In the shadowy world of geopolitics, optics matter. For India, the pattern that emerged in the aftermath of the 2019 Pulwama–Balakot crisis has ominously repeated itself in 2025. Despite public posturing and nationalist rhetoric, behind closed doors, New Delhi once again found itself pulled back from the brink—not by its own strategic restraint, but by foreign pressure and global diplomatic choreography.
The 2019 Template: Bombast, Bombing, and Backpedaling
The Pulwama attack in February 2019, which killed over 40 Indian paramilitary personnel, was a watershed moment. India responded with airstrikes across the Line of Control (LoC) in Balakot, claiming to have targeted terrorist camps run by Jaish-e-Mohammad.
The objective in 2019 was the same as that of the current Operation Sindoor: to eliminate the terrorists responsible for the massacre and dismantle their support networks. Yet despite the bold rhetoric, not all of the perpetrators were neutralized. In fact, several key planners of the 2019 attack remained alive — some of whom played direct or indirect roles in orchestrating the 2025 Pahalgam massacre. Among them was Sheikh Sajjad Gul, who has now emerged as the mastermind of the 2025 Pahalgam massacre, who managed to evade Indian intelligence for years.
The failure to neutralize Gul proved disastrous. Intelligence now shows that not only did he evade capture in India, but he was able to expand his terrorist network under Pakistan’s ISI protection. In a shocking revelation, it has come to light that Gul had earlier stayed in Kerala to pursue a lab technician course, a fact the Kerala Police were entirely unaware of until recently. The state police, even now, have no clarity on when and where he resided, underscoring a serious breakdown in surveillance and intelligence sharing.
Following his studies, Gul returned to Kashmir and opened a diagnostic lab that covertly supported terrorist operatives. Despite his long history of terror links — including being caught with 5 kg of RDX in Delhi’s Nizamuddin station in 2002 and sentenced to 10 years in prison — he was allowed to disappear post-release. In 2017, Gul moved to Rawalpindi, Pakistan, received training under the ISI, and in 2019 was appointed head of The Resistance Front (TRF), a LeT proxy outfit created to present an indigenous Kashmiri face to terrorism after international outrage over the Pulwama attack.
The TRF claimed responsibility for the April 22 Pahalgam attack that left 26 people dead. Gul, most likely holed up in Rawalpindi’s cantonment under ISI protection, has coordinated several high-profile attacks between 2020 and 2024 — including targeted killings, grenade attacks, the ambush of J&K police in Bijbehra, and the Z-Morh Tunnel attack in Ganderbal. His rise represents a colossal intelligence failure — a man once in Indian custody, educated within Indian institutions, was allowed to slip through the cracks and evolve into a central figure of anti-India terror operations.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) designated Gul a terrorist in 2022 and announced a ₹10 lakh bounty on his head. However, by then, his network was already entrenched and operational. Sources now say that Gul personally coordinated the Pahalgam attackers.
Gul’s family, too, has a history of militancy. His brother, a former doctor at Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital in Srinagar, fled to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the 1990s and is now reportedly involved in terror financing via Gulf-based fugitive networks.
That such a figure was once within reach — and allowed to vanish — raises profound questions about the lapses in India’s internal security apparatus. Had decisive action been taken in time, the horrors of 2025 may have been averted.
Meanwhile, the world applauded India’s “Surgical Strikes,” but the situation escalated when Pakistan retaliated, downing an Indian jet and capturing its pilot, Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman.
In public, India celebrated his return as a diplomatic victory. Behind the scenes, however, the U.S. scrambled to mediate. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo admitted that nuclear war was narrowly averted thanks to intense backchannel communication. Washington, not New Delhi, was the real crisis manager.
Despite India’s muscular language, it quietly walked back from the edge, essentially accepting a diplomatic draw rather than a strategic win. The global community’s message was clear: escalation will not be tolerated—and India complied.
2019: A Manufactured Victory?
In the fog of war and diplomacy, truth often arrives years late, buried in memoirs and classified leaks. For India, the most sobering revelation came not from Islamabad or Beijing, but from Washington D.C.—in the form of Mike Pompeo’s 2023 memoir, Never Give an Inch.
In that book, the former director of CIA pulls back the curtain on the real events that followed the 2019 Pulwama terror attack and the retaliatory Balakot airstrikes. Far from the triumphalist narrative that dominated Indian media, Pompeo revealed how India bent under US pressure.
It was Pompeo’s urgent intervention—calling both Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Pakistani Army Chief General Bajwa—that prevented escalation. Pompeo’s account directly undermines India’s portrayal of strength and sovereignty, suggesting that the country’s leadership was forced into de-escalation under U.S. pressure.
Had India not agreed to the ceasefire in 2019 and instead finished the job — eliminating all the terrorists responsible — the story of 2025 might have been very different. The decision to halt mid-operation gave surviving conspirators the time and space to regroup, grow in influence, and ultimately orchestrate an even bloodier massacre. The price of unfinished justice, as the nation has now seen, is paid in innocent lives.
This continuity of terror, enabled by unfinished operations and diplomatic restraint, exposes a troubling pattern: India bends, and its enemies regroup.
2025: A Familiar Playbook
In May 2025, India once again launched airstrikes into Pakistan-occupied territory. Indian politicians repeated their old script of “zero tolerance,” but behind the curtain, the same choreography unfolded.
This time, it wasn’t Pompeo but U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, along with UK diplomats and Saudi intermediaries, who pressed both countries to back off. Within 48 hours of the strikes, India agreed to a ceasefire.
If the Pompeo book made the 2019 retreat undeniable, the events of 2025 only confirmed the pattern.
In both instances, India’s posture of retaliatory strength was undermined by its subsequent acquiescence to international diplomacy. Behind the facade of sovereignty lies a pattern of external dependency whenever the Indo-Pak powder keg is lit.
The Illusion of Strategic Autonomy
The recurring theme in both 2019 and 2025 is not just the threat of conflict—it’s India’s apparent inability to define the terms of engagement and resolution. While Pakistan uses escalation as a negotiating tactic, India often finds itself cornered into de-escalation under global pressure, sacrificing both tactical gains and narrative control.
Critics argue that New Delhi’s hawkish language is increasingly out of sync with its diplomatic outcomes. Far from projecting strength, these cycles reinforce the perception of a regional power that talks tough but folds when push comes to nuclear shove.
Isn’t this precisely what the U.S. Ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti, warned of — or rather, threatened — when he said “in times of conflict, there is no such thing as strategic autonomy”? His remark came just days after Prime Minister Modi’s warm summit with Putin, where India asserted its independent foreign policy. Garcetti’s statement, echoing old colonial attitudes, wasn’t just a critique — it was a signal: fall in line, or pay the price. That same pressure in 2019 derailed India’s momentum, and its consequences are now tragically evident.
Both crises highlight a sobering reality: India talks like a regional hegemon but acts like a managed client state when the stakes rise too high. Its military doctrine crumbles the moment the U.S. steps in with a red phone and a veiled threat.
Pompeo’s book was a wake-up call in 2023. It exposed how little control India had over its own narrative and how easily it bowed to diplomatic pressure when confronted with escalation.
Instead of learning from that revelation, 2025 has shown that New Delhi is still playing to the same script, hoping its domestic audience won’t read the fine print—until the next memoir tells them the truth again. But, the world is changing; who knows—maybe this time we won’t have to wait years for a book. Maybe one day, when Trump’s feeling particularly frisky, he’ll just live-thread the whole backroom drama on Truth Social.
The Road Ahead
Each de-escalation is presented as a win, but it leaves India exactly where it started—grappling with persistent cross-border militancy, relying on foreign states to mediate regional crises, and failing to craft a long-term deterrence model that doesn’t implode under international scrutiny.
The current ceasefire, like that of 2019, is fragile. And unless India learns to match rhetoric with resilient, autonomous policy execution, it risks becoming a pawn on its own chessboard—again.
