Even as the country was cheering the surgical strikes against some half a dozen terror launching pads across the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir, the mood in top policy making circles was not of chest-thumping but of quiet confidence and firm resolve. There is a clear recognition that the strikes are not a magic bullet that will end the export of terrorism from Pakistan. The mandarins understand that forcing compellence on Pakistan will be a long haul and that pressure will have to not only be maintained but even ratcheted up in the weeks, months and years ahead. But one thing is clear: there will be no more backing down in the face of Pakistani provocations. What is more, having broken the pattern of predictability of India’s response, the Modi government appears set to take calculated risks to steadily raise the costs for Pakistan of any adventurism. Simply put, the strategic template on Pakistan has started to change in a way that will even bind future governments in Delhi to not regress to the times when India only retaliated by threatening to retaliate and then resigned itself to go back to the dialogue table.

The multiple strikes across the LoC, even though not deep penetration, are a clear statement of intent of how the Indian government will respond in the future to any terror strike from Pakistan. What this means is that it unsettles the old Pakistani calculus in which it retaliated against any Indian offensive action either through cross-border raids or through terrorist strikes. While India is braced for some such Pakistani action, what has changed is that any such Pakistani move will almost certainly beget a counter attack by India. Top Indian officials are quite clear that even though India is not interested in going on an escalation path, Pakistan will be made to pay a price for any action it initiates against India. The name of the game now is to raise the costs for Pakistan and this will be done not just through not just kinetic means – the surgical strikes is really the lowest end of the spectrum of response and India is prepared to up the ante if required – but also non-kinetic measures, some of which are already unfolding – boycotting of the SAARC summit, going full steam ahead for isolating Pakistan in the region, reviewing the Indus Waters Treaty, rethinking the MFN status etc. There is a quiver full of arrows that will be fired in a graded and carefully calibrated manner in the coming days.

Although the Pakistanis are going red in the face denying the surgical strikes, they know that their bluff is starting to be called, which in turn means that they no longer quite sure on how to react to India’s dare. In a sense the Pakistanis face the classic dilemma of a bully who makes a lot of noise and tries to browbeat others through bluster. But the moment the other side hits back, the bully generally reacts by denying that he got hit. It was actually quite funny to see the nonplussed Pakistanis react to the Indian announcement of the surgical strikes. Ever since the Uri terror attack, the Pakistanis had been loudly declaring how impregnable their security was, how they wouldn’t allow India to enter into an inch of territory under their control, how they wouldn’t hesitate to nuke India and so on and so forth. One editor and TV anchor, who is really a closet Islamofascist but is seen by many in India as the face of liberal Pakistan – yes, I speak about the charlatan Najam Sethi who once in a while lets his mask of liberalism slip away – even went to the extent of saying that the Pakistani solider is filled with such zeal that even the Indians know that one Pakistani can take on three Indians. That the ratio has come down from one Muslim equal to ten Hindus in the Ayub years to 1:3 now is of course quite a climb down for the Islamofascists in Pakistan.

Be that as it may, after India announced the strikes, apart from denial by Pakistan Army, the bluster gave way to a degree of bewilderment and the sub-text of many analysts and commentators was ‘how could India behave so irresponsibly, don’t they know we are a nuclear weapon state….’ On twitter the hashtag #peacenotwar started trending in Pakistan. It is also at times like this that the Pakistanis start to remember Nehru and Gandhi, and you know they are jittery when they lament how far India has moved away from the path shown by both these icons. It is of course another matter that the Pakistanis forget that even when India was the land of Gandhi and Nehru, they showed unremitting hostility to India. At the official level, the internal dissonance between civilians and military in Pakistan was also on display. While the military spokesman issued a flat denial of Indian claims and insisted that only cross-LoC firing had taken place, the Prime Minister of Pakistan spoke of ‘naked aggression’, a phrase which has never in the past been used to describe cross-LoC firing. Meanwhile, the defence minister of Pakistan – only a ceremonial post really considering that he cannot even enter the GHQ without permission from the army and doesn’t have the power to even post a chaprasi in the defence ministry without the army’s nod – who was shooting his country in the foot by indulging in some irresponsible nuclear sabre-rattling before the strikes, was reduced to babbling inanities like ‘we warn India to not do this again’.

It is possible that Nawaz Sharif saw the Indian action as a Godsend to pull the army a peg or two down from the high pedestal it has perched itself on, and in the process regain some of his lost authority. For its part, the army’s embarrassment was quite obvious. In a sense, this was Raheel Sharif’s Abottabad and in some ways worse because its one thing to be caught napping when the Americans carry out an operation and quite another when the Indians carry out a strike. The Pakistan army faces a difficult dilemma: it cannot try and agitate international opinion against India without accepting the strike took place. But that will mean earning the shame of sleeping on the job which will damage the carefully cultivated image that the Pakistan army has built for itself as the guardians of both the ideological and territorial frontiers of the country. An admittance would also confront the Pakistan army with enormous public pressure for pay-back to India. There is no way the army can say they can’t do anything, but doing something entails big risks especially if India decides it will control escalation dominance. While underplaying the strikes deprives the Pakistanis the justification of retaliation – how can you retaliate to something which you claim never happened? – it does reduce the pressure to go up the escalation ladder.

The Pakistanis also know that they have very little international sympathy on their side. Even China has taken a somewhat nuanced position on the Indian strikes. Apparently, after the strikes, India had reached out to Muslim countries supposedly close to Pakistan, and far from any protest the message was that do what you have to do. The Western world and Russia have also brushed aside Pakistan’s complaints. In South Asia, Pakistan’s isolation is almost complete. This means that diplomatically Pakistan has very little going for it and in the event of any escalation, even if pressure is put on both countries to back down, India will be in a better position to resist than Pakistan. Economically, Pakistan knows that any escalation will put paid to the very fragile economic recovery and maybe even jeopardise the ruinously ambitious CPEC project. The same dynamic will operate in India, but once again the strength of the Indian economy puts it in a better position to handle the fallout.

The ball is now squarely in the Pakistani court. While there will be a temptation to retaliate, Pakistan can no longer be as surefooted as before because the impunity has ended and they will be on tenterhooks about how India will respond and at what level to any action by Pakistan. It is entirely possible that Pakistan will try and reach out to India and offer a dialogue to cool things down. But since the rules of the game have changed, India is unlikely to be beguiled by any such overture and will judge Pakistan’s sincerity on the basis of actions on ground and not proceed on basis of empty promises. Meanwhile, the non-kinetic measures are likely to continue apace to squeeze Pakistan even as the military pressure is maintained. How effective this new strategy will prove, only time will tell. But the old strategy of flip-flops, one step forward two steps back, and turning the other cheek has run its course. Neither seasons nor election cycles will decide the time frame of the new policy; only Pakistani actions will.