The death toll from one of the deadliest strikes on Indian security forces in Kashmir history has continued to rise, and so too the pressure on Narendra Modi’s government to retaliate.

India has directly accused Pakistan of involvement in the raid on Sunday by four militants on an army base in Uri, near the “line of control” that divides Kashmir between the two nuclear powers. At least 18 soldiers were killed, most in fires set by the militants, which consumed their tents and temporary shelters as they slept.

Modi was elected prime minister in 2014 promising to toughen India’s stance against Pakistan and its alleged sponsorship of militancy in the Kashmir valley. Ram Madhav, the general secretary of the ruling Bharatiya Janata party, struck the same aggressive tone on Sunday, saying: “For one tooth, the complete jaw.”

Restraint – of the kind India showed after the November 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, or after the assault by militants on an air base in Punjab in January – would “betray inefficiency and incompetence”, the leader of Modi’s party said.

But analysts say that tough rhetoric aside, the range of possible Indian responses to this latest attack are limited.

One reason is structural. Unlike Pakistan, India’s government is civilian-led and senior military officials “are not in the security planning loop at all”, says Ajai Shukla, a former Indian army colonel, now defence analyst.

The result is little military involvement in national security contingency planning, he says, and less capacity to escalate against Pakistan without igniting a full-blown war.

“To escalate militarily, one has to do a lot of advance planning, capability assessments, diplomatic strategy. Escalation dynamics have to be thought through. The entire political and military game has to be worked out in advance – none of this has been done yet,” Shukla says.

Even if swift military retaliation were possible, both sides are keenly aware of the limits of armed coercion, particularly since Pakistan acquired nuclear capacity in 1998.

“The government actually has a very narrow band of options, and even those are not without a certain amount of risk,” says Dhruva Jaishankar, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution in New Delhi.

Covert action, such as cross-border raids on militant camps or training centres, could send a signal to Pakistan but would do little to cool public anger at home.

India could also shell Pakistan positions across the disputed Kashmir border – as both sides have done in past years – at the risk of drawing retaliatory shelling and further weakening a 2003 ceasefire agreement.

Airstrikes against Pakistani army posts or Jaish-e-Mohammad facilities are also a possibility, though would come with significant risk of casualties from Pakistan’s air-defence system, geared towards that very kind of Indian attack.

“All options come with latent risks and latent costs, but the short answer is there are no good options, and if there were, they would have been explored already,” Jaishankar says.

Yet if the Indian government can ride out the public anger, a restrained, diplomatic response might be its wisest route.

Myra MacDonald, a South Asia specialist and author of an upcoming book about relations between India and Pakistan, says the statements issued on Sunday by the US and UK were telling. Both governments unequivocally condemned the attack but, unlike past years, did not twin their condemnation with appeals for a return to dialogue on the Kashmir issue.

“Both countries realise there is very little hope of Pakistan giving up its support for militant groups,” she says.

That, combined with India’s growing economic clout, has seen greater Indian-US military cooperation than ever before, and Pakistan grow increasingly isolated from its neighbours and the international community. Stopping attacks by militants from Pakistan might be a losing battle, but India is winning the wider diplomatic war.

“The US and the UK have seen so much double-dealing by Pakistan in Afghanistan that they are now far more sympathetic to the Indian position,” MacDonald says.

An earlier version of this story said 20 soldiers died in the attack but the Indian government has since denied those reports, putting the figure at 18.

