When Sushant Singh wrote in The Caravan’s March 2025 cover story that a politically weaker Modi, struggling with a tepid economy, could be compelled to turn the country’s attention towards Pakistan once again under some pretext, it was easy to read the line as one analyst’s cautious reading of Indian politics, but a few months later, with Pahalgam and the strikes that followed it, the sentence looks much less like analysis and much more like a warning that the region did not heed.
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To understand why the warning matters, one has to go back to what Balakot was meant to be, because the story that Indian television sold in February 2019 bears little resemblance to what the evidence now suggests. After the Pulwama attack killed forty CRPF personnel, the Indian Air Force crossed into Pakistani airspace in the early hours of 26 February, and within hours the country’s loudest news channels were announcing that a major terrorist camp had been destroyed and hundreds of militants killed, a claim repeated with such confidence and such volume that questions about proof seemed almost unpatriotic. Modi himself told the nation that his decision to give the military a “free hand” had made the difference, and in the weeks that followed, “Balakot” stopped being the name of a place and became something closer to a campaign slogan.
What is striking, looking back, is how little there was underneath all that noise. The Indian Air Force never issued an official statement claiming any particular number of dead, it never offered evidence of the successes that the studios were celebrating, and independent analysts who studied satellite imagery of the site could not find the destruction that the television coverage implied, so that an institution which had supposedly achieved a historic success remained oddly silent while others spoke on its behalf. Institutions that have genuinely won something tend to say so, and the silence of the IAF in those days tells us more than any of the anchors’ shouting did.
The following day, 27 February, was the part that Indian coverage preferred to move past quickly, because in the aerial engagement over Kashmir India lost a MiG-21 and its pilot, Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, was captured by Pakistan, and on that very same morning an Indian Mi-17 helicopter was brought down near Budgam by a missile from the IAF’s own air defence, killing six airmen and a man on the ground, an error the air chief would later describe as a mistake. Singh’s reporting adds further detail to this picture, since he writes that the force missed its designated targets in the first place and that there was a second, narrowly avoided friendly-fire incident over Rajasthan, so that when the whole sequence is laid out together it is difficult to describe it as anything other than a military failure that was repackaged, almost immediately, as a triumph.
This is where the story stops being merely a post-mortem of one operation and becomes a story about politics, because Modi went into the 2019 general election carrying an image as a strongman who had hit back where earlier leaders had hesitated, and the BJP returned with 303 seats. I would not claim that Balakot alone produced that result, since Indian elections are never decided by a single event, but it would be equally dishonest to pretend that the strike and its aftermath played no part in giving him the fillip he needed, because a failed operation, once wrapped in the language of national pride, turned out to be worth far more to him politically than a successful one would have been had it been subjected to honest scrutiny.
What I find most troubling, and what Singh’s sources appear to find troubling as well, is the conduct of the institution at the centre of it all. More than half a dozen people he spoke to, including senior IAF officials and diplomats, made it clear that the air force was playing its designated part in supporting the ruling party’s narrative, and whether that was driven by political loyalty or by a wish to conceal its own failures, which is most likely a bit of both. That convention took decades to build and, once bent, it is not easily restored, particularly when the people who bent it face no consequences for doing so.
And there were no consequences, which may be the most important part of the whole affair. No one was publicly held to account for the missed targets, the air defence blunder produced little that ordinary Indians ever saw, and the force that overpromised and underdelivered carried on as though nothing had happened, so that in a system with real accountability an operation like this would have ended in an inquiry whose findings were open to the public, whereas in India it ended in an election victory.
That brings us back to the question of pretexts, because within weeks of Singh’s article the attack at Pahalgam took place in April 2025, and in early May India launched strikes under the name Operation Sindoor, which led to four days of the most serious fighting between the two countries in decades. I want to be careful here, since it would be lazy and unfair to suggest that any government simply manufactured a crisis, and Pakistan has its own responsibilities to answer for when it comes to militancy in the region, but one can still observe that the pattern Singh described was visible once more, with a leadership under domestic pressure, a confrontation with Pakistan, an immediate rush of triumphant messaging and claims that ran well ahead of the evidence.
What gives Singh’s warning its weight is that Balakot was not an isolated episode but part of a pattern, in which a security crisis with Pakistan is met with a wave of nationalist messaging that serves the ruling party’s political and ideological project, and in which the facts of the operation matter far less than the story that can be built around it. Modi’s politics has always drawn strength from the image of a leader who protects a Hindu nation against an enemy across the border, and a crisis, whatever its origin, is the setting in which that image is easiest to project, so it is hard to ignore how often moments of military confrontation have coincided with moments of domestic political need, and how consistently the official version of events has been shaped to defend the regime and its agenda rather than to inform the public.
The aftermath of Operation Sindoor has only strengthened that impression, because after a year of the government presenting the operation as a decisive success and describing it as a reset of the strategic balance with Pakistan, India’s own new army chief, Ashutosh Dixit, has now spoken about shortcomings and deficiencies that the military identified when it reviewed the operation, and about the need to remove them.
The honesty of a single general may not change the course of Indian politics, but it does show that those inside the system know the distance between the official story and the reality, and for two nuclear-armed neighbours that distance is dangerous, because the next crisis will be fought not only with aircraft and missiles but with competing claims of who won the last one.Balakot, then, matters less as a battle than as a precedent, because it showed that a failure could be sold as a victory, that the armed forces could be drawn into the selling, and that nobody would pay a price, and Sushant Singh deserves credit for saying so plainly in an environment where doing so is not without risk, even if the region will only learn over time whether his larger warning proves right.
