The terms ‘war’ and ‘peace’ are often defined imprecisely in world history. Is peace merely defined by the absence of mobilised militaries engaging in pitched battles?

Clearly not – war is taken as any adversarial interaction in which rivals compete, using all methods, be it military or otherwise, to subdue the other party. By this token, India and Pakistan have been at war for exactly 78 years, even as I write this on Independence Day 2025 as a gedanken experiment.

The orthodox Clausewitzian definition of war as nothing other than a continuation of policy by other means is sufficient to convey to us how governments use war, even if it does not define accurately what war is in itself. In any event, all wars are derived from state policy and lead almost directly to strategic concerns. Strategy may be defined as the use of battles to win the war.

Strategy is future-oriented: it is a declaration of intent by a government and an indicator of the possible means required to fulfill that intent. Strategy combines means, ways and ends. It is designed to make war usable by the state so that it may fulfill its political objective.

In the India-Pakistan context, our overall policy would be to contain Pakistan so that it does not pose a physical danger to us, sharing as it does a long land boundary across flat plains and deserts.

Another policy aim would be to restrain the country from exploiting religious differences within India considering that more Muslims live in India than in Pakistan, their ancestors having opted to remain in the mother country even in the backdrop of a religion-based partition. Finally, there is the long-term goal of undoing some of the mistakes of partition, the so-called unfinished agenda; for example, could Op Sindoor progress to Op Sindhu? Whether any or all of these policy aims are resolved now, later or never is not known to any of us. However, they are the guiding principles of any war that has been fought with Pakistan in the past, is being fought at the present or will be fought in the future.

Our strategic thinking vis-à-vis Pakistan has been concerned with maintaining our relationships with other countries, notably the USA, China and Russia, and to a smaller extent Europe and the Gulf states so that........

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