India’s Pakistan problem : operation Parakram revisited

• Main Author: Basrur, Rajesh
• Other Authors: S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Social sciences::Political science; Operation Parakram; Terrorists
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/155456
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Why did India launch and later withdraw from the exercise in coercive diplomacy–Operation Parakram–against Pakistan in response to the attack on India’s Parliament by terrorists based in that country? This paper marshals factors operating at the systemic, state and individual/small-group levels of analysis to show that, despite the paucity of evidence on decisionmaking of the kind required for an effective foreign policy analysis (FPA) approach, a reasonably clear picture can be developed. It combines deductive logic relating to state behavior in a nuclearized environment with the limited empirical evidence available to show that India never intended to go to war and that the operation was essentially a bluff that, having eventually reached a dead end, was called off.