The cat is now definitively out of the bag: during the recent Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Anil Chauhan, the Chief of the Defence Staff of the Indian Armed Forces, provided a telling quote in an interview with broadcaster Bloomberg TV: “What is important is… not the jet being down[ed], but why [it was downed]”. In the same interview, the general confirmed that India had very likely experienced military losses in its short but severe skirmish with Pakistan in mid-May, something the government in New Delhi had sought to avoid acknowledging. There is sufficient evidence to suggest that Pakistan has destroyed at least one of India’s extremely expensive Dassault Rafale jets, imported from France at 200 million euro apiece.
Britta Petersen heads the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s New Delhi Office.
According to Chauhan, “the good part is that we are able to understand the tactical mistake [that] we made, remedy it, rectify it, and then implement it again after two days, and [were thus able to] fly all our jets again”. Following a terrorist attack in Kashmir, a contested region claimed by both India and Pakistan, in May the Indian government commenced Operation Sindoor, in which the Indian Army attacked a number of positions in Pakistan occupied by the terrorist organizations Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Tayba (LeT). Pakistan then retaliated. The two-day battle that ensued, conducted primarily via drone warfare, resulted in the death of around 200 people, including, according to Indian estimates, around 100 terrorists in Pakistan.
This exchange of hostilities between two neighbouring enemy states (both of whom have nuclear capabilities) is not only a real-time snapshot of how modern, digitally controlled warfare is carried out — it also constituted a shift in the strategic balance on the subcontinent, to China’s benefit. It made clear the extent to which China had become responsible for equipping and guiding Pakistani military strategy. This is not only a development that should worry India, but also one that makes a more fully fledged conventional war in the region more likely. As Pakistani military expert Ayesha Siddiqa explains, “proxy wars and terror are now the new normal, as are counterattacks”. It is also worth mentioning something that is often overlooked: this region has been engaged in substantial conventional armament efforts for quite some time.
Large-Scale Armament
In 2025, India’s military budget has grown by approximately 9.53 percent, while China’s has increased by 7.2 percent, according to its finance ministry. According to Shashi Tharoor, the Chairman of the Indian Parliament’s Committee on External Affairs, 82 percent of Pakistan’s weapons come from China. As far back as 2020, the independent Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) assessed that over three-quarters (77 percent) of Pakistan’s armaments were sourced from China.
Consequently, India and China differ in terms of their interests. For some time now, India has felt that it has had to take increasingly forceful measures against terrorist organizations that carry out attacks on Indian territory with the protection of the Pakistani military. “From the Pakistani perspective, it was India who fired the first shot. Pakistan then warded it off. The government is satisfied”, Siddiqa says. Pakistan claims sovereignty over Kashmir, a Muslim-majority territory that has been a constant source of conflict since independence in 1947. Given that Pakistan has no hope of military victory over a vastly larger and now economically much more powerful India, it has engaged in a “war of a thousand cuts” in its attempts to take control of Kashmir.
In Pakistan, a country riven by multiple economic crises and in which elected governments are regularly threatened with removal by the army, the issue is an effective tool for the military to fuel nationalist sentiments and demonstrate its importance to the people. But this wave of nationalism across the subcontinent, further stoked by Indian media during Operation Sindoor, is also useful for India’s prime minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist government. In 2019, it revoked the special status previously granted to the region of Jammu and Kashmir and made the Buddhist-majority region of Ladakh into its own union territory, a move that was met with displeasure in Kashmir. The promise that Jammu and Kashmir, which both before and since have been administered by the government in New Delhi, would be restored their rights as a state, remains unfulfilled.
Modi’s Kashmir policy is a thorn in the side of China’s government, given that it bolsters India’s territorial claim to the region of Aksai Chin, a part of Kashmir administered by China, as well as the Shaksgam Valley, located in Kashmir, which Pakistan ceded to China in 1963. Despite all this, China continues to pursue a long-term geopolitical strategy that extends well beyond this border conflict. It wishes to establish itself as the dominant power in Asia and to reduce the influence of both India and the United States in the region.
China vs. India
“China would like India to remain locked in regional conflicts that would bleed its financial and military resources”, says journalist Sandipan Sharma of India Today magazine. He cites security expert Tara Kartha of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, a think-tank based in New Delhi, as saying that “India needs to work out who its true enemy is. This enemy wants India to wage war.” Anushka Saxena, research analyst at the Takshashila Institution in Bengaluru, also says that, “from a Chinese perspective, a local conflict would not be an unfavourable outcome”. The potential risk would lie in the danger of such a conflict escalating into an all-consuming war that would negatively impact China’s economic and security interests.
In light of this, Liu Zongyi, director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies (SIIS), believes that de-escalation is necessary. He argues that, if it should proceed with the conflict with Pakistan, India could end up supporting separatist and extremist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which would threaten Pakistan’s internal security and disrupt the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The CPEC is a core component of China’s “New Silk Road” or Belt and Road Initiative, which is aimed at shoring up China’s global influence through investments in critical infrastructure projects. Although there is no concrete evidence that India is providing support to extremist groups, China has bigger plans regardless.
As Operation Sindoor came to an end, Prime Minister Modi emphasized that the ceasefire merely constituted a pause in fighting, and that any future terrorist attacks would result in a military response. The situation, therefore, remains as tense as ever.
The brief conflict in May was the first time that Pakistan used large numbers of Chinese weapons, including the Chengdu J-10 fighter jet, the JF-17 fighter jet, which was developed in cooperation with Pakistan, the HQ9P rocket defence system, PL-15 rockets, and hundreds of drones. “Besides the use of Chinese military technology, Chinese air defence, and satellite-based ISR support in response to Operation Sindoor, the DG ISPR briefings highlight Pakistan’s efforts to emulate the multi-domain warfare of the Chinese military”, says Harsh Pant, Professor of International Relations at King’s College in London.
China introduced the concept of multi-domain warfare in order to strengthen its conventional capabilities by integrating information technology, cybersecurity, and space-related efforts for war purposes. Through joint military manoeuvres with Pakistan and cooperative efforts in several other areas, the aim is to develop an interoperable capacity that would allow for joint military operations to be conducted. The goal is for coordinated procedures and mutual dependencies to become so deeply embedded that they ultimately become interchangeable.
At the same time, the appearance of Chinese survey vessel Da Yang Yi Hao in the Indian Ocean in May (amid widespread suspicion that it was engaging in espionage under cover of “research”) indicates that China has a more comprehensive strategy. Such actions give India even more reason to fear that a two-front war is on the cards. As Pant warns, “China-Pakistan military cooperation has materialized far beyond the logic of geopolitical signalling in the post-Cold War era. The threat is imminent, grave, and real-time for India”.
A Fight for Dominance in the Indian Ocean
The Indian Ocean region is an incredibly important maritime corridor that connects Asia, Africa, and Europe. India perceives China’s growing influence in the Indian Ocean — the result of China’s strategic initiatives such as the New Silk Road, military modernization, and investment in infrastructure — as a threat. This has long been described as China’s “string of pearls” strategy, in reference to the network of military and commercial interests and relationships that stretch from mainland China all the way to Port Sudan on the Horn of Africa.
These maritime routes pass through a number of historic bottlenecks such as the Strait of Mandeb, the Strait of Malacca, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Strait of Lombok, as well as other strategic maritime centres in Somalia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and the Maldives. Many Indian commentators have argued that this strategy, when considered alongside the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor and other aspects of the New Silk Road, represents a threat to national security, as it amounts to an encirclement of India, endangering its trade prospects, and in the worst case threatening its territorial integrity. India also fears that China might construct a naval base in the Pakistani port city of Gwadar, which is part of the CPEC. Doing so would enable Beijing to conduct military excursions in the Indian Ocean.
As a result, India is investing more extensively in its military. The country already has the fourth-largest military budget in the world after the United States, China, and Russia. The next conflict seems like it could erupt at any moment. As Operation Sindoor came to an end, Prime Minister Modi emphasized that the ceasefire merely constituted a pause in fighting, and that any future terrorist attacks would result in a military response. The situation, therefore, remains as tense as ever.
This article first appeared in nd.Aktuell in collaboration with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Translated for Gegensatz Translation Collective by Ryan Eyers and Joe Keady.