
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