Operation Sindoor signals India’s shift to proactive compellence—but without formal doctrine and institutional depth, the PRAHAAR approach risks remaining an episodic deterrent rather than a lasting strategic transformation
This article is part of the essay series: From Response to Reorientation: One Year of Operation Sindoor
Operation Sindoor marks not merely a military response, but also the operational crystallisation of India's evolving counter-terrorism doctrine: deliberate, escalation-dominant, and strategically irreversible.
For over three decades, India's response to Pakistan's state-sponsored terrorism followed a predictable geometry, including provocation, restraint, diplomatic protest, and eventual absorption. Each atrocity, from Bombay 1993, Parliament 2001, Mumbai 2008, to Pulwama 2019, was met with the same cycle. Indian civilians bore the costs; the perpetrators operated from sanctuaries across the border with near-total impunity.
Operation Sindoor, launched in May 2025 in direct response to the Pahalgam massacre in April 2025, represents something categorically different: it marks the operational debut of what strategic analysts are beginning to call the PRAHAAR Doctrine.
That geometry has now changed. Operation Sindoor, launched in May 2025 in direct response to the Pahalgam massacre in April 2025, represents something categorically different: it marks the operational debut of what strategic analysts are beginning to call the PRAHAAR Doctrine, a posture built not on restraint but on compellence, not on punishment but on cost imposition so severe that the adversary's calculus is permanently altered.
Table 1: Evolution of India’s Military Response to Terror Attacks (1999–2025)
| 1999 Kargil — reactive conventional defence | 2016 Uri — punitive surgical strikes | 2019 Balakot — escalation testing | 2025 Sindoor — doctrine crystallised |
Source: Author’s compilation
To understand why the PRAHAAR Doctrine became necessary, one must first cautiously understand the architecture of Pakistan's approach to sub-conventional warfare. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence does not merely tolerate terrorist organisations; it cultivates, finances, arms, and directs them as instruments of strategic policy. Terror groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), and the Haqqani Network are not considered a menace within Pakistan's security establishment; they are seen as assets. The Pahalgam massacre of April 2025, which killed 26 innocent tourists in cold blood, bore every hallmark of Pakistan-sponsored proxies, characterised by meticulous target selection—of location and victims based on faith—and the preservation of plausible deniability through the use of non-state actors.
This model of using proxies as instruments of coercion below the nuclear threshold has been Pakistan's most effective strategic tool against India. For decades, it imposed asymmetric costs with near-zero risk of direct accountability. Nuclear weapons have, meanwhile, continued to serve as a deterrence umbrella, sheltering conventional and sub-conventional aggression alike.
The Pahalgam massacre of April 2025, which killed 26 innocent tourists in cold blood, bore every hallmark of Pakistan-sponsored proxies, characterised by meticulous target selection—of location and victims based on faith—and the preservation of plausible deniability through the use of non-state actors.
Pakistan's military establishment assumed that India's desire to be seen as a ‘responsible power’ would always override its appetite for retaliatory action. For thirty years, that wager paid off.
Table 2: Operational Signals from Operation Sindoor (2025)
| 9 Terror infrastructure sites were struck across Pakistan and PoK in Op Sindoor. | 0 Pakistani military assets targeted — a deliberate escalation signal | 26 Indian civilians killed in Pahalgam — the provocation that ended an era of restraint |
Source: Author’s compilation
PRAHAAR, a Hindi word meaning strike, is not merely a term used to echo in the security establishments; it is, in fact, a conceptual doctrine that represents the institutionalisation of proactive compellence and the willingness to strike terror infrastructure at source, within adversary territory, with precision munitions, while simultaneously managing escalation ladders through deliberate signalling. India’s leadership has reiterated “zero tolerance against terrorism” and the principle that “talks and terror cannot go together”.
Operation Sindoor operationalised this across three dimensions simultaneously. First, kinetic precision—Rafale jets equipped with SCALP cruise missiles and HAMMER munitions struck nine identified terrorist infrastructure nodes across Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), including the LeT headquarters in Muridke and JeM facilities in Bahawalpur—this was a statement of both capability and intent.
India has not merely responded to terrorism; it has redefined the rules of engagement for posterity.
Second, deliberate escalation management—India explicitly avoided striking Pakistani Army installations, air bases, or conventional military assets, communicating a clear message that it is not a war with Pakistan's state, but the eradication of Pakistan's terror infrastructure.
Third, simultaneous information-domain operations: for the first time, India narrated its own strikes in near-real time through official briefings, releasing coordinates, imagery, and a structured strategic communication framework that denied Pakistan the space to define the narrative. Therefore, India has not merely responded to terrorism; it has redefined the rules of engagement for posterity.
Critics of the PRAHAAR approach correctly identify the nuclear dimension as the central strategic risk. Pakistan's nuclear threshold has never been formally declared, and its first-use doctrine, premised on asymmetric conventional weakness, theoretically permits nuclear signalling in response to even limited Indian conventional strikes.
Despite this dilemma, Operation Sindoor demonstrated that India has developed a sophisticated understanding of Pakistan's nuclear red lines. By targeting terror infrastructure rather than military formations, and by instituting a deliberate operational pause after the initial strikes, India signalled both resolve and restraint.
Pakistan’s nuclear bluff, it appears, has diminishing returns against a state that has demonstrated both the capability and the doctrinal willingness to operate within the sub-nuclear space.
The result was significant. Pakistan’s military establishment—confronted with precise, deniable, and internationally defensible strikes against facilities it officially denies hosting—chose de-escalation over escalation. Pakistan’s nuclear bluff, it appears, has diminishing returns against a state that has demonstrated both the capability and the doctrinal willingness to operate within the sub-nuclear space.
Operation Sindoor's kinetic success, however, must not obscure what remains structurally incomplete. The doctrine remains vulnerable to misreading, especially in future crises managed by different political leaderships or military commands. India still lacks a formally published National Counter-Terrorism Compellence Doctrine. Its information warfare architecture, as argued extensively elsewhere, remains fragmented and reactive, unable to sustain the narrative advantages gained in the first 48 hours of Sindoor before adversarial counter-narratives regained ground in international media. The intelligence-to-strike cycle, while demonstrably improved, has not yet been institutionalised at the speed and regularity required to make operations under the PRAHAAR doctrine a routine deterrent rather than an exceptional event.
The intelligence-to-strike cycle, while demonstrably improved, has not yet been institutionalised at the speed and regularity required to make operations under the PRAHAAR doctrine a routine deterrent rather than an exceptional event.
The transformation from reactive restraint to proactive compellence is historic. But a doctrine that exists only in battlefield execution, without doctrinal codification, integration with information warfare, and the institutional permanence required to make it credible across administrations and crises, remains a half-completed revolution.
India's strategic task now is to move PRAHAAR from a posture that has been demonstrated to one that adversaries understand as permanent, predictable, and inescapable. Only then will Pakistan's decades-long exploitation of India's restraint ultimately end.
Soumya Awasthi is a Fellow with the Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Observer Research Foundation.
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Dr Soumya Awasthi is a Fellow, Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Observer Research Foundation. Her work focuses on the intersection of technology and ...
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