Indian attacks in Pakistan increase fears of further conflict
In the first hours of Wednesday, Indian armed forces said they struck nine locations in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, where residents woke up to loud explosions, as the nuclear-armed rivals edged to the precipice of a full-blown military conflict.
New Delhi said its missiles precisely targeted “terrorist infrastructure” across the border while demonstrating “considerable restraint”. The Indian Army, in a statement, said the attack was “non-escalatory in nature” and pointed out that Pakistani military facilities were deliberately not targeted.
Yet a fuming Islamabad claimed that Indian attacks in six Pakistani cities killed at least 8 civilians, including two children. Pakistani ministers also claimed that the country’s air force had shot down several Indian military jets.
India’s missile attacks – called Operation Sindoor – were the country’s response to the deadly April 22 attack in Indian-administered-Kashmir’s Pahalgam, in which 26 people were killed.
India blamed Pakistan for that attack, while Islamabad denied it had any role. Since then, Indian armed forces have combed the forests near Pahalgam, arrested more than 2,000 people and raided homes in an unsuccessful manhunt for the gunmen who fled after shooting tourists dead.
The May 7 attacks on Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir offer Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi a chance to bolster his strongman image at home, analysts told Al Jazeera. But the Indian government’s emphasis on signalling “restraint” points to an attempt to balance that domestic message with a different narrative for the rest of the world.
Amid it all stands an undisputed fact, say analysts: India’s attacks have raised the risks of the region spiralling into a wider conflict.
‘Concerning development’
The Indian attacks were the most expansive since the neighbours last fought a full-fledged war in 1971 – a time when neither had nuclear weapons at their disposal as they do now.
Of the six places that Indian missiles struck, two are cities – Muzaffarabad and Kotli – in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The region of Kashmir – one of the world’s most militarised zones – is claimed in full, and ruled in parts, by India and Pakistan, who have fought three wars over it.
But the other four targets that India struck are in Punjab -Bahawalpur, Muridke, Sialkot and Shakar Garh. Among them, Bahawalpur falls in southern Punjab province, facing the Thar desert, while Muridke is just next to Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city, with a population of 14 million.
The Indian military has not hit Punjab, Pakistan’s economic heartland that is also home to 60 percent of the country’s population, since 1971.
Indian air attacks since then have mostly targeted remote parts of Pakistan or Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Six years ago, Indian jets fired missiles at Balakot in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, after a suicide bomber killed at least 40 Indian paramilitary soldiers in Indian-administered Kashmir.
These May 7 attacks are different. Lahore, next to Muridke, is close to the Indian border and is Pakistan’s second-most populous city, pointed out Sumantra Bose, an Indian political scientist whose work focuses on the intersection of nationalism and conflict in South Asia. Bahawalpur, in southern Punjab, is also a key city.
The Indian government claims that it strategically hit only “terror infrastructure”. And in a post on X, the Indian army said, “Justice is served.”
But Bose said the attacks were “a very concerning development”.
“Surgically targeted precision strikes do not change the fact that there have been these large explosions in major Pakistani population centres,” said Bose. “This is proper Pakistan, not Pakistan-administered-Kashmir [claimed by India].”
Source: Aljazeera
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