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Pakistan’s generals thrive on chaos, using endless jihad to justify power while destroying their nation. Today we uncovers how fire, ruin, and perpetual conflict define Pakistan’s strategy, and why understanding this is key to India’s security and regional stability.
There was once a drunk monkey that lived in a bamboo grove on the edge of a kingdom. This monkey would scream, throw stones, and steal fruits from passing villagers every day. It was small, weak, and often beaten back by villagers, yet it would return, screeching louder, and claim the grove as its own empire.
One day, a young warrior approached the old Zen master.
“Master, we have beaten the monkey many times, but it returns. It never accepts defeat. It disrupts our markets, attacks our children, and claims the grove as its kingdom. How do we defeat it forever?”
The master smiled.
“The monkey believes that as long as it screams, it wins. You believe that beating it back is victory. But so long as the monkey screams again, you have not won.”
The warrior asked, “Then what is victory, Master?”
The master walked silently to the grove. The monkey screamed, hurled fruit, and beat its chest. The master did not fight back. Instead, he cut down the entire grove.
With nowhere to hide, the monkey was caught, caged, and shown to the people.
The monkey, humiliated and stripped of its kingdom, finally fell silent.
The master turned to the warrior:
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Operation Sindoor (May 2025) was India’s limited military campaign launched in retaliation for a major terrorist attack in Pahalgam, Jammu & Kashmir. It consisted of precision missile and drone strikes against Pakistan-based terrorist infrastructure, marking an unprecedented stand-off engagement between India and Pakistan that stopped short of a full-scale war.
India targeted nine terrorist-linked sites (including Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba facilities in Pakistan’s mainland) using long-range, stand-off weapons.
The operation’s initial objectives were to punish and degrade the terrorist networks responsible for cross-border attacks while avoiding strikes on Pakistan’s regular military or civilian targets. After the Pakistani military responded to attacks on terror centers, the mission included the backers of terrorists as well. After that no distinction was made between the two.
The operation was a resounding success. Let us list the top most achievements from the Indian standpoint. Here are the top five.
Total Air Dominance Achieved
Severe Attrition of Pakistan’s Air Force
Precision Strikes on Pakistan’s Strategic Assets
Demonstrated India’s Escalatory Dominance
Tested Indigenous Systems Under Combat Conditions
From a purely military standpoint, the battle successes were overwhelming, announcing Indian dominance.
You see, the impact of India's targeting of the Pakistani air bases was far more devastating than what came out in conventional media. We discussed that on YouTube.
So far, so good.
However, despite these gains, the limited scope of Operation Sindoor also underscored certain limitations.
By design, it avoided targeting Pakistan’s military or altering territory, thus stopping short of compelling any permanent change in Pakistan’s behavior.
Pakistan’s security establishment absorbed the strikes and retaliated within the limited conflict, launching its own operation (“Bunyan-un-Marsoos”) with drone and missile attacks on Indian military sites, which failed spectacularly.
While India’s strikes imposed short-term costs and asserted a “new normal” of response, they did not fundamentally dismantle Pakistan’s capacity or resolve to sponsor proxy warfare.
Indeed, Islamabad’s military doctrines and ideological posture, rooted in an enduring hostility toward India, remain intact and continue to fuel its confrontation with India.
Where is the gap between India's overwhelming military superiority and even larger budget differential and the final narrative that the media and history records?
Let us understand it.
India's military budget differential versus Pakistan is almost 9 times.
How is it that despite having almost 9 times the military budget, India does not seem to punch as strongly during its confrontations against Pakistan?
When you look at the factors that dim the differential, then they would include:
Narrative Losses: The narrative machinery from Pakistan and the anti-India groups across the West, the Chinese-influenced world, and internally in India is substantial. It can reverse actual victories in narratives. Given that only a handful of Indian military officers would know the actual reality, the "narrative losses" play a significant role in resetting the war story even within the military circles.
Weapons for China: While the entire spectrum of weapons is created with both, China and Pakistan in mind, substantial investment may be going into arms specifically for China.
Indigenous Science: The success of Indian weapons hinges inherently on internal R&D and the "Make in India" factor. Purchasing weapons from outside could have been faster and cheaper, though extremely risky. So much of mili investment remains in R&D.
Actual differential vs Pakistan: Given all these factors, we aver that the real differential would be less than 50% of the almost 9 times of budget superiority that India enjoys.
We have tried to show where the differential gets eroded via a waterfall chart. The markers below are just for illustration and do not have a logical or mathematical basis.
Having said that, India-Pakistan wars suffer from two other main weaknesses:
The result is that most of the attacks by India are not a declaration of war, but the launching of operations. The result is that Pakistan’s military and by extension, the beholden Indian media and “intellectual“ circles parade the falsehood of Pakistan’s “victory“ even when they lose miserably.
Fundamentally, there is a difference between a War and an Operation.
In the Indian subcontinent’s strategic lexicon, there is a crucial difference between a limited military operation and a full-fledged war, especially between two nuclear-armed rivals like India and Pakistan.
A declared war typically involves general mobilization of forces, broad war aims (such as territorial conquest or complete military defeat of the opponent), and an official belligerent status under international law.
In contrast, an “operation” usually denotes a contained use of force for specific objectives – often punitive or retaliatory – without an open-ended intent to engage in total war.
Since the late 20th century (especially post-1971), India and Pakistan have avoided formal declarations of war even during serious hostilities, preferring to limit conflicts in scope and duration. This is partly due to the nuclear shadow: both states recognize that an uncontrolled war could escalate into a nuclear exchange, so they carefully calibrate their military actions.
For example, the 1999 Kargil conflict – though intense – was never officially declared a war by either side; India treated it as an “operation” (code-named Operation Vijay) to evict intruders from its territory, consciously confining the conflict to the Kargil sector and not crossing the Line of Control (LoC), to prevent escalation.
Similarly, recent Indian retaliatory strikes (2016, 2019, 2025) have been termed operations, underscoring limited aims and duration.
The semantics reflect strategic intent. Labeling a campaign an “operation” signals that the military action is bounded – a single episode or series of strikes – rather than open war. In the Indo-Pak context, this distinction is vital for crisis stability.
By keeping operations “short of war,” India seeks to punish Pakistan without crossing Pakistan’s perceived redlines for full-scale conflict or nuclear use. For instance, the Balakot airstrike of 2019 (Operation Bandar) was carefully calibrated to hit a terrorist camp outside Kashmir, in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.
Yet, India emphasized that it was not an act of war against Pakistan – it was a counterterrorism operation limited in time and target.
This framing helped restrain the crisis, as Pakistan’s reprisal stayed limited to a tit-for-tat air skirmish, after which both sides de-escalated.
By contrast, a declared war would imply a state-to-state fight with far greater stakes and uncontrollable momentum. Declaring war activates different international expectations and may remove certain self-imposed constraints (for example, targeting enemy military assets broadly rather than a narrow set of targets).
In the Indo-Pak milieu, an “operation” is a politically controlled, limited military endeavor – often one-off or short-term – aimed at specific goals, such as retaliation or coercive signaling. A “war,” on the other hand, entails general hostilities and broader objectives (e.g., forcing surrender or territorial change).
Keeping actions at the operational level allows India to manage escalation tightly. As Operation Sindoor illustrated, India struck Pakistan-based targets while insisting it had “no intent to attack the Pakistani military” or territory, thus framing the engagement as finite and defensive.
This distinction allowed both sides to step back after a few days, unlike in wars, which tend to expand until one side is defeated or major powers intervene.
Strategic Scope of Operation Sindoor: Operation Sindoor was unprecedented in scale among India’s retaliatory strikes to date, yet it remained strategically limited in objective. Its aim was not to occupy land or destroy Pakistan’s armed forces, but to “degrade a specific ecosystem of terrorist violence” on Pakistani soil.
Over ~4 days, India launched multiple waves of stand-off precision strikes using fighter jets (e.g. Rafales with SCALP missiles), ground-launched missiles, and armed drones. These targeted terrorist training camps, launchpads, and leadership hideouts across Pakistan-administered Kashmir and even deep in Punjab province.
India expanded its target set beyond previous operations, hitting not only forward launch camps but also the headquarters of Jaish-e-Mohammad in Bahawalpur and Lashkar-e-Taiba’s base in Muridke. By striking nine sites in one concerted campaign, India sought to impose tangible costs on the terror networks and their backers.
This represented a shift from prior symbolic strikes to a “cost-imposition” strategy aiming at real damage.
Crucially, Sindoor’s design included explicit limits: Indian pilots were ordered not to target Pakistani army units or shoot first at Pakistani jets, even at the expense of higher risk to Indian aircraft.
This restraint was strategic – it signaled India’s focus on terrorists only, avoiding provocation that could widen the conflict.
Indeed, on the operation’s first day, India is rumored to have absorbed losses (Pakistani air defenses may have shot down one or more aircraft) because it chose not to pre-emptively suppress enemy air defenses or engage Pakistani fighters unless fired upon.
This self-imposed constraint, while costly tactically, kept the confrontation bounded and sent a clear message: India’s quarrel was with terrorism, not the Pakistani state. Such calibrated force indicates that Operation Sindoor’s scope was carefully managed – powerful enough to punish and deter, yet limited enough to avoid a general war.
Did Limited Objectives Undermine Long-Term Deterrence? This question strikes at the heart of India’s post-Sindoor strategic debate. On one hand, proponents argue that Sindoor strengthened deterrence by proving India’s willingness to retaliate forcefully and its ability to do so without triggering nuclear war By “calling Pakistan’s bluff” of nuclear blackmail and carving out space for conventional strikes below the nuclear threshold, India may have reset the deterrence balance – Islamabad can no longer assume that its nuclear arsenal will shield it from Indian conventional response to terrorism.
The operation’s success in hitting terror infrastructure and the relative international understanding it received (many global powers tacitly accepted India’s right to retaliate against terrorism) could discourage Pakistan from authorizing large-scale terror attacks in the near term. In that sense, limited objectives achieved a tactical deterrent effect: they punished the immediate provocation and signaled the cost of future misadventures.
On the other hand, critics caution that such one-off punitive operations have inherent limits in deterring a determined adversary over the long run. Pakistan’s response to Operation Sindoor itself is instructive.
Unlike after the 2016 Uri strikes or 2019 Balakot, when Pakistan could downplay or deny India’s actions, this time the damage was undeniable and public. Pakistan’s military felt compelled to retaliate militarily, launching its own drone and missile strikes on Indian targets and escalating the clash. The crisis only just stopped short of a wider war, thanks in part to diplomacy, where India accepted the white flag from Pakistan.
This sequence suggests a tit-for-tat escalation dynamic: each limited Indian strike raises the bar, prompting Pakistan to respond more forcefully (to avoid appearing weak or setting a precedent of impunity). Indeed, Sindoor led to “orders of magnitude more weapons and targets on both sides than previously” in such crises.
Furthermore, long-term deterrence hinges on altering the adversary’s cost-benefit calculation in a durable way. Operation Sindoor, while painful for Pakistan in the moment, did not impose irreparable costs on Pakistan’s military or its proxy infrastructure. “As targeted groups adapt – dispersing assets, improving concealment – the demands on India’s intelligence and targeting will intensify.”
Walter Ladwig observes that the long-term viability of calibrated retaliation depends not just on political resolve but on whether India can continue to find meaningful targets and neutralize them faster than they regenerate. If future attacks occur despite Sindoor, it could indicate that the deterrent effect was temporary or insufficient, potentially emboldening the Pakistani side if they come to view India’s responses as ultimately tolerable or containable.
Operation Sindoor’s limited objectives provided a short-term deterrent burst and demonstrated a new level of Indian resolve. However, they arguably do not guarantee long-term deterrence, given Pakistan’s capacity to absorb punishment and persist in its strategy (as discussed below). The operation stopped short of any systemic change in Pakistan’s behavior – no militant group leadership was permanently eliminated, nor was Pakistan’s support apparatus dismantled.
True strategic deterrence would require either cumulative pain that eventually forces Pakistan to change course or a qualitatively different approach that addresses the root drivers of Pakistan’s aggressive policy.
It is quite obvious and even overwhelmingly strong attacks and military victories are spun by Pakistani establishment as their "victories", despite every evidence to the contrary. From 1948 to 1965 to 1971 to Kargil to Operation Sindoor, the story has been consistent.
There is a book that is highly significant in understanding the Pakistani military brain - the Quranic Concept of War.
Brigadier S.K. Malik's 1979 publication, endorsed by President Zia-ul-Haq, presents a profound exploration of war doctrines through the lens of Quranic principles.
Malik posits that for Muslims, warfare transcends mere physical or material conflict, embodying a spiritual imperative. This work significantly influenced Pakistan's military and ideological landscape, resonating with certain jihadist factions. By integrating religious and military paradigms, Malik's treatise offers a unique perspective on the intersection of faith and conflict, contributing to the evolution of Islamic military thought and its practical applications in modern warfare.
Before we go further, let us dwell a bit on one battle that Mohammad fought - the Battle of Uhud. Malik’s interpretation of Uhud is central to the Pakistan Army’s jihad-centric strategic culture.
The Battle: The Battle of Uhud occurred in 625 CE between Muhammad’s forces from Medina and the Meccan Quraysh. Initially, the Muslims had the upper hand in the fight. However, a group of archers, driven by greed for war spoils, abandoned their strategic positions on the hillside despite clear instructions. This disobedience allowed the Meccan cavalry to launch a surprise attack from the rear, reversing the Muslims’ advantage. The battle ended with heavy Muslim casualties, including the death of 70 key companions, and Muhammad himself was injured, forcing the Muslims to retreat and regroup despite the setback.
Interpretation: Malik rejects the idea that “defeat” is determined by material losses or battlefield setbacks. He argues that true victory lies in maintaining faith, spirit, and commitment to jihad, regardless of physical casualties or territorial losses.
For Malik, victory means retaining spiritual strength and the will to persist in jihad, making the continuation of the struggle itself a triumph, even when outward circumstances suggest otherwise.
“The Battle of Uhud was a victory of faith, for it strengthened the believers’ resolve to continue jihad with greater vigor.”
Some key concepts of Pakistani Strategic Culture come from Malik's book.
Victory = Persistence, Not Battlefield Success: As long as the will to fight (jihad) remains, war is never truly lost. Even heavy material losses, like those suffered at Uhud, do not amount to defeat if the ideological commitment endures. Retaining faith and the spirit to continue the struggle is what defines victory, not temporary setbacks. It is the continued resolve, not material outcomes, that determines whether a battle or a war has truly been lost.
Total war is beyond kinetics: War is fought on spiritual, ideological, and psychological fronts. Loss of land, casualties, or tactical setbacks do not matter if the spirit of jihad remains alive. True defeat occurs only when the will to fight is broken, not when material losses are suffered on the battlefield.
Perpetual Conflict as Strategy: The Pakistan Army remains committed to perpetual hostility against India. Even after repeated military setbacks, it does not view itself as defeated. For Pakistan, survival and the ability to continue resistance are themselves considered victory. The focus is not on winning battles but on maintaining constant opposition, keeping the spirit of conflict alive at all costs.
Conventional asymmetry is Irrelevant: Battlefield inferiority or economic weakness is irrelevant if Pakistan can keep India unsettled using jihad and proxy warfare.
“Victory in war is the creation of a favourable psychological state to accept the will of Allah, not mere territorial conquest.”
Malik's central argument is that for a Muslim state, war is not an aberration but an integral part of a continuous struggle. He posits that Jihad is the equivalent of "total strategy" or "policy-in-execution," a never-ending struggle waged on all fronts—political, economic, social, psychological, and spiritual—to achieve the state's ultimate mission.Military force is but one instrument within this totalizing concept of conflict.
This worldview primes the military for a permanent state of confrontation, where peace is merely a temporary truce and the struggle is eternal.
For Malik, terror is not merely a byproduct of war or a means to an end; it is the "end in itself".
Victory is achieved not when the enemy's army is destroyed, but when his soul is paralyzed by fear and his faith is dislocated.
"Terror," he writes, "is the decision we wish to impose upon him".
This doctrine provides a powerful religious sanction for the use of terrorism and psychological warfare as primary instruments of state policy, aimed at shattering the enemy's will to resist.
This ideological framework finds a deeper, more manipulative context in the analysis provided by Dr. K.V. Paliwal in Two Faces of Jihad.
This duality is masterfully employed in Pakistani statecraft. To the Western world, especially when seeking aid or diplomatic support, Pakistan presents a "Meccan" face: a partner in the "war on terror," a victim of extremism, a voice of moderation. Simultaneously, it wages a relentless "Medinan" proxy war against India, fueled by the very ideological fervor articulated by Malik. This explains Pakistan's remarkable diplomatic resilience in the face of overwhelming evidence of its support for terrorism. It is not merely a state engaging in a "double game"; it is an ideological actor adept at deploying contradictory narratives as a core element of its total strategy. India's own doctrine must therefore be sophisticated enough to counter both faces: a hard-power response to Pakistan's Medinan aggression and a relentless information and diplomatic campaign to unmask and neutralize its Meccan facade.
There is another book that is incredibly illuminating when it comes to understanding Pakistan's strategic culture and military mindset. Christine Fair's "Fighting to the End."
Some important takeaways from Christine are:
Pakistan’s Army Sees Itself as the Guardian of Islam and Pakistan’s Ideological Frontiers
Strategic Culture Rooted in Perpetual Conflict with India
Preference for Risk and Conflict Over Stability
Inability to Accept Defeat
Use of Asymmetric and Proxy Warfare
Army’s Dominance in Pakistan’s Political and Security Policies
Fair’s central thesis is that the Pakistan Army possesses a strategic culture that allows it to rationalize, reframe, or outright deny its military defeats. With the singular exception of the 1971 war, which was too catastrophic to spin, the army "does not see itself as ever having been defeated militarily" by India.Pakistani military histories and memoirs consistently focus on tactical victories or acts of battlefield bravery, while blaming political leadership or international betrayal for strategic failures like the Kargil withdrawal.
This selective memory sustains an institutional myth of martial superiority and divine favor, preventing the kind of introspection that would normally follow repeated military losses.
This refusal to internalize defeat is buttressed by an ideological obsession that casts India as an existential, irreconcilable enemy. The Pakistan Army sees itself as the ultimate "guardian of Pakistan's ideology"—the Two-Nation Theory—which frames the conflict not as a political dispute but as a civilizational struggle between "Muslim Pakistan" and "Hindu India".Indian Hindus are routinely depicted in Pakistani military literature as cunning, cowardly, and inherently antagonistic to Islam.
This dehumanization of the adversary makes compromise impossible and perpetual conflict a sacred duty.
Furthermore, Fair argues that the Pakistan Army has an unorthodox concept of victory where endurance itself is a triumph. Simply by continuing to resist India's conventional superiority and challenging its regional dominance, the army achieves an "honorable" outcome. It seeks "parity in defeat"; even if it loses a round, it must extract a price from India (like downing a jet post-Balakot) to claim it gave as good as it got and thereby restore its deterrence credibility.This mindset explains why, paradoxically, Pakistan’s revisionist demands on India often increase after a loss, as the army doubles down to justify its sacrifices.
Both Malik and Fair’s analyses align in explaining why Pakistan’s Army embraces tactical and strategic defeats while still maintaining a narrative of “victory through continued resistance.”
Malik’s writings provide the ideological foundation, framing war as a spiritual and psychological struggle where persistence itself becomes victory.
This underpins the Pakistan Army’s belief system, shaping its readiness for perpetual hostility against India regardless of material setbacks.
Fair operationally describes how this mindset shapes Pakistan’s military and strategic behavior, showing how the Army converts survival and continued resistance into a symbol of triumph, sustaining its posture of conflict while avoiding accountability for failures.
Fair’s institutional analysis shows how this ideology is operationalized into a strategic culture that refuses to acknowledge defeat, valorizes resistance for its own sake, and views conflict with India as an eternal, existential struggle.
Punitive strikes like Operation Sindoor, while inflicting material damage, are processed through this ideological-institutional filter.
For the Pakistani establishment, such strikes are not a signal to cease hostilities but are instead absorbed as the expected "cost of Jihad"—a test of faith and resolve that must be endured.
The damage is repaired, the "martyrs" are glorified, and the institutional narrative of righteous struggle is reinforced. This creates an immunity to deterrence by punishment. India’s doctrine cannot be based on the assumption that inflicting pain will lead to a rational recalculation of costs and benefits by Pakistan, because the adversary's calculus is not rooted in rational-material logic.
It is driven by ideology, identity, and an institutional need to perpetuate the conflict. This fundamental disconnect is why India must now consider a new doctrinal approach.
India’s engagements with Pakistan have ranged from total wars (1971) to constrained strikes (2016, 2019, 2025). A few key patterns emerge:
This comparative analysis highlights that, while India has refined the art of limited military operations, Pakistan’s fundamental strategic approach has not undergone a significant change in response.
Operation Sindoor, for all its operational prowess, laid bare the strategic cul-de-sac of India’s current doctrine. A policy centered on reactive, punitive strikes has successfully demonstrated India's capability and resolve, but it has failed to achieve the most critical strategic objective: a lasting change in Pakistan's behavior. The cycle of terror, retaliation, temporary lull, and renewed terror continues, albeit at a higher threshold of violence. This necessitates a fundamental shift in Indian strategic thinking from punitive deterrence to strategic coercion.
The distinction is critical.
Punitive deterrence, as currently practiced, is a reactive posture. It aims to inflict costs after a provocation to deter a future attack. Its goal is to restore a fragile status quo and "teach a lesson," with the hope that the adversary will amend its ways. As decades of experience have shown, this hope is misplaced when dealing with an ideologically motivated revisionist state like Pakistan.
Strategic coercion, in contrast, is a proactive posture. It does not merely seek to deter a future act but aims to compel a change in an adversary's current and ongoing policy—in this case, Pakistan’s state-sponsored use of terrorism. Its objective is not to restore the status quo but to actively and permanently alter it in India's favor. While a doctrine of punitive deterrence amounts to "mowing the grass," a doctrine of strategic coercion aims to poison the roots of the problem by targeting the institutional and structural enablers of Pakistan's proxy war.
Achieving such a permanent behavioral change is an ambitious and high-risk endeavor. It requires moving beyond targeting the symptoms (terrorist camps) to targeting the system that sustains them—the military-intelligence establishment of Pakistan. This could involve imposing cumulative, and potentially unbearable, costs on the Pakistan Army's assets, institutional pride, and internal stability until it concludes that the continuation of its proxy war is more dangerous to its own survival than abandoning it. A doctrine of strategic coercion would borrow from Cold War concepts of compellence: not just preventing an action, but forcing an adversary to undo or forsake a hostile course of action. For Pakistan, this would mean being pressured into verifiably dismantling terrorist groups like LeT and JeM, a step it has historically resisted with great success.
Finally, we come to a point where we need to look at the key objectives, instruments, and escalation strategies India should consider in future contingencies to move beyond tactical deterrence and toward a strategic victory – i.e., a lasting change in Pakistan’s behavior.
These recommendations are offered with the caveat that they must be calibrated to manage escalation carefully in a nuclear environment:
Implementing these recommendations would mark a transformation in India’s strategy – from a traditionally defensive, reaction-oriented stance to a more proactive, coercive strategy. It aligns with the evolution already hinted by Operation Sindoor, where India moved from mere symbolic strikes to meaningful degradation of the adversary’s assets. However, such a doctrine requires strong political will, military readiness, and diplomatic finesse to manage the inherent risks. It also demands continual evaluation of Pakistan’s responses – the strategy must remain dynamic, adjusting if Pakistan signals willingness to back down or if, conversely, it escalates irresponsibly.
Operation Sindoor has been a watershed, showcasing both the potential and the limits of India’s current approach. It proved that India can retaliate forcefully yet control escalation – a significant step in the Indo-Pak equation. The challenge ahead is to build on this momentum and craft a strategy that does not just deter the next attack, but strives to break the cycle of violence perpetually. Achieving a “strategic victory” will likely require India to think beyond one-off operations and instead engage in sustained coercive diplomacy, economic pressure, and if necessary, repeated and intensifying military action that collectively persuade Pakistan’s leadership that the old games are no longer worth it. Only then can South Asia move towards a more stable peace, where deterrence is not just short-term and tactical, but enduring and transformative.
Quranic conceptualization of war is not a Pakistani invention. It is followed by Iran and even internal Islamist groups within every country.
In the Indian context, this has an essential set of lessons for the Hindus.
Let us understand that.
This is precisely how Islamist attacks in Kashmir, Bengal, UP, Kerala work: continuous, low-level violence, demographic expansion, and psychological intimidation to create an atmosphere of fear and insecurity while avoiding decisive confrontation. Escalate violence into a genocide when one is dominant.
So the question that Hindus have been asking on several fora is - How can the Hindus Survive?
Recognize It Is a Perpetual War: Stop viewing attacks as isolated events. Recognize them as parts of a continuous ideological war aimed at establishing dominance. Each attack, regardless of its scale, fits into a broader strategy of persistent confrontation, wearing down the opponent’s resolve over time. This mindset allows the aggressor to frame ongoing violence as progress, turning every act into a step toward their larger ideological and strategic goals.
Build Physical Security: Establish community-level watch groups, legal defense networks, and rapid alert systems to strengthen collective security. Where legally permitted, organize self-defense and weapons training to prepare for potential threats effectively. Systematically document every incident, ensuring accurate records for local, national, and international advocacy. This documentation will help expose patterns of targeted violence and mobilize broader support, ensuring communities are not isolated when under attack. Building these protective networks empowers communities to respond swiftly and strategically to any threat they face.
Psychological Resilience: Do not internalize fear. Instead, honor and celebrate those who resist and survive, shifting the focus from perpetual mourning to courage and resilience. This mindset transforms communities from passive victims into active defenders, ensuring that the spirit of resistance remains alive even in the face of ongoing threats and challenges.
Legal and Institutional Pressure: File cases and pursue justice relentlessly to raise the cost for perpetrators and deter future attacks. Monitor police and administrative actions closely to ensure they remain neutral and accountable. Use tools like RTI, PILs, and other legal avenues to uncover and expose the support networks enabling violence. This systematic legal strategy not only holds individuals accountable but also dismantles the broader structures that sustain targeted aggression, turning the law into a powerful tool for community protection and justice.
Demographic Consolidation: Invest in education, economic strength, and building strong community bonds. These foundations empower communities to effectively resist external threats. Actively work to reverse internal divisions based on caste, region, or language, and foster unity to present a cohesive front. A community that is educated, economically stable, and united can better protect its interests, ensuring resilience and strength against those who seek to divide or weaken it through targeted attacks or exploitation.
Narrative Warfare: Control the narrative with clarity and confidence. Systematically expose Islamist violence using verifiable data and personal stories, ensuring each incident is documented and shared widely. Create media content, videos, social media posts, and local WhatsApp group updates that reveal the truth on the ground, bypassing biased filters. Transition from a defensive posture to an assertive narrative that highlights facts while holding perpetrators and enablers accountable. This proactive approach educates the community, counters disinformation, and ensures that the reality of targeted violence is neither hidden nor dismissed, strengthening collective resolve and global awareness.
Strategic Political Engagement: Ensure communities vote in blocs to elect leaders who will actively protect their interests and security. Use this collective strength to push for laws that prevent illegal conversions, land jihad, and demographic encroachment. Voting strategically and in unity transforms communities from passive observers into active participants, shaping policies that safeguard their future, ensuring that leadership remains accountable and committed to addressing the specific challenges faced by the community with clarity and determination.
Economic Strength: Support Hindu businesses, boycott those funding Islamist networks of hate and extremism - for example, Halal-certified businesses. Build local economic ecosystems to reduce dependency.
Survival and "life as usual" are not possible over the next century for Hindus if they are not able to reverse the scourge of Islamism.
Let's discuss different ways Hindus can use to fight the existential scourge of Islamism.
Breaking the spirit and infrastructure of jihad: Adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward Islamist violence using legal and administrative measures. Ensure every act of violence is pursued relentlessly in courts, making accountability unavoidable. Actively dismantle support systems such as illegal madrasas and hidden financial channels that fund or shelter radical networks. Strengthen intelligence efforts to identify these networks early and cut off their lifelines. Enforce strict, consistent policing in known hotspots to prevent attacks and discourage radical activities. By combining legal action, administrative focus, and firm policing, communities can protect themselves while ensuring that extremist violence is met with decisive, lawful consequences at every level.
Expose the Ideological Bankruptcy: Use Islamic texts to reveal how violence is justified by radicals, helping to separate moderate Muslims from extremist ideologies. Encourage open discussions that challenge Islamist supremacy in debates, media platforms, and intellectual circles, breaking the silence that allows radical narratives to grow unchallenged. By using their own texts and teachings to expose contradictions and incitements to violence, it becomes possible to weaken extremist claims while empowering moderate voices to reclaim space and challenge radical dominance confidently.
Reciprocal Psychological Warfare: Demonstrate that every attack will bring clear and visible consequences—legally, economically, and socially—for those responsible. It should be made known that violence will not go unanswered. At the same time, refuse to surrender to fear narratives that seek to weaken resolve. Instead, project confidence and resilience, showing that the community will stand firm, pursue justice, and protect itself, ensuring aggressors understand that each act of violence carries a significant cost.
Build Institutional Power: Courts, police, and media must not be captured by Islamist sympathizers. Create Hindu legal aid networks to defend victims and prosecute aggressors.
Strategic Patience: Islamists play the long game. Hindus must be prepared for a multi-decade resistance. Every community must have a 50-year vision.
Islamism’s doctrine:
“Victory is continuing jihad and creating insecurity.”
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