How has Operation Sindoor impacted our nation? In terms of self-reliance, foreign policy, and the way forward for our economy. In this free-wheeling conversation, we are joined by Iqbal Malhotra, author of best-selling books specializing in Pakistan affairs, such as “Kashmir, Untold Story: Declassified” and “The Bomb, the Bank, the Mullah and the Poppy: A Tale of Deception”. The conversation was conducted with Navin Berry, editor.
Navin: I’m sure to all our understanding, at least in my lifetime, I don’t have memories of the Bangladesh war or the liberation war. They must have been quite bad. But I am sure Operation Blue Star had its own ramifications, very major ones. But for much of the younger generation and those who are studying politics and geopolitics recently, a lot of turnarounds. How do you see that four-day retaliation Operation Sindoor that we launched, what is your take?
Iqbal: Let’s look at the kind of impact it has had. Firstly, it has exposed the abysmal failure of our foreign policy. We don’t have a single friend in the world other than our single all-weather friend Israel. No other friend.
In fact, the Honorable Foreign Minister stated that the Taliban has supported us, but two-three days after he spoke, there was a photograph of the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi with the Taliban foreign minister and the Pakistani foreign minister. And he had brokered a peace between them. The reason why they were at loggerheads was that the Taliban produces the source of Pakistan’s off the books revenue which comes from narcotics. And they had a fight over the spoils of the narcotic revenue. So, the Pakistanis presumably pay them a miniscule amount of money.
In 2019, the London School of Economics did a study in the Bakwa market in Afghanistan which is the biggest wholesale market in the world for crystal meth. You could buy it there for $320,000 a metric ton. And in 2019 the street price in North America was $40 million a metric ton. That’s the difference – over 100 times – and these guys are crying that we also want roads, we also want malls, we also want highways and expensive cars.
The Chinese have brokered the peace so that leaves us with one friend. Now the question is that why have we only got one friend in the world who is willing to stand up with us? None of our QUAD partners, nor erstwhile members of the non-aligned movement, or our traditional friends, like Russia. Nobody has been willing to stand up with us and be counted as a supporter of India and endorse the action that we took on the night of 6th / 7th May to destroy and degrade the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan.
Now of course it doesn’t make any difference because after one week, the terrorists will come back. You can kill 10,000 terrorists and it won’t make a difference to them.
Navin: So when the government of India says Operation Sindoor is ongoing, it’s not been given up, are they saying that any further attacks, we will keep giving them back the same medicine?
Iqbal: See the point is whether you will be able to give back the same medicine or not. That’s a debatable point. But let us first go through the takeaways. The first takeaway I said is the failure of foreign policy. The second takeaway is the internationalization of Kashmir. After the Simla Agreement of 1972, Kashmir was a bilateral issue. And after 53 years it has now become an international issue. It has been very swiftly and deftly stolen away from the hands of the government of India and thrown open to the international community. That means everybody and his uncle will say that I am going to mediate between India and Pakistan. And any action on our part will invite opprobrium from the outside world because they will frown upon it since nobody has endorsed our action.
The third factor is the re-hyphenation of India-Pakistan. In 2005 when George Bush came to India and he and Manmohan Singh signed the Indo-US nuclear deal which was then ratified in 2008 by the US Congress and it later on, became law. The fact is that the hyphenation was with one fell swoop removed. Because the Americans stood behind us.
Now I don’t know if you noticed but the RBI came out with figures about a week ago that showed that FDI in India in the financial year 2025 has fallen by 96% over the financial year 2024. This is net FDI. Now the issue is that this is such a big fall. It is even less than the FDI that we had before the 1991 reforms. Why has this happened and the mere fact that the perception of India as being a safe haven for the manufacturing industries that were to be shifted from China to India – to deleverage China. Companies like Apple, Dell, Google, Alphabet were preparing to move to India. Who on earth will want to invest in India in FDI, when Operation Sindoor is still in progress and India is a potential war zone.
Now, the fifth takeaway, is the US disapproval of India’s reactive politics. Now a great state when it has to retaliate will retaliate covertly. They will retaliate by using non-state actors. I agree with one thing that the government has done.
What the government has done is what they have said and I have been saying this for a long time. That there are no non-state actors in Pakistan. These are the vanguard of the Pakistan state. The Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Jaish-e-Mohammad, the Tariq-e-Taliban, all of these actors are all Pakistani state actors. They are all controlled by the Inter-Services Intelligence and they have used this terminology to actually hide the fact that all the terrorist attacks on India are penetrative attacks to see what kind of reaction will emanate and whether India is a soft state, or whether India is a hard state. And therefore, we should already have had a calculus in place which should have retaliated in a more sophisticated manner with greater damage to Pakistan’s assets and credibility.
Why should we announce that we are only going to hit your camps? You announce that you are only going to hit the terrorist targets so that we leave the option to climb down. But why will they climb down? Because they well know and they knew that your announcement to say we’re only hitting terrorist targets if they didn’t retaliate, you would make political capital out of it, in the Bihar elections, in the UP elections. And you would say, look, we have finished the Pakistanis. And you would internally, in every forum, have humiliated them and you would have externally also passed the message that they didn’t have the spine to retaliate and they read the fact that your foreign policy has been structured to actually cater to not India’s external relationships and its external equation in the world but to domestic politics.
The deification of this foreign policy has been completely shattered. And my guess is why Trump is repeating this thing over and over again that I brokered the ceasefire, because it’s a US disapproval of India’s reactive politics.
Navin: So, the US disapproval is for what exactly?
Iqbal: For rocking the boat. Because you see Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, he made an announcement in the first half of April that Apple is shifting the manufacture of iPhones for the US market entirely to India from China. And the Chinese didn’t like that. And they were adopting delaying tactics to delay dispatching the machines that Apple had ordered that make the iPhones. Now they don’t want to lose a few billion dollars worth of Apple orders and Apple is a company that is at the cutting edge of technology. So, from the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 16, they are constantly innovating, they are inventing and there is a learning curve that you travel down and there is a tremendous development and enhancement of skill sets in the workforce. Which is an invaluable learning which the Chinese have been getting and now they will be cut off.
So, the question is that till date nobody has looked into the fact that the four terrorists were using BeiDou satellite phones. The terrorists who massacred the 22 civilians, they were using the BeiDou.
There was a photograph of one of them and there was a comment. So, no attempt was made to investigate that angle. No attempt was made to check the mobile towers and see what other local networks these guys were using. They are still not being apprehended. What was the motive behind the attack? Every action has a motive. What was the motive behind the attack and did the Pakistanis achieve their motive or not? Or were the Pakistanis simply a facilitator and was the Chinese motive to draw India into a conflict? To paint India in the perception of US investors as a war zone where there will be no relocation of manufacturing from China.
Navin: And have we fallen into their trap?
Iqbal: We have. They have succeeded. What is Trump saying every time? He is humiliating us.
Navin: So, what is Trump’s game in not making all this shift to India?
Iqbal: Trump’s game is very simple. Trump, I don’t know the English equivalent of the word Pappu. Pappu? I consider Trump to be a Pappu. That means he’s a patsy. His son and Mr. there’s a chap called Breach, Mr. Breach Candy or something. These guys landed up. They were seduced by the ISI to set up a cryptocurrency exchange. Now, why does the ISI and why did these guys meet General Munir? Now he’s FIELD MARSHAL. And why were they feted?
I saw a video of these fellows wearing kurta pajamas, and they were all in a mujra and they were all dancing away. They were doing this because the financial action task force set up by the United Nations has been sanctioning all these narcotics players. Now we know that the ISI that runs the narco operations has a global alliance with the Mexican Sinaloa cartel. Because they are proponents of a philosophy called deviant globalization which is the consolidation of criminal networks across continents and supply chains. So now they had a problem because they weren’t able to absorb and reroute and launder the money that they were earning from the sales of heroin and crystal meth in the continental United States, North America and in Western Europe. So, they wanted a good secure crypto exchange. And Trump Jr has got them that crypto exchange. Now, the irony is that the market for the products of Afghanistan, heroin and crystal meth which are consolidated by the ISI. The main market is the US. So, the US is getting more addicts and those addicts are paying US dollars to the Pakistanis. And the crypto exchange is going to launder the money. So, there is a double whammy against the Americans.
Navin: The plot thickens. And where does it leave us?
Iqbal: It leaves us between the devil and the deep blue sea. There is a big storm coming, there is no harbor available to park your boat. Where are you going to go? Are you going to throw an anchor and hope the storm bypasses you? Or are you going to try and sail out of the storm.
My number 6 take away is that Sino-Pak is one military entity across the line of control and the line of actual control. I have been saying this for the last two years. Nobody believed me. And I must reveal to you today that when Pakistan signed an agreement to get access to the Chinese BeiDou satellite network of 46 satellites low earth orbit, medium earth orbit and geostationary and for military applications. That is the time when the Government of India should have woken up. This is the summer of 2018. In 2019 you undertake article 370 and you make fiery speeches in parliament saying that we will also take back Aksai Chin. That got the Chinese worried because the Chinese have invested 30 billion dollars in building two dams on the Indus River near Gilgit which are generating 40 gigawatt of electricity. The Bungi Dam and the Daimar-Bhasha dam – they are clouded in secrecy. I revealed the facts about these dams in my book on Kashmir in 2019. Since then, the internet has gone dry of any information on what progress has taken place. And the Chinese want to tap the impact of global warming on glacial melt. There is an increasing flow of water in the summer months when the glaciers melt in that region. And for them it would be horrendous if India was to stake a claim to Aksai Chin and to take Aksai Chin back or take the northern areas back which mistakenly people in India call Azad Kashmir. Azad Kashmir is just a strip on the western part near Jammu and Poonch. The northern area is the main thing. How will you take it back? They are 100% Muslim population. You want to take in more Pakistani Muslims into India?
Secondly, they have resettled Punjabis over there. The local ethnic fellows have vanished. So, how can you take that land back and the Chinese, because the C-PEC assets flow from there into Xinjiang, they have got a division of troops there – PLA troops. Do you know that they have set up 11 oil refineries in Xinjiang to process the crude that’s coming from Gwadar to Xinjiang into downstream products like naphtha, aviation turbine fuel, kerosene oil, petrol, diesel, you name it.
They have got out of that Malacca Strait vulnerability. All their shipping oil is not going to Malacca Strait. It’s coming straight to Gwadar and being pumped up. They need electricity for it. The Daimer-Bhasha and the Bungi Dam is going to generate electricity for it. And they are going to pump the oil and gas which they are doing through the grid into the rest of northern China, which is deficient in electricity.
So, when the stakes are so high, how can you be so naive and say, we will do this and we will do that? It is a naive statement. And as a serious mature government we should not treat this matter as so trivial and make it into a jingoistic matter.
Now in 2018, when these fellows signed that deal with the Pakistanis, then in 2019 Xi Jinping and he had a meeting with the Prime Minister and the Hindu newspaper broke this story, that there was a kind of a guess, that he wanted a settlement on Kashmir. And the Prime Minister had just abolished 370, to resounding applause all over the country. After he has abolished 370 and he has staked a claim politically in the Lok Sabha to Aksai Chin and northern areas and Azad Kashmir, how can there be a settlement?
So, that’s when Mr. Xi Jinping stabbed the Prime Minister in the back and sent his forces in February 2020 that culminated in the Galwan crisis. The Chinese knew that on a tactical level they cannot defeat the Indian army because the Indian army is tactically superior to the PLA. And the PLA has a problem that China is a one child family. And nobody wants to sacrifice his life to fight Indians because if they die then the whole family goes with it. So, they prefer to stay back and fight. So, they learnt that. So, they have spent the last 6 years devising electronic warfare which they have disseminated to the Pakistanis and that’s why the whole world has seen no dog fights in the air.
But aircraft like manned drones, 100-150 kilometers behind the border, firing missiles like Star Wars. So that’s one military entity. So, when you take on Pakistan you take on China. When you take on China you take on Pakistan. Don’t think that if you take on China in a future conflict the Pakistanis will not, they’ll be itching to join in.
Navin: So where does this leave us?
Iqbal: I told you earlier that all non-state actors are state actors. And all non-state actors are state actors and there is no doubt about that fact, so this is another take away. Now from our end, one very significant takeaway, is the fact that our Air Force, despite the shortcomings, we have been able to successfully undertake coercive precision airstrikes. We’ve knocked off airfields, we’ve knocked off aircraft, we’ve knocked off terrorist hideouts.
And these are coercive and they are precision airstrikes. And they have been reluctantly applauded by the rest of the world.
But in this entire process, our one learning, you must realize is that an aircraft when it goes into battle, a fighter aircraft is only one part of a five-man component. Which is a satellite, the AWACS, the airborne warning and control systems and then the satellite, the AWACS, the ground radar, the fighter aircraft and the beyond visual range missiles. Now all these five assets talk through one communication network, one telephone line. The Pakistanis have that data link which is the Chinese one that they have with Chinese help that they have developed.
And that one data link links all their assets together including their F-16s with the Chinese data link. Now we have four data links working. We have one which is geared towards our Russian aircraft, French aircraft, Israeli electronics and we are now developing a fifth one for Raffale. But the fact is what we need is one data link that links our AWACS, our satellites, our radar, ground radar, our fighter aircraft whether they be Raffale, Sukhois, Mirages, MiG-29’s, Jaguars and our missiles.
But having said that, the end result, of what we were able to achieve, through our relentless and precision strikes, these guys are now regrouping to try and analyze where they went wrong. And six months down the road, they will come back because they want to keep India and its perception as a war zone, not a secure place to make investments.
Navin: So, are you going to say that this was an economic fight actually?
Iqbal: Yes, very much so. So somewhere where we are tom-tomming ourselves as the world’s fastest growing economy and all the rest of it. We have been taken down. So you have to distinguish and disassociate the national benefit from the political benefit. You can tom-tom your achievements at the time of campaigning, election or canvassing. But if you are going to make it a habit all through the year then it’s going to have repercussions like this.
Navin: But if the Chinese are going to regroup and relearn from their experiences. So will we.
Iqbal: But you see our decision-making system is very slow. This tender for the Rafale was first floated in 2006 and it was decided in 2012, six years later. And we were to have 126 Rafale. We only have 36. For three years, the INS Vikrant, the new one has been without fighter aircraft. It shares Vikramaditya’s aircraft. Now the first Rafale will come in 2030. Why didn’t the government pick up American fighters and have them ready?
Navin: So, where does it leave our relations with China and South Asia as a whole? Bangladesh is simmering.
Iqbal: Look, as far as China is concerned, we are in a state of pre-war with them. They have voluntarily declared that they are behind Pakistan and we are now fighting a single domain war with replenishments from the Chinese. They are behind the Pakistanis. They have a symbiotic association and they have pledged to defend the sovereignty of Pakistan. So, China is now in the open, our enemy. Yet, we are dependent on it because for 33 years from 1988 to 2019 we hugged them and nothing happened because they have still remained our adversary.
And it is high time we called a spade a spade. It’s high time we sought to diversify our supply lines. We should have done that in 2020. By now we would have been free of the Chinese. Five years it takes to develop alternate supply chains and re-industrialize your country. We have become a nation of growing traders. Industry has been wiped out. We have been de-industrialized. We need to get out of this mess.
Navin: But the government has been making very strenuous efforts to Make in India.
Iqbal: Make in India is the same thing as the Congress party’s 1955 Avadhi resolution which said that we are working towards a self-reliant India. What is the English translation of Atmanirbhar? Self-reliant? Right? So, self-reliance and Atmanirbhar are the same thing. It’s the same Nehruvian policy which has got a new name here in Atmanirbhar Bharat. But you didn’t give India a chance to become self-reliant. 30 years ago, 80% of the raw materials for your pharmaceutical exports were made in India. Now 80% is being imported.
Navin: But why don’t we also blame our industry?
Iqbal: See if you open the door for them and say you exercise your own judgment. You can rectify the scene now. You can still rectify it but you have to have the political will to do so.
Navin: Why shouldn’t the big industrialists, instead of thinking of getting into retail should go into manufacturing and leave the retail, to the smaller businesses?
Iqbal: I think they should do it in the national interest. And leave the retail and these soft sectors to small entrepreneurs. Now there are 2 more takeaways. By swinging this cryptocurrency deal with America and being instrumental in changing the president of America’s attitude towards India. The deep state is still pro-India. If you look at Vice President JD Vance, he is a member of the deep state. He is not a Trump-ite. You got Secretary of State Marco Rubio, deep state, not a Trump-ite. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, member of deep state, not a Trump-ite.
But Trump we have not been able to crack. And he has now become a spokesperson for the Pakistanis. And by swinging this deal of cryptocurrency and getting Trump to criticize and humiliate India publicly, repeatedly. It’s an intolerable situation that that man should humiliate us. But that’s what he’s doing. And what is the reward for this Munir. Field Marshal. Do you know Field Marshals never retires. He will never retire. He will remain on active duty and he is the son of a cleric. And he is an India hater and you heard his speech before Pahalgam when he spoke to the Pakistani NRIs.
Navin: So where are we now?
Iqbal: We are lost in the woods.
But the fact is that we have not handled this maturely, mainstream media of India forced the government’s hand to retaliate. If the Godi media hadn’t been there, I think the government of India would have reacted more maturely. But they ratcheted up the escalation ladder so fast and compelled the government for domestic political reasons to attack.
Navin: What’s the way forward?
Iqbal: I don’t know the way forward. There are many brilliant minds in the government. They should be figuring out what’s the way forward.
Navin: Where is the hope going to emerge for India?
Iqbal: The hope will emerge for India once Mr. Trump leaves the scene. Because he is an irrational and unpredictable variable in this game. He has not only taken his vendetta against India to a bizarre level. He has rung up Tim Cook and said don’t make your phones in India and I will have a 25% tariff on Tim Cook’s Apple phones, the fact is that even with the 25% tariff, they will still make a profit of $430 per phone. And if they were to make it in the US, their profit would come down to $60. So, the point is that this man is going on a crusade against you.
Navin: But what do you think is the primary reason for the vendetta against India? I thought he and Modi were very great friends.
Iqbal: I have no guess on this. But it’s obviously something which has hurt him, hurt his ego and caused him a certain amount of humiliation which has knowingly or unknowingly been done by the government of India. So, it is very difficult to speculate because you can speculate but it may not be the right reason. It may be something trivial. It may be something very serious. But something has piqued him and unless that is overturned.
Navin: There is a school of thought which says that in his world view India doesn’t matter.
Iqbal: Sir, due respects. Trump is not a serious player in international politics. He just happened to have won…..he is an unpredictable person, he doesn’t know what he is going to do next. I think we need to invest time to figure out how we can bring Trump back on track.