SOMETIME ON 7 MAY, Lieutenant General Rajiv Ghai, India’s director general of military operations, called his Pakistani counterpart, Major General Kashif Abdullah. At 1.05 am, India had launched Operation Sindoor—airstrikes targeting what the Narendra Modi government described as “terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir from where terrorist attacks against India have been planned and directed.” Ghai called Abdullah “to communicate our compulsions to strike at the heart of terror … but the request was turned down with an intimation that a severe response was inevitable and in the offing.” Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, Pakistan’s director general of inter-services public relations, confirmed that the two DGMOs had spoken. “We clearly told them that we would only talk once we had responded,” he said in a BBC interview.
In his first public statement about the operation, on 15 May, the minister of external affairs, S Jaishankar, boasted about this conversation. “Even at the start of the operation, we had sent a message to Pakistan saying we are striking at terrorist infrastructure and not the military, and the military has an option to stand out and not interfere,” he said during a media interaction. “They chose not to take that good advice.” Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition, was quick to pounce. “Informing Pakistan at the start of our attack was a crime,” he posted on social media, asking who had authorised the call and how many aircraft India had lost as a result. Jaishankar’s ministry dismissed Rahul’s post as an “utter misrepresentation of facts,” clarifying that “at the start” did not mean “before the commencement.” It did not, however, clarify when the call took place. On 26 May, Jaishankar reportedly told a parliamentary committee that the call was made half an hour after the operation concluded, and after the government had notified the media.
Whenever it took place, the exchange between Ghai and Abdullah, tense and unresolved, would soon be recognised as the first step up an escalation ladder that, a US diplomat told me, brought the world “closer to a nuclear exchange than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.” Few people realise, they said, that, after three days of drone, artillery and missile strikes, the two countries were just three rungs short of the brink when the United States mediated a ceasefire. “We stopped the nuclear conflict,” the US president, Donald Trump, said on 12 May. “It could have been a bad nuclear war. Millions of people could have been killed, so I’m very proud of that.” Despite the pause, India and Pakistan, locked into their own narratives, remain ready to push forward militarily, seemingly unconcerned that the whole of South Asia could end up in the shadow of mushroom clouds.
The strikes were the first salvo in a tale of escalation without resolution, with each side claiming restraint and victory, even as the human, material and strategic costs are still being counted. India and Pakistan avoided a full-scale war, but the confrontation laid bare the tenuousness of nuclear deterrence. Mechanisms meant to contain escalation faltered under pressure. Diplomatic ties swiftly unravelled—envoys were expelled, borders sealed, treaties suspended. A parallel war unfolded online, where disinformation proliferated across both social media and mainstream outlets, deepening public mistrust and inflaming nationalist sentiment.