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Editor’s Note
In Part I of this series, the author analysed the sources of Pakistan’s enduring resilience despite chronic internal vulnerabilities. Part II turns the lens towards India, examining the implications of Pakistan’s renewed geopolitical activism and outlining strategic, diplomatic, economic, and security choices India must consider to safeguard its interests and remain geopolitically pivotal in a rapidly shifting multipolar order.
Strategic Choices in a Multipolar, Transactional World
Part II: Setting the Context
In Part I, the author discussed what makes Pakistan tick and its current defence posture in the geopolitical, diplomatic, economic, and military spheres. Before turning to India, the following essential steps are suggested for Pakistan:
Pakistan’s Geopolitical-Diplomatic-Economic Blitzkrieg
| Theme | Description | Implications |
| Multi-Nation Engagement | Engaging multiple poles of power to reduce dependency. | Enhances flexibility but increases coordination complexity. |
| Transactional | Deals framed around loans, investments, and defence MOUs. | Short-term gains; limited structural reform. |
| Dominant
Military |
Army leadership driving diplomacy via Special Investment Facilitation Council
(SIFC) and defence channels. |
Ensures continuity but marginalises civilian foreign policy apparatus. |
| Infrastructure Surge | Ports, corridors, and resource sites marketed to foreign investors. | Creates stake for partners but risks over-commercialising sovereignty. |
Strategic Recommendations for Pakistan
To ensure long term stability and prosperity:
- Institutionalise Multi-Domain Diplomacy: Create a civilian-military foreign policy council to synchronise engagements and prevent contradictory commitments.
- Prioritise Fiscal Prudence: Focus on investment climate reforms to convert political goodwill into durable capital flows.
- Balance Transparency with Flexibility: Disclose terms of major foreign agreements to improve credibility while preserving negotiation room.
- Deepen Regional Energy Network: Pursue Iran pipeline under a sanctions-compliant framework and explore joint Saudi-Chinese investment in energy corridors.
- Leverage Multiple Regional Partnerships: Expand technical cooperation with Turkey and Malaysia to build indigenous defence and tech capacity.
- Strategic Communication: Craft a consistent narrative portraying Pakistan as a balanced, mature state and not an opportunistic player; to reassure all partners.
- Re-build Trust with India: To create a win-win situation, prevent anti-India activities within, and create climate and conditions of trust to move forward.
Prognosis: Enduring Fragility or Strategic Renewal?
Pakistan’s resilience is undeniable, but its sustainability remains uncertain. Structural weaknesses include deepening internal fault lines, heavy debt servicing burdens, climate vulnerability, civil–military imbalance, rising extremism, and a volatile youth bulge.
- Exacerbated internal fault lines (Baluchistan, Sind, PoK) deepening due narrow vision, and fractious polity.
- Debt servicing consumes over half of revenues.
- Climate vulnerability (floods, droughts) threatens agriculture.
- Civil–military imbalance hinders democratic reform.
- Rising extremism challenges social cohesion.
- The youth bulge, if unmet by jobs, could turn explosive.
Pakistan has repeatedly shown strategic ingenuity to buy time, whether through IMF bailouts, China’s loans, or nationalist mobilisation. The real question is whether this cycle of “survival without reform” can continue indefinitely. Some signs hint at a positive turnaround: growing public discourse on accountability, society’s digital activism, and the army’s cautious re-evaluation of overreach after Imran Khan’s fallout. CPEC’s second surge, if managed wisely, could catalyse industrial growth. However, absent deep governance reform, Pakistan risks remaining resilient but stagnant; perpetually reinventing itself for survival rather than transformation.
Implications for India
India is a civilizational and regional power, the world’s fastest-growing economy, a strong military power, an NWS, and a credible soft power; accepted as a mature, democratic non-hegemon, following the dictum of ‘Vasudeva Kutumbakam’. India has always desired a stable, prosperous Pakistan to achieve a win-win equation regionally. Pakistan’s recent geopolitical resurgence has implications for India across strategic, diplomatic, and economic dimensions, and India’s responses should be calibrated to sustain its security, deter escalation, protect its economic interests, and preserve regional influence. Some key implications for India are listed below:
India’s Strategic Responses to Remain Geopolitically Pivotal
- Geopolitical reorientation: Pakistan’s diversified engagement with multiple powers, multipolar international platforms and multiple domains (diplomacy, security, economic, informational, nuclear, military), reduces its exposure to any single external sponsor and creates alternative channels for partnerships (ready to even send their military as mercenaries to client nations like KSA), that bypass traditional Western-led architectures. It complicates India’s regional leadership ambitions and bargaining power, especially in South Asia, particularly if Pakistan gains more credible multilateral backing for its security and economic initiatives.
- Regional Transactional Posturing: By deepening transactional relationships, Pakistan signals a desire to shape regional norms and access new finance, energy, and trade corridors, potentially altering the strategic balance in South Asia. India could face a dilution of its preferred regional architecture, especially if Pakistan assumes a leadership role in joint security and development initiatives. A more diversified Pakistan makes regional alignment less predictable
- Security dynamics and Kashmir Issue: An international Pakistan-friendly regional security architecture can influence deterrence calculations and crisis management on the India-Pakistan border, including cross-border terrorism, border incidents, and conventional calculus along the Line of Control. It will raise the perceived costs of coercive signalling or escalation in bilateral standoffs. Pakistan’s use of multipolar platforms to press its narrative could complicate international mediation and increase the salience of Kashmir-related issues in global forums. A crowded diplomatic space may heighten rhetorical pressure and complicate negotiations with India on final solutions and confidence-building measures (CBMs).
- India needs to re-invigorate her Communication Strategy: Pakistan’s broader diplomatic engagement influences international perceptions and creates competing narratives on terrorism, governance, and development, necessitating a more robust and coherent Indian communications strategy abroad. Soft-power challenges could affect India’s ability to shape global attitudes on regional security and democracy, especially in forums where Pakistan is active.
- Pakistan’s economic stability can foster better relations: On the positive side, accelerated cooperation, investment, and access to development finance can ease Pakistan’s macroeconomic pressures, potentially stabilising cross-border spillovers and easing border management pressures in the short term, while raising the importance of credible governance for sustained benefits. If Pakistan’s energy and water management agreements (cross-border gas or electricity exchanges) materialise, energy security and industrial activity in Pakistan could improve, reducing domestic sources of instability that sometimes spill over into cross-border tensions.
Strategic responses from India to enhance global relevance (all not necessarily focused on Pakistan)
Operation Sindoor illustrated to the world and Pakistan the recalibration of the ‘use of multi-domain force’ by India against Pakistan, and also called out Pakistan’s nuclear bluff. It signalled that India now links terror acts with national response, and there will henceforth be a high price to pay for state-sponsored terrorism. Some priority recommendations:
- Strategic Priorities: Preserve multi-domain deterrence and operational readiness. Avoid reactionary escalation, and respond with calibrated diplomatic and economic statecraft rather than tit-for-tat isolation. India’s traditional non-alignment strategy is tested by Pakistan’s manoeuvres. We need to invigorate complementarities with partners (US, EU, Japan, Gulf, ASEAN, Russia) to shape outcomes favourable to Indian strategic interests. Strengthen economic resilience and regional connectivity to undercut Islamabad’s appeal for quick transactional deals.
- Harden and diversify security architecture: Strengthen deterrence and crisis management at the border(s) through robust readiness, enhanced surveillance, and risk-reduction measures with neighbouring states, while pursuing targeted diplomacy to prevent misperceptions or inadvertent escalation.
- Deepen defense-industrial collaboration with trusted partners, while avoiding unnecessary military entanglement with newer external partners that might complicate strategic priorities.
- Expand and optimize regional engagement. Intensify engagement with SAARC-type platforms where feasible, while exploring new formats that include like-minded states to promote regional stability, trade diversification, and joint counterterrorism frameworks.
- Economic resilience and connectivity. Accelerate regional economic initiatives that bolster energy security, trade efficiency, and infrastructure investment, ensuring that India remains a preferred partner for regional connectivity projects and supply chains. Protect domestic economic gains by strengthening supply-chain resilience. Ensure ease of doing business for regional partners.
- Diplomacy and narrative management: Proactively articulate India’s position on regional multipolar shifts, emphasising commitment to peace, stability, and inclusive growth, while clearly delineating red lines on terrorism and cross-border aggression. Engage with international audiences through consistent messaging on governance, human rights, and regional security to reinforce credibility and counter disinformation.
- Bilateral Hot-lines: Apart from the current military DGMO-level hotline, crisis-management hotlines at the defence and foreign minister levels be established (with neighbours).
Conclusion
As Anatoly Lieven so lucidly states, Pakistan’s ability to “keep ticking” is neither accidental nor mystical. It derives from a confluence of historical design, institutional continuity, strategic geography, and external patronage. The military–bureaucratic nexus ensures coherence; the geopolitical location guarantees external interest; Islamic ideology supplies unity; and societal adaptability absorbs shocks. However, this resilience is also Pakistan’s greatest paradox; it enables survival but inhibits reform. The very mechanisms that keep Pakistan alive (military dominance, rent-seeking diplomacy, crisis-driven unity) also prevent it from maturing into a stable democracy or diversified economy. Pakistan endures not because it solves its crises, but because it continually converts them into opportunities for reinvention; a nation that survives by mastering the art of managing its own fragility. For India, if we consider ourselves a ‘civilizational power’, we should not keep agitating or constantly carping about Pakistan. As our economic, diplomatic, and military power grows and the asymmetry with Pakistan widens, Pakistan will remain a pinprick or a source of discomfort to be dealt with episodically. We keep reiterating ‘don’t compare us’ but do so constantly! India requires Pakistan to keep us on our toes and keep our powder dry. Let India focus on bigger challenges like China, global geopolitical churnings and the road to prosperity and a place in the global high table.
Lt Gen PR Kumar
Lt Gen PR Kumar (Retd) served in the Indian Army for 39 years, He was the DG Army Aviation, before superannuating from the appointment of Director General of Military Operations (DGMO) in end 2015.
He continues to write and talk on international and regional geo-political, security and strategic issues. He can be contacted at prkumarsecurity.wordpress.com and kumapa60@gmail.com
