Defence Minister Arun Jaitley said on Thursday, October 9, that the cost of Pakistan’s “adventurism” would be “unaffordable”. What does that mean in practical terms? A hint was provided by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during an election rally when he said the India-Pakistan border would be fine in a day or two.

After suffering massive targeted damage to its infrastructure through retaliatory Indian mortar shelling, Pakistani shelling dipped on Thursday night (October 9) and through Friday (October 10).

Unlike Border Security Force (BSF) posts, Pakistan Rangers posts are largely embedded within Pakistani villages. The massive BSF retaliatory shelling has displaced over 25,000 Pakistani villagers and caused significant damage to Pakistan Rangers’ infrastructure.

Whether or not the lesson has been absorbed by Rawalpindi GHQ is moot. But there is no doubt Pakistan’s army brass has been taken aback by the ferocity and pinpoint precision of India’s retaliatory shelling. Pakistan’s army has been testing the political will of the Modi government for several months with firing across the LoC. It has now received its most emphatic answer yet.

On a day an Indian (Kailash Satyarthi) and a Pakistani (Malala Yousafzai) won the Nobel peace prize, Pakistan’s army stands doubly shamed: it was death threats by its creation, the Taliban, that drove young Malala out of Pakistan.

Why does Pakistan behave like a rogue nation? It’s important to understand Islamabad’s pathology in order to answer that question.

Nearly 140 million of Pakistan’s 180 million people are Punjabis or Sindhis of Indian descent. They suffer from a permanent identity crisis. To acknowledge their Indian civilisational genealogy would negate the very idea of Pakistan. This is the pathology that drives Pakistan’s visceral hostility towards India.

Prime Minister Modi’s rapidfire meetings with US President Barack Obama, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe have also unnerved Pakistan’s army. Islamabad fears that its make-believe idea of parity with India is being eroded in the new geopolitical balance of power. Hence its renegade efforts to attempt equivalence with India in the eyes of the international community by firing across the border.

The attempt at equivalence also explains the Pakistan defence ministry’s veiled nuclear threat which carries no credibility. The Generals in GHQ Rawalpindi know that even short-range tactical nuclear weapons are not an option in a conflict.

However, a consensus is building among India’s strategic affairs community that New Delhi’s no-first-use nuclear doctrine should be changed to one that mandates massive and immediate retaliation in the event of use of newly developed small battlefield tactical nuclear weapons by the enemy. Pakistan’s nuclear bombast will come to a shuddering halt once such a doctrine is put into place.

The spike in mortar shelling across the border reflects the Pakistani army’s growing anxiety that the window of opportunity to claim a semblance of equivalence with India is rapidly closing.

India’s GDP in real exchange terms is $2 trillion. Pakistan’s GDP is a paltry $0.23 trillion. Within 10 years, assuming an annual growth rate of 7%, India’s GDP will double to $4 trillion. Pakistan’s economy is growing at 2% a year. Over the next 10 years, Pakistan’s GDP, at this growth rate, will thus crawl to $0.28 trillion – barely 7% of India’s $4 trillion.

Once economic disparities widen beyond a certain point, the equivalence Pakistan craves becomes a chimera even for its own citizens.

China’s growing unease with Islamist terrorism among Uighars in its vast, restless Xinjiang province is already forcing Beijing to reassess its infrastructural and covert support to Islamabad. Significantly, President Xi Jinping skipped the customary halt in Islamabad during his India visit amidst security concerns.

Afghanistan, led by new president Ashraf Ghani, is even more antagonistic to Pakistan and favourably inclined toward India than Hamid Karzai’s government was. Last week Kabul signed an agreement with the US to retain 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014. Washington’s continuing military presence in Afghanistan will complicate Islamabad’s strategic depth theory.

The rapidly evolving India-US strategic partnership and the emerging India-US-China triangle – comprising the world’s three largest economies over the next decade – will further marginalise Pakistan.

Meanwhile, global anger against the Islamic State’s brutal advance across Iraq and northern Syria has made terrorists and their sponsors pariahs. All this adds up to a geopolitical nightmare for Islamabad.

Pakistan’s army knows it can never resolve Kashmir in its favour nor does it really want to: the moment hostility with India ceases, the Pakistani army loses its primacy and vice-like grip on 25% of the national budget.

The more Pakistan ratchets up the Kashmir dispute though, the more international attention it hopes to attract. Rawalpindi’s Generals had got used to the UPA government’s do-nothing policy. They have now tested the new government’s will and are learning their lesson the hard way.

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