When children grow up hearing that their neighbors and minority peers are existential threats, empathy dies early.

For generations, Pakistan’s school system has done far more than teach kids how to read, write, and pass exams. It operates as a quiet, methodical machinery—one that molds exactly how young Pakistanis view religion, nationalism, history, and, most crucially, those they are taught to see as “the enemy.”

Ideally, a classroom should spark curiosity. It should teach a child how to question the world. But in Pakistan, critics point out a grim reality: the public-school system serves as an assembly line for ideological conformity rather than independent inquiry.

This is not a new debate, but it just took on a sharp, urgent relevance. A major 2025 report by IMPACT-se titled Review of Pakistani Textbooks—authored by Ratnadeep Chakraborty and edited by Madeleine Ferris—blew the lid off the current curriculum.

After investigating 86 government-approved textbooks across Punjab, Sindh, and the Federal Directorate, the study exposed a deeply unsettling reality. Historical distortion, religious exclusivism, and aggressive nationalistic messaging are systematically baked into everything from social studies and Urdu to geography and Islamic education.

The report highlights how India is routinely painted as an existential, permanent threat. Meanwhile, discussions regarding Jews and Israel rely heavily on hostile stereotypes, classical antisemitic tropes, and highly selective historical narratives.

Furthermore, the concept of jihad is frequently framed not as an internal spiritual struggle, but as a noble, militaristic obligation, with virtually zero discussion about the human cost of violence or extremism.

A National Identity Built on Exclusion

This is no sudden shift. It is the continuation of a dark pattern researchers have warned about for decades. Way back in 2003, a seminal study titled The Subtle Subversion revealed that Pakistan’s textbooks were actively promoting intolerance and glorifying militarism.

More recently, a report by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), Quality Education vs. Fanatic Literacy, reached the exact same conclusion: discriminatory narratives and exclusionary ideas about citizenship are deeply embedded in both provincial and federal classrooms.

At its core, this is a symptom of Pakistan’s ongoing identity crisis. Ever since the partition of British India in 1947, successive governments have tried to manufacture national unity through religion-centered nationalism. This project peaked in the 1980s under the military dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq, whose sweeping “Islamization” policies hardwired religious ideology into state institutions—especially the schools.

The fallout of those choices is what children are breathing in today. According to the IMPACT-se report, multiple textbooks explicitly teach that Pakistan was created “exclusively as a free state for Muslims.” While wrapped in the flag of patriotism, this language effectively strips religious minorities of their stakes in the country. It implies that Hindus, Christians, and Shia communities exist completely outside the central national story.

The textbooks pay lip service to equality, but the daily reality for these minority communities is one of severe social and institutional marginalization—a truth completely erased from the classroom.

The portrayal of history is equally black-and-white. Complex historical events are flattened into a simplistic narrative: Muslims are always the victims; Hindus are always the aggressors. The “Two-Nation Theory”—the political idea that Indian Muslims required a separate homeland—is taught as infallible divine truth rather than a debated historical theory.

When children grow up hearing that their neighbors and minority peers are existential threats, empathy dies early. Education built on fear yields an adult population ruled by suspicion.

The Slow Death of Independent Thought

The crisis isn’t just what these kids are learning; it’s how they are being taught. Pakistan’s education system rewards rote memorization over actual analysis. Students get top marks for parroting official state talking points, not for questioning them.

The CSJ report highlights an even more aggressive trend: religious material has spilled far beyond the boundaries of Islamic Studies (Islamiyat). It now shows up in science, social studies, and language textbooks.

Consequently, non-Muslim students are routinely subjected to compulsory Islamic teachings inside mainstream classes. This directly violates Articles 20 and 22 of Pakistan’s own Constitution, which explicitly guarantee religious freedom and protection from forced religious instruction.

The Structural Breakdown

Pakistan is already battling a massive educational emergency. Millions of children are entirely out of school, literacy rates are stagnant, and public spending on education hovers around a dismal two percent of GDP. But the deeper tragedy is what happens to the children who do make it inside the classroom.

When you feed students a diet of simplified history, rigid dogmas, and state-sanctioned hostility, you produce adults completely unequipped for democratic participation or informed citizenship. A society that outlaws questions eventually hollows out its own intellect.

Is Real Reform Possible?

There have been piecemeal attempts to fix the system. The CSJ notes that some provincial boards have tried to introduce more inclusive content. Sindh’s curriculum, for example, features a bit more material on diversity and peaceful coexistence. Reformers continuously advocate for human rights education, peace studies, and comparative religion to be taught from an early age.

Yet, these efforts are drop-in-the-bucket fixes against a massive, rigid structure. The state still treats national identity as something incredibly fragile—something that will collapse if it isn’t guarded by strict ideological conformity.

The profound irony is that this fearful approach completely betrays the vision of Pakistan’s own founder. In his famous speech on August 11, 1947, Muhammad Ali Jinnah explicitly declared that religion should have nothing to do with the business of the state, and that all citizens would be equal. Today, that speech is rolled out for ceremonial occasions but kept far away from civic textbooks. Instead, patriotism remains fiercely shackled to religious conformity.

Ultimately, Pakistan’s textbook crisis is a mirror of the society it is choosing to build. Schools can either raise a generation capable of critical thought, empathy, and healthy debate, or they can continue to manufacture individuals trained only to repeat inherited grievances. A curriculum rooted in fear might enforce short-term obedience, but it will never build intellectual confidence or regional stability.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

In its efforts to woo foreign investment and overhaul its image, Pakistan is trying to sell the natural resources of Balochistan to the world.

The Government of Pakistan has imposed a series of restrictions to maintain law and order in Balochistan, the largest and most troubled province of the country. Issuing a notice on 17 May, the Government imposed Section 144 across Balochistan for a period of one month. The notification put restrictions on all public gatherings, including rallies and processions involving five or more people. Covering of faces in public places is also prohibited.

Imposition of restrictive measures in Balochistan vindicates the failure of the Pakistan Military, Federal Government, and the Provincial Government led by Chief Minister Sarfaraz Bugti to bring the armed struggle of Baloch rebels under control. Pakistan security forces have been incurring huge losses at the hands Baloch militants. On 12 May, in the latest case, a search operation team came under heavy fire from the Baloch militants in Barkhan District, killing five Pakistani military personnel.  

Pakistan’s Balochistan problem has lingered for eight decades. The ruling elite has failed to come up with a mutually acceptable solution to the problem that has led to four Baloch insurgencies in the short history of the country: 1948, 1958, 1973, and 2003. The latest insurgency intensified with the alleged rape of a Baloch doctor, from the Bugti Tribe, by a colonel of the Pakistan Army in 2005. 

The rape took place at Sui, Dera Bugti, in the heavily guarded government-owned natural gas plant. The colonel was never held accountable; instead, the doctor was held captive and threatened to stay silent. This not only provoked the Baloch but also united various tribes to seek justice for a Baloch woman, intensifying attacks on the Pakistan Army. In response, instead of addressing the heinous crime and punishing the colonel, Pakistani forces killed the prominent Bugti tribe leader, Akbar Bugti, in August 2006. 

Naturally, the killing stoked up anger, strengthening Baloch nationalist sentiment and escalating the conflict. Since then, the situation has been compounded further with huge human rights violations, with the adoption of the brutal “kill and dump” policy of the Pakistani State. 

In 2011, a senior vice-president of the Balochistan High Court Bar Association (BHCBA) had warned that if the “kill and dump” policy was not stopped, the situation in Balochistan could go out of control. Over 15 years later, the situation in Balochistan has only worsened further. Even the people who raise their voice on human rights violations of the Baloch people, like the leadership of Baloch Yekjehti Committee (BYC) and their supporters, are sent behind bars. 

The ruling elite remain deluded by the notion that the country’s strong military can help it to end the conflict in Balochistan. That is a grossly miscalculated assumption. Internal reports have time and again underlined the reality in Balochistan. Calling its 2025 report on Balochistan Balochistan’s Crisis of Trust, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) had said in its press release that “The mission’s findings reveal a disturbing pattern of continued enforced disappearances, shrinking civic space, erosion of provincial autonomy and unchecked impunity—conditions that continue to fuel public alienation and political instability.” 

At a time when Islamabad is trying to promote an image of being a regional stabilising force and making efforts to bring the two warring factions in the US-led war against Iran to the negotiation table, the persisting internal instability and Islamabad’s approach towards Balochistan and the Baloch people expose its efforts to portray the country in a positive light. 

Shorn of any credibility that it could utilise to overhaul the country’s image by overlooking conflict in Balochistan and security issues in general, the country’s leadership resorts to the practice of externalising the blame and accusing others of damaging its image. 

In a recent statement, Pakistani Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting Attaullah Tarar issued a long statement on X: “We understand quite clearly that behind such stories are certain elements, mainly the detractors of peace, who are unable to come to terms with Pakistan’s role for peace in the region as well as Pakistan’s continued and successful fight against foreign-sponsored and abetted terrorism.” Tarar stated that it seems some elements could not digest the fact that Pakistan was playing a role in regional stability and making progress in eliminating terrorism. 

Measures like the ones taken in Balochistan are a self-evident acknowledgement that the real situation in the province is worrying. Reality is that Balochistan remains Pakistan’s most deprived and poor province despite being rich in natural resources and having a long coastline. The poverty in Balochistan increased from 41.8 per cent in 2019 to 47 per cent in the Financial Year 2025, way high above the national poverty rate of over 29 per cent.

In its efforts to woo foreign investment and overhaul its image, Pakistan is trying to sell the natural resources of Balochistan to the world. Lately, it has tried to woo the US to invest in the critical minerals of Balochistan, including copper. When Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshall Asim Munir presented rare earth minerals to President Donald Trump while on a visit to the US in October 2025, the Chief Secretary of Balochistan said in a statement in December that “American and other companies are interested in investment in this mineral (antimony, among others), which is more precious than gold and copper.” 

While the government is making ambitious efforts to entice foreign countries to invest and dig minerals from Balochistan, regional parties like the Balochistan National Party (BNP) have raised questions on the laws that allow the extraction of Balochistan’s resources. 

The hard reality is that situation in Balochistan remains abysmal: use of force, threatening and arresting people like Mahrang Baloch and others. This will not resolve the Baloch problem; nor will it divert attention from the issue. The country needs concrete steps, acceptable to the Baloch people, to resolve the issue of continued Baloch resistance.

But the brutal use of force by the Pakistani state against the poorest province of Pakistan is unlikely to change in a country where the military’s domineering presence in politics remains strong. This will keep fuelling public apathy and disaffection in Balochistan and in the absence of any genuine and sincere approach by the state if Pakistan to resolve the issue of Baloch alienation, the situation in likely to aggravate further in the days to come.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

Foreign interference is unacceptable in Canada. It shouldn’t become acceptable simply because it’s aimed at India.

I don’t pretend to have deep, on-the-ground knowledge of Alberta’s separatist debate. But Canada’s near-universal pushback against foreign interference in that conversation has been heartening, because it reveals a civic reflex Canadians still share, whatever your view on separation, you don’t want outsiders manipulating a domestic question.

Recent reporting has made the concern concrete. A study summarized by Global News warned that foreign actors, including American and Russian ones, are meddling in Alberta’s separatist debate in ways that threaten Canadian sovereignty (Global News, May 2026). Canada’s National Observer reported research showing inauthentic ‘news’ channels and influence campaigns amplifying Alberta secession and annexation narratives (Canada’s National Observer, April 2026). The Guardian reported a major Alberta voter-data breach linked to separatist organizing, exactly the kind of vulnerability experts warn can be exploited (The Guardian, May 2026).

So, Canada’s standard is clear: foreign interference is unacceptable, especially when it rides on disinformation, data exposure, and community targeting. Good. Now apply that same standard to how many Indians, across political views, have experienced the Khalistan file for years.

From India’s perspective, the core complaint is at least a few decades old that Canadian political space, and institutions have enabled an overseas separatist ecosystem to operate openly from Canada, often wrapped in ‘rights’ language, even as India links that ecosystem to extremism, intimidation, and criminality. That is not a characterization I’m inventing; it is an official position India has put on record. In September 2023, India’s Ministry of External Affairs explicitly referred to ‘Khalistani terrorists and extremists’ sheltered in Canada and said, ‘the space given in Canada to a range of illegal activities including murders, human trafficking and organised crime is not new’.

Canadians can disagree with India’s framing. But the asymmetry in Canadian instincts is hard to miss. When Alberta becomes the target, Canadians immediately reach for the language of sovereignty, manipulation, coercion, and democratic integrity. When India raises similar concerns about separatist organizing from Canadian soil, often paired with intimidation politics and crime allegations, Canada’s reflex is too often to repackage it as ‘a disagreement about free speech’.

Canada’s own intelligence reporting has, in fact, moved closer to India’s concern than Canada’s political class admits. The CSIS Public Report states that ongoing involvement in violent extremist activities by Canada-based Khalistani extremists continues to pose a national-security threat to Canada and Canadian interests, and notes that some fundraising can be diverted toward violent activity (CSIS Public Report, 2025). That is not India lobbying Canada. That is Canada describing a domestic threat.

The double standard isn’t only about what is tolerated on Canadian soil. It’s also about what Canadian politicians choose to amplify abroad and that record spans parties.

During the 2020–21 farmers’ protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly called the situation ‘concerning’ and signalled support for peaceful protest and dialogue (Hindustan Times, December 2020). Conservative MPs spoke too. In the House of Commons, Arnold Viersen said Sikhs were ‘thinking of and praying for India’s farmers’ protesting new legislation (House of Commons Hansard, November 2020).

Conservative MP Brad Vis tabled petitions from constituents ‘concerned for the safety of farmers’ protesting domestic legislative changes in India (House of Commons Hansard, December 2020). Conservative MP Tim Uppal likewise said India’s farmers ‘deserve to be heard and respected’, a message amplified in media coverage (Scroll, December 2020). Ontario NDP MPP Gurratan Singh was also cited among Canadian politicians voicing concern about the protests, showing the commentary extended beyond Ottawa into provincial politics (Canada’s National Observer, December 2020).

The Amritpal Singh episode in 2023 is even more instructive because it involved public order and violence, not merely protest. Al Jazeera reported that Amritpal and supporters armed with swords, knives and guns raided a police station in February 2023 after an aide was arrested, an event central to the later crackdown and manhunt (Al Jazeera, April 2023). India Today reported Punjab Police describing the Ajnala, Punjab incident as an attack on police and highlighting pressure on authorities during the confrontation. (India Today, February 2023).

Now ask a simple question: if a mobilized group stormed a police station in Canada to force the release of an aide, under threat, with weapons visible, would Canadian authorities treat it as ‘civil liberties’ theatre, or would they enforce criminal law and restore public order?

Canadian political reactions again moved quickly into public positioning. Global News reported that MPs from multiple parties criticized India’s crackdown and internet restrictions, and it specifically noted Conservative voices as well. Conservative deputy leader Tim Uppal and Conservative MP Jasraj Singh Hallan among them (Global News, March 2023). Canada’s Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly said Canada was following developments ‘very closely’ (The Indian Express, March 2023). Jagmeet Singh called the crackdown ‘draconian’ and urged Canadian intervention (Hindustan Times, March 2023).

Outside government, the World Sikh Organization of Canada issued a formal statement condemning the “security operations” in Punjab and raising fears about extrajudicial harm, illustrating how non-government actors in Canada also shaped the narrative internationally (World Sikh Organization of Canada, March 2023)

India’s response to both episodes followed the same script: formal diplomatic pushback and a clear message that Canada was commenting on internal Indian matters. In 2020, India summoned Canada’s envoy, warned that Trudeau’s remarks could ‘impact ties’, and called the commentary ‘ill-informed’, ‘unwarranted’, and ‘interference’ (Al Jazeera, December 2020) (India Today, December 2020) (Reuters, December 2020).

In 2023, as Canadian politicians and organizations criticized the Punjab crackdown, Indian officials framed the operation as law-enforcement action to ‘nab a fugitive’, signalling that Canada’s commentary was external noise while India pursued policing. (The Indian Express, March 2023.)

Put the pattern together and the hypocrisy becomes harder to ignore. Canada is right to reject foreign interference in Alberta. But Canada’s political class has repeatedly engaged in rhetorical interference in India, on mass protests and on an internal security crackdown triggered by a police-station attack, then bristled when India said, plainly, ‘this is our internal matter’.

That is why the Alberta interference debate matters beyond Alberta. It has forced Canadians to admit, in real time, that democratic debates can be manipulated through proxies, disinformation, intimidation, and exploitation of institutional openness. Canada is suddenly fluent in the language of foreign influence because it can taste it.

The underlying principle is that sovereignty is not selective. If foreign interference is wrong when aimed at Canadian unity, it is equally wrong when Canadian space is used to inflame separatist politics abroad.

Foreign interference is unacceptable in Canada. It shouldn’t become acceptable simply because it’s aimed at India.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

Some disappeared are released, broken by torture. Some are formally charged. Some are killed and their bodies dumped.

Some human rights crises burst into international consciousness through a single image, a single video, a single act of resistance that the world cannot ignore. Other crises unfold in the dark, year after year, building a pile of unaddressed suffering that grows so high it becomes invisible. Balochistan belongs to the second category. It is the most underreported sustained human rights crisis in modern South Asia, and the international community’s silence on it is one of the diplomatic failures of our time.

The numbers, when assembled, are difficult to dismiss. The Baloch Yakjehti Committee documented over 1,250 cases of enforced disappearance in 2025. The Human Rights Council of Balochistan recorded 1,455 cases in the same year. Paank, the human rights wing of the Baloch National Movement, documented 95 enforced disappearances in November 2025 alone, along with 21 cases of severe torture and 20 extrajudicial killings. These figures, reflecting only what could be verified, suggest that what is happening in Balochistan is not occasional repression but a sustained campaign of state violence against a population.

The Pattern of Disappearances

The mechanism of enforced disappearance in Balochistan follows a well-documented pattern. Pakistani security forces, operating in plain clothes or in uniform, conduct raids on homes, often at night, and take individuals away without warrants, charges, or notification of family members. The detained person enters a network of informal detention centres run by the army or intelligence services, where they may be held for weeks, months, or years without external contact.

Some of the disappeared are eventually released, often visibly broken by torture, with explicit warnings against speaking publicly about their experience. Some are formally charged after extended periods in incommunicado detention and transferred to regular prison. Some are killed during their detention, with their bodies dumped near roads or in remote areas, in what Baloch activists call kill and dump operations. And some simply vanish, never accounted for, leaving families to wait indefinitely for information that does not come.

The targets of disappearance are not, by and large, militants. They are students, lecturers, journalists, doctors, lawyers, and human rights activists. Mahrang Baloch, the woman human rights defender who has emerged as the most prominent voice of the movement, is a medical doctor. Many of her colleagues in the Baloch Yakjehti Committee come from professional and academic backgrounds. The pattern is one of targeting the educated, articulate, and organisationally capable members of Baloch civil society, not just suspected separatists.

Some disappeared are released, broken by torture. Some are formally charged. Some are killed and their bodies dumped. Some simply vanish, never accounted for, leaving families to wait indefinitely.

The Recent Escalation

The crisis in Balochistan has escalated sharply since 2024. The triggering events have included a March 2025 attack by Baloch separatists on a passenger train, after which Pakistani authorities launched broad sweeps under the Counter Terrorism Department and arrested or disappeared several prominent Baloch human rights defenders. In response to peaceful protests organised against these arrests, Quetta police stormed a Baloch Yakjehti Committee gathering at the University of Balochistan in March 2025. A subsequent sit-in, organised by Mahrang Baloch and other activists, was raided by police using batons and tear gas at five-thirty in the morning.

The pattern continued through 2025 and into 2026. The provincial government’s approval of the Balochistan Prevention, Detention and Deradicalisation Rules 2025, signed off by Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti, was understood by human rights organisations as a state attempt to legalise the disappearance system that had been operating informally for years. The new rules permit the designation of individuals as suspects subject to interrogation in detention centres, formalising what had previously been an extra-legal practice.

Federal-level changes have made the situation worse. Amendments to Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorism Act of 1997 now allow law enforcement to detain individuals for up to three months without charge or judicial oversight. This power has been used repeatedly against Mahrang Baloch and other Baloch Yakjehti Committee activists. The legal framework that emerged in 2025 essentially provides Pakistani authorities with broad discretion to detain whoever they wish for as long as they wish, with minimal accountability.

The International Response Gap

The international response to Balochistan has been thin compared to the scale of the crisis. UN human rights experts have issued statements. Some Western governments have raised concerns in private diplomatic channels. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have published reports. But there has been no sustained international campaign comparable to those organised around other comparable crises. There has been no UN Security Council attention. There have been no targeted sanctions against the Pakistani officials responsible. There has been no equivalent of the Magnitsky-style measures that Western states use for other human rights abusers.

The reasons for this gap are partly geopolitical. Pakistan has been treated as an important state by various Western governments, by China, and by Saudi Arabia. Each of these relationships has imposed costs on the willingness of those states to confront Pakistan publicly on its conduct in Balochistan. But the gap is not just about external geopolitics. It is also about the difficulty of access. Foreign journalists are largely barred from Balochistan. Foreign human rights observers face severe restrictions. The information space is, by Pakistani design, opaque. As a result, what is happening in Balochistan does not generate the kind of viral images and stories that drive sustained international attention.

This dynamic has allowed the Pakistani state to operate in Balochistan with a degree of impunity that would not be tolerated anywhere with greater external scrutiny. The pattern of disappearances has continued for over two decades. The international response has been incremental concern, rarely translating into structural pressure.

What Operation Sindoor Changed

Operation Sindoor, indirectly, has begun to change the international information environment around Pakistan. The detailed exposure of Pakistan’s relationship with Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba during the May 2025 conflict, combined with international attention to the Pahalgam massacre, has raised broader questions about the Pakistani state’s conduct. Some of those questions extend naturally to Balochistan. If Pakistan’s security establishment is willing to host UN-designated terrorists in major cities, what is it willing to do to its own citizens in marginalised provinces?

Indian diplomatic engagement with international human rights bodies has also become more sophisticated. The contrast between India’s open society in Kashmir, where journalists work and tourists travel, and Pakistan’s closed system in Balochistan has been highlighted in international forums by Indian representatives in ways that previously felt heavy-handed but now resonate more credibly.

The Baloch movement itself has become more articulate, more organised, and more capable of presenting its case in international languages. Mahrang Baloch’s prominence as a face of the movement has helped. So has the work of diaspora communities in Europe, North America, and the Gulf, who have built advocacy networks that did not exist a decade ago.

These developments are early. They have not yet translated into the structural international pressure that would force a change in Pakistani conduct. But they represent a shift in the information landscape that, if sustained, may eventually force the world to look more carefully at what has been happening in Balochistan for far too long. The first step is to refuse to look away. Operation Sindoor, by exposing what Pakistan does abroad, may help sustain attention on what Pakistan does at home. That is a small consolation for the families of the missing. It is not nothing.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

Police confirmed that several hostage-takers and hostages were inside the bank, according to a statement issued during the ongoing operation.

Authorities said the driver of a cash transport vehicle was among those being held.Large numbers of police officers were deployed around the area, which was cordoned off as security forces responded to the incident.

German police did not disclose the number of hostages involved, identify the suspects or provide details about possible demands.

The incident remained ongoing as authorities worked to secure the release of those inside the bank.Hostage situations are relatively rare in Germany, where heavily armed police tactical units are routinely deployed in major security incidents involving banks or public institutions.

No injuries had been reported at the time of the police statement.

The international community has, for too long, accepted Pakistan’s victim narrative at face value. The reasoning has often been geopolitical.

Every time the world confronts Pakistan with evidence of its support for terrorism, it responds with the same script. It is a victim of terrorism, not a sponsor. Its neighbours are out to defame it. The groups operating from its soil are rogue actors, beyond state control. The script has worn thin. Operation Sindoor, in May 2025, demolished it.

The Indian airstrikes on the night of May 6 to 7, 2025, did not target shadowy hideouts in remote tribal regions. They targeted Bahawalpur, a city of nearly a million people in central Punjab, well within Pakistan’s settled and policed heartland. They targeted Muridke, the sprawling Lashkar-e-Taiba complex on the outskirts of Lahore. They struck nine sites in total, four in Pakistan proper and five in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir. The locations told their own story. These were not camps that Pakistan had failed to find. These were camps that Pakistan had built.

The Family Business of Terror

Consider the case of Jaish-e-Mohammed, the group whose Bahawalpur headquarters India struck on May 7. Jaish was founded in 2000 by Masood Azhar, a man Pakistan released from Indian custody in December 1999 in exchange for hostages on a hijacked plane. According to multiple accounts cited by Pakistani journalists and Western researchers, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate paraded Azhar through Pakistan after his release on a fundraising tour, and helped him stand up the new outfit.

Pervez Musharraf, who served as Pakistan’s president from 2001 to 2008, admitted in a 2019 interview that Jaish-e-Mohammed had carried out attacks in India on the instructions of Pakistani intelligence. This was not an Indian allegation. This was the former military ruler of Pakistan acknowledging that Pakistan’s spy agency had directed terror operations against a neighbouring country.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group whose Muridke complex India also struck, has a similar profile. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies has documented that Lashkar conducts its attacks, including the 2008 Mumbai siege, with the consent and support of the ISI. David Coleman Headley, the Pakistani-American operative who scouted the Mumbai targets, testified that he met with six different ISI officers during his time with Lashkar. American investigators identified one of them, known only as Major Iqbal, as having provided 25,000 dollars in cash and direct operational guidance for the attack that killed 166 people.

What the Strikes Revealed

If Jaish and Lashkar were really rogue outfits operating outside Pakistani state control, the strikes of May 7 should have produced confused and uncertain reactions. Pakistan should have struggled to identify what had been hit, who had died, and why. Instead, the response was immediate and revealing. Pakistan’s military leadership knew exactly what had been targeted, because the targets were on Pakistan’s books in all but name.

In September 2025, a senior Jaish commander named Masood Ilyas Kashmiri appeared at the group’s annual Mission Mustafa conference and openly admitted that Masood Azhar’s family had been killed in the Bahawalpur strikes. Ten members of the family died, including Azhar’s sister, her husband, a nephew, a niece, and five children. Four close aides also died. The location of the strike was Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah, the headquarters of Jaish-e-Mohammed, sitting comfortably inside Pakistani territory, with a UN-designated terrorist living openly within its walls.

The picture this paints is unambiguous. Masood Azhar, listed as a global terrorist by the United Nations Security Council since May 2019, was not in hiding. He was at home, with his family, in a complex protected by the Pakistani state. His brother Abdul Rauf Asghar, also a UN-designated terrorist and the operational head of Jaish, was reportedly killed in the same strike. Pakistan’s posture of plausible deniability has rested for decades on the fiction that men like these are difficult to find. India’s strikes proved that the only people who found them difficult to find were Pakistan’s own authorities.

The Cost of the Charade

The international community has, for too long, accepted Pakistan’s victim narrative at face value. The reasoning has often been geopolitical. Pakistan was a frontline state in the Cold War. Pakistan was a partner in the war on terror. Pakistan held nuclear weapons that demanded careful handling. Each of these arguments contained a fragment of strategic logic. None of them justified the systematic protection of men who killed civilians in Indian cities and villages.

The cost of this charade has been borne by India and by the broader region. Pakistan’s continued sponsorship of terror groups has poisoned the entire South Asian neighbourhood. It has prevented the development of normal trade and travel relations. It has consumed resources that could have built schools and hospitals on both sides of the border. And, most tragically, it has cost thousands of innocent lives across decades of attacks that Pakistan’s intelligence services helped plan, fund, and execute.

Operation Sindoor changed the equation. By striking Bahawalpur and Muridke, India made plain what had always been true. The terrorist infrastructure attacking India operates from inside Pakistan, with the protection of the Pakistani state. The terrorist leadership lives in Pakistani cities, raises families in Pakistani neighbourhoods, and runs operations from Pakistani buildings. The fiction of state distance from these activities has collapsed.

The world now has a choice. It can continue to accept the Pakistani script of victimhood, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Or it can finally treat Pakistan as what it has long been: a state that uses terrorism as an instrument of policy, and that pays a price every time it does. India has decided which path it will follow. The international community must now decide which path it can credibly continue to ignore.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

The broker gets the headline. Whether the broker shapes the outcome is a different matter entirely.

Every few years, usually after some dramatic diplomatic moment, a version of the same argument resurfaces in Western policy circles: Pakistan, despite being economically fragile and institutionally troubled, keeps showing up at the table. India, despite being the region’s dominant economy and a democracy with global ambitions, somehow doesn’t. The implication is usually that India is doing something wrong, or that Pakistan has figured out a trick India refuses to learn. This reading is understandable. It is also, on closer inspection, considerably overstated.

What Pakistan Actually Does — and What It Costs

Let’s be clear about what Pakistan’s diplomatic record actually consists of. It has, at various points, served as a conduit between parties that could not talk to each other directly. In 1971, it facilitated the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China. Through the 1980s, it managed the American and Saudi pipeline to the Afghan mujahideen. Most recently, in early 2026, it apparently relayed a fifteen-point American peace proposal to Tehran as Washington and Iran traded strikes across the Middle East.

These are real accomplishments. The structural explanation for them is also fairly persuasive: Pakistan is nuclear-armed, so India cannot simply overwhelm it; it is perpetually broke, so it needs patrons and is therefore always in the market for a useful role to play; and it sits at a geographic crossroads that makes it hard for any outside power with regional ambitions to simply ignore. A state that needs patrons to survive is a supplicant. A state that needs patrons for everything except survival has leverage.

But this picture has a shadow side that tends to get glossed over. The same army that makes Pakistan useful as a broker also spent two decades as the Taliban’s primary patron and ran the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network, which is perhaps the most consequential act of nuclear irresponsibility since the Cold War. The Saudi-Pakistani defence pact signed in September 2025 — widely celebrated as evidence of Pakistani strategic genius — places Islamabad in the position of simultaneously acting as Sunni military guarantor to Riyadh and back-channel to Tehran, while managing a domestic population that includes forty million Shia Muslims. That is not strategic elegance. That is a set of contradictions held together by willpower and ambiguity, and ambiguity eventually runs out.

As for the 2026 Iran ceasefire — the centrepiece of Pakistan’s current claim to indispensability — what has it actually produced? A communication channel, some announcements, a few deadlines that came and went, and a running commentary on Truth Social that has alternately declared peace imminent and threatened renewed bombardment, sometimes within the same week. Pakistan relayed a message. That is nothing. But it is a long way from a settlement, and attributing structural significance to a back channel whose existence owes something to a crypto deal signed in January 2026 between Pakistan’s army chief and the Trump family’s business venture requires a certain generosity of interpretation.

India’s Forgotten Record

The standard critique of Indian foreign policy — that it is all relationships and no obligations, all presence and no commitment — proceeds as though India’s diplomatic history began sometime around 2014. It didn’t.

During the Korean War, it was India’s V.K. Krishna Menon who broke the armistice deadlock that had stalled negotiations for over a year. The specific problem was prisoner-of-war repatriation — neither side could accept the other’s terms, and the talks had collapsed. India proposed voluntary repatriation overseen by a neutral commission. The formula was adopted in the 1953 Armistice, and India chaired the commission that implemented it. This is precisely the kind of creative, trust-based mediation that gets attributed exclusively to Pakistan in contemporary analysis. It happened, it worked, and it has been largely forgotten.

In Cyprus, from 1964 onward, India contributed meaningfully to the UN peacekeeping force at a moment when Greek and Turkish Cypriot violence was threatening to pull NATO members into direct confrontation. Again, not a passive gesture — load-bearing participation in a genuinely difficult situation.

In South Asia itself, India built SAARC in 1985 as a regional integration framework, and the diagnosis of its failure matters enormously. SAARC did not fail because India lost interest or refused to make commitments. It failed because Pakistan consistently used it as a platform for bilateral grievance rather than regional cooperation — most visibly when the 2016 Islamabad Summit was cancelled after Pakistan-based militants attacked an Indian Army base at Uri. When an institution you helped build gets repeatedly blocked by one of its members, the conclusion to draw is not that you should have built more institutions.

The Gulf: A Different Kind of Presence

The argument that India has no real presence in West Asia because it has no defence pacts or troops stationed in Gulf states reflects a fairly narrow idea of what presence means. Over nine million Indian nationals live and work across the Gulf. Their remittances — exceeding forty billion dollars annually — are not just an economic statistic. They represent a web of human and institutional relationships that generates its own diplomatic weight.

When conflict has broken out in Yemen, Sudan, or Lebanon, India has mounted large-scale evacuation operations for its citizens. These operations do not happen without the quiet cooperation of Gulf governments. That cooperation reflects a relationship of mutual utility — not formalised in a treaty, not legible in alliance databases, but real. India also does not need troops in Riyadh to have influence in Riyadh. It needs Saudi Arabia to care whether India is doing well. Given the depth of economic and human ties, Saudi Arabia does.

More recently, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor — announced at the 2023 G20 Summit in New Delhi — represents exactly the kind of connectivity architecture that is supposedly absent from Indian foreign policy. It ties Indian ports to Gulf infrastructure to European markets, and it gives multiple partners a concrete stake in Indian diplomatic stability. It is slower than a defence pact. It is also, arguably, more durable.

Strategic Autonomy and its Variables

None of this means India’s foreign policy is without genuine limitations. The doctrine of strategic autonomy — India as friend to all, obligated to none — has real costs that deserve honest acknowledgement. A state that declines binding commitments on most contested questions of international order does not accumulate allies in the deep sense — states that owe their security to Indian support and therefore have a structural interest in Indian success. Strategic autonomy, practised consistently, means India has many friends and few clients. That is a real constraint on the kind of influence that gets exercised in crisis moments.

Whether that is a correctable policy or structural reality is the more interesting question. India’s size and economic trajectory mean that many states want its friendship regardless of whether it takes sides. The United States cultivated a similar posture through much of the early twentieth century — extensive economic engagement, minimal alliance obligations — and the transition from that posture to full great-power engagement was ultimately forced by external events rather than chosen. Whether the current deterioration of the regional security environment, including the 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, might function as a similar forcing moment is perhaps the most consequential open question in South Asian foreign policy today.

What the Competition Actually Is

The framing of India versus Pakistan as competing models of diplomatic influence obscures something important: they are not competing for the same thing. Pakistan is optimised for crisis relevance — it is useful when things are going wrong, when parties cannot talk to each other, when someone needs a conduit. That is a real and valuable role. It is also, by definition, dependent on there being a crisis, on the crisis involving parties who both trust Pakistan, and on the political incentives of outside powers aligning in ways that make Islamabad useful rather than inconvenient.

India is building something slower and harder to see — economic interdependence, connectivity infrastructure, institutional presence across multilateral forums, and the accumulated credibility that comes from not being anyone’s instrument. Whether that model generates more durable influence over the next two decades than Pakistan’s brokerage model is a genuinely open question. But it is the right question to ask, and it is not answered by pointing to who was on the phone with Trump and Tehran in the same week. The broker gets the headline. Whether the broker shapes the outcome is a different matter entirely.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

Nancy Grewal’s family is demanding justice. Justice now means more than solving a murder.

Western democracies like to sermonize about rights, pluralism, and the protection of dissent. Their real test is simpler: what do they do when an ordinary immigrant woman says she is afraid and asks for help?

Nancy Grewal asked for help.

She was a 45-year-old Sikh woman who moved to Canada in 2018, settled in Windsor, Ontario, and worked as a personal support worker. Her union later described her as a steward and a committed worker. She was not a celebrity activist insulated by institutions. She was a frontline worker, often alone, who also became known online for criticizing the violent Khalistan movement and the people she believed used intimidation, influence, and religious spaces to dominate parts of her community.

On the night of 3 March 2026, after finishing work at a client’s home on Todd Lane in LaSalle, she was stabbed multiple times and later succumbed to her injuries. Police were unusually clear from the beginning: this was “not a random act of violence” but “an intentional act against her.” The Ontario Provincial Police later joined the probe. Nancy Grewal was not caught in random chaos—she was targeted.

What makes the case darker is that she appears to have predicted it.

CityNews reported on 5 March that Nancy’s sister, Alisha, said she had been receiving threats, believed she was being followed, and had already gone to police with the names of the people she feared. Alisha called the murder “pre-planned” and “revenge” for Nancy’s videos. Later, speaking to AM800, she asked the question that now sits at the centre of the case: if her sister was “giving names, giving everything,” why was she not taken seriously?

Nancy’s own words make that question impossible to ignore. In a video recorded after someone tried to burn her house in November 2025, she said: “I’m a Canadian citizen, but I don’t feel safe in this country right now.” She also pointed toward Gurdwara Khalsa Parkash in Maidstone, alleging that the intimidation came from men linked to that gurdwara. This matters because it places the story not simply in the realm of a private feud, but in a charged religious ecosystem where community power, diaspora radicalism, and fear can overlap.

After her murder, investigators released surveillance footage of what they described as a targeted arson at her home. A van stops. A man gets out with a gas can, pours liquid on the porch, sets it alight, and flees. This was no imagined danger—it was a documented attack on her home months before she was killed.

Nancy did not describe that arson as an isolated act. She linked it to an earlier shooting near St. Rose Avenue and Wyandotte Street East in Windsor. In her account, these were connected expressions of the same pattern. She said the “real man” behind the attacks does not come forward himself but “hires repeat offenders and criminals to do the job.”

That line is one reason public attention later turned to the names her family raised.

After Nancy was killed, her mother said she had feared Avtar Singh Kooner. She also named Barinder Shokar and Harpinder. According to the family, Harpinder befriended Nancy on Instagram, followed and surveilled her, came to her house, and checked for cameras around the home and car. Her mother’s point was blunt: Nancy’s location as a healthcare worker was not widely known, and it was highly unlikely that her employer had leaked it. If that account is true, this was not accidental exposure—it was deliberate access.

The Kooner name carries its own shadow. Air India inquiry records show that RCMP investigators searched Avtar Singh Kooner’s residence in June 1985. Reporting on Gurfathe “Laddi” Singh Kooner, Avtar’s son, described an earlier case in which he was seen tossing a bag from an F-150 pickup; the recovered bag contained guns and ammunition. The backdrop is darker still: Avtar Kooner appears in a social media photograph with Lakhbir Singh Rode, nephew of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Rode has been publicly identified as a leading figure in the International Sikh Youth Federation, which Canada lists as a terrorist entity. None of this proves who killed Nancy Grewal, but it places the names raised by her family within a historical and political context far more serious than Canada likes to admit.

Then the institutional questions become impossible to ignore.

On 15 March, the OPP released the arson video and said they were trying to determine whether it was linked to Nancy’s murder. On 20 March, Alisha publicly asked why that footage had not been released sooner. By 23 March, AM800 reported that the OPP and LaSalle Police had taken over the arson file from Windsor Police because investigators believed there could be a connection. If a woman reports threats, if her home is later confirmed to have been targeted in an arson attack, and if that arson may be linked to her murder, then the issue is no longer simply whether she was afraid. The issue is whether the system acted with anything like the urgency her case demanded.

There is another deeply uncomfortable detail. Nancy had spoken to CBC in February about the threats she was facing. Canadaland later described that interview as one in which she said she feared for her life just days before she was stabbed to death. The interview, by later accounts, aired only after she was killed. CBC is entitled to its editorial judgment, but the moral question remains: when a woman says on record that she is under threat, what obligation does a public broadcaster owe—not just to journalism, but to urgency?

This should shame more than one institution. Police had warnings. Media had testimony. Her family says officers were given names and even a letter. Yet Nancy remained exposed until the danger she described became irreversible.

Canada has a habit of flattening such cases into the language of “community tensions,” as though threats, stalking, arson, and murder are merely difficult internal disagreements best managed quietly. That language is not neutral. It shields institutions from embarrassment while leaving vulnerable people to absorb the risk.

Nancy Grewal’s family is demanding justice. Justice now means more than solving a murder. It means answering the harder question Canada would rather avoid: When Nancy Grewal said she was in danger, why did Canada not act as if she was?

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

For Pakistan’s small Sikh community, long associated with sacred shrines and historical memory, but seldom with state authority, it marked a rare breakthrough.

Pakistan is often described as an Army with a state rather than a state with an army. In such a system, even seemingly routine decisions, such as military promotions, can carry deep political meaning. One such case was the promotion of Lt Col Harcharan Singh in February this year, as the first Sikh officer in Pakistan’s history to attain this rank. Months later, it still merits attention, not because it was merely unusual, but because it revealed how identity, military power, and regional politics continue to intersect in Pakistan.

At one level, the promotion was politically noteworthy and institutionally revealing. For Pakistan’s small Sikh community, long associated with sacred shrines and historical memory, but seldom with state authority, it marked a rare breakthrough. Yet in Pakistan, where the military remains the country’s most powerful institution, promotions are seldom read only as personnel decisions. They can also be instruments of strategic messaging.

Advancement within Pakistan’s armed forces carries prestige, influence, and political meaning beyond what most civilian institutions can confer. For a minority officer to rise in that structure is therefore no minor development.

Harcharan Singh’s own journey helps explain why the event resonated so widely. 

Born in 1987 in Nankana Sahib: the birthplace of Guru Nanak and one of Sikhism’s holiest centres, he came from a town central to Sikh religious consciousness worldwide. He later studied at the prestigious Forman Christian College in Lahore, one of Pakistan’s oldest and most respected institutions, historically known for producing political leaders, diplomats, academics, and public figures across communities.

Afterward, he reportedly cleared Pakistan’s Inter Services Selection Board and entered the Pakistan Military Academy, Kakul, through the 116^th Long Course. When commissioned in 2007, he was widely described as the first publicly known Sikh officer to receive a regular commission in the Pakistan Army since Partition.

He was initially inducted into the Army Ordnance Corps, a technical branch responsible for logistics, stores etc. Subsequently he joined the 12^th battalion of Baloch Regiment, indicating movement into a more operational environment linked to field command structures. In professional militaries, such trajectories matter. They reveal whether representation remains ceremonial or extends into the institution’s core functions.

By that measure, Singh’s promotion is meaningful. But it is placed within a broader strategic context.

Pakistan’s Sikh population is small, commonly estimated to be no more than 15,000. Yet its political value exceeds its demographic size. Unlike other minority communities, Sikhs occupy a space where faith, geography, memory, and India-Pakistan rivalry converge. Pakistan hosts some of Sikhism’s most sacred sites: Nankana Sahib, Kartarpur, Panja Sahib. Few states possess custodianship over the sacred geography of a community whose largest population lives elsewhere.

Islamabad has increasingly recognised the utility of that reality.

The Kartarpur Corridor, opened by former PM Imran Khan in 2019, was welcomed by pilgrims as a humanitarian and religious breakthrough. It was also an exercise in modern soft power. It allowed Pakistan to project tolerance, engage Sikh sentiment directly, and shape international perceptions at relatively low strategic cost. 

That same logic helps explain why Sikh inclusion carries a different strategic weight from the inclusion of other minorities. Sikhs constitute roughly 1.7 to 2 percent of India’s population, but their national influence exceeds numbers alone. They are economically prominent, politically mobilised, globally networked through a substantial diaspora, and historically overrepresented in India’s armed forces relative to population share. Their presence in Punjab, India’s border state adjoining Pakistan, adds another layer of geopolitical relevance.

Unlike Christians or Hindus, Sikhs offer Pakistan something rare in geopolitics: a minority constituency with emotional relevance inside India, religious relevance globally, and sacred geography inside Pakistan. 

This is why Pakistan’s engagement with Sikh politics has never been merely domestic.

During the militancy years of the 1980s, Pakistan’s security establishment was widely understood to have provided sanctuary, training, financing, and logistical support to Khalistani militant networks operating against India. Over time, the methods evolved from covert infrastructure and cross-border facilitation to diaspora outreach, information campaigns, and symbolic religious diplomacy. The objective, however, has often appeared consistent: keep Punjab politically sensitive and India strategically vulnerable. 

Seen in that light, Harcharan Singh’s promotion is about more than minority advancement. It reinforces outreach to Sikh communities abroad, complements Pakistan’s custodianship narrative over Sikh heritage sites, and projects institutional openness at a time when the country continues to face scrutiny over blasphemy laws, discrimination against Christians, insecurity among Hindus, and the constitutional exclusion of Ahmadis.

That leads to a more difficult question. If this promotion is evidence of broad-based inclusion, why has no Christian, Hindu, or other minority officer publicly emerged with comparable prominence in the Army’s visible hierarchy? Are others less capable, less deserving, or simply less useful to the state’s strategic narrative?

This is where representation shades into selective inclusion.

Institutions sometimes elevate a few exceptional individuals not only to reward merit, but also to project an image of systemic openness and institutional inclusivity. One success story can be amplified as proof of reform. Yet symbolic mobility for a handful does not necessarily amount to structural equality and inclusion of minorities. 

None of this diminishes Harcharan Singh’s personal achievement. Rising through a rigid military hierarchy requires discipline and competence. But in Pakistan’s case, it would be simplistic to read the episode solely through the language of diversity and one individual’s calibre.

As with many political gestures in Pakistan, the significance of this promotion lies not only in what it reveals, but in what it may conceal. The deeper story is about how states convert identity into influence. Pakistan’s handling of Sikh symbolism: from Kartarpur diplomacy to selective representation in the army, suggests a maturing soft-power strategy in which minority visibility serves not only domestic optics, but wider geopolitical aims vis-à-vis India. 

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

India has tended to treat each episode as a bilateral matter, protest, and move on.

On April 10, 2026, China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs unveiled its sixth round of “standardised” place names for what it calls “southern Tibet”—a reference to India’s Arunachal Pradesh—adding 23 new entries to its expanding list. This latest exercise continues a pattern that began in 2017, taking the cumulative number of renamed locations to over 110.

Before 2017, such efforts were limited, with just 16 names officially retained between 2009 and 2017. However, the pace has accelerated significantly in recent years, with successive batches introduced in 2017 (6 names), 2021 (15), 2023 (11), 2024 (30), 2025 (27), and now 2026 (23), reflecting a sustained and deliberate push.

Notably, the 2026 list is overwhelmingly focused on geographical features rather than inhabited areas. Only two names—Chaku and Xinjing (Shincheon)—refer to settlements, both located in zones of historical or strategic relevance dating back to the Sino-Indian War. The remaining 21 names are assigned to mountains, peaks, and slopes, many situated around the Yarlung Tsangpo basin and its adjoining valleys, underscoring a targeted approach to cartographic assertion in sensitive terrain.

Three Fronts, One Target

Arunachal Pradesh is only one corner of a much larger game. In Nepal’s northern districts — Humla, Rasuwa, Sindhupalchowk — there have been documented encroachments over the last several years: border pillars moved, Chinese infrastructure appearing on areas Nepal’s own maps show as Nepali territory, grazing land that Himalayan communities have used for generations quietly absorbed into what Beijing treats as administered Chinese space. The renaming of these locations follows the encroachment, retrospectively assigning Chinese names to places already brought under de facto control.

Nepal’s response has been muted, for reasons that are not hard to understand. Its Belt and Road commitments — including the Pokhara International Airport, financed by Chinese loans and opened in 2023 — create financial obligations that generate strong incentives to avoid confrontation. Beijing’s United Front Work Department has invested heavily in cultivating relationships within Nepal’s major political parties and media institutions. And Nepal’s political instability — the country has cycled through governments with remarkable speed since its 2015 constitution — means there is rarely an administration in Kathmandu with both the institutional continuity and the political will to push back consistently.

In Bhutan, the stakes are starker still. China and Bhutan have been negotiating their border since 1984, with more than 25 rounds of talks without resolution. In 2020, China introduced an entirely new dispute by listing Bhutan’s Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary as a “disputed area” at a Global Environment Facility board meeting, despite having raised no prior claim there. Sakteng lies in eastern Bhutan, far from the longstanding western disputes, abutting Arunachal Pradesh. The strategic logic was transparent: manufacture a new bargaining chip to trade for concessions in Doklam, the plateau whose military value China has coveted ever since the 73-day standoff of 2017.

Doklam matters not because of its size but because of where it points. A Chinese military presence there would command the Chumbi Valley, which in turn points directly at the Siliguri Corridor — the narrow strip of Indian territory, roughly 22 kilometres at its narrowest, that connects India’s entire northeastern region to the rest of the country. Strategists sometimes call it the Chicken’s Neck. It is the most consequential piece of geography on the eastern front, and it is what sits at the end of the thread that runs from Doklam through Bhutan’s border negotiations to Beijing’s renaming exercises in Arunachal.

The Real Prize Is Not on the List

None of the 23 newly named locations in Arunachal Pradesh are what China actually cares about most. Arunachal is a display case — a pressure point kept warm to ensure that India cannot concentrate its diplomatic and military energies on the one piece of territory that China genuinely cannot afford to lose: Aksai Chin.

China’s National Highway 219, which traverses the Aksai Chin plateau at an altitude, is the primary logistical link between Tibet and Xinjiang — two regions whose stability is central to the CCP’s territorial narrative. Beijing quietly built the road through Aksai Chin in the late 1950s before India even knew construction had begun. When New Delhi eventually discovered it, the resulting crisis fed directly into the 1962 war. India has never formally conceded the territory. Every official Indian map still shows Aksai Chin as part of Ladakh. The 2019 reorganisation of Jammu and Kashmir, which created the Union Territory of Ladakh with Aksai Chin explicitly within its stated boundaries, was a deliberate signal — and Beijing read it precisely that way. The military buildup in Ladakh that led to the Galwan Valley clashes of June 2020 was, at least in part, a response to Indian infrastructure development that China interpreted as preparatory to a more assertive posture.

The shadow of Zhou Enlai’s “package deal” offer to Nehru still haunts the diplomatic architecture. In 1959, China proposed recognising the McMahon Line in the east in exchange for India’s acceptance of Chinese sovereignty over Aksai Chin in the west. Nehru rejected it, and the offer was never formally revived. What China appears to be doing today is inflating the price of any future version of that deal: each new disputed name in Arunachal, each encroachment in Humla, each manufactured claim in Sakteng adds another chip to Beijing’s side of the eventual table. India’s domestic political constraints — no government can publicly concede Aksai Chin and survive — mean that formal negotiation remains frozen. But in the meantime, the ground shifts.

What India Has Got Right, and What It Hasn’t

India’s response since Galwan has been more serious than its pre-2020 posture. The acceleration of border infrastructure in Ladakh and Arunachal — roads, tunnels, forward helipads — has been real and measurable. The forward deployment of additional mountain divisions has followed. The Modi government’s decision to ban hundreds of Chinese apps, restrict Chinese investment in sensitive sectors, and publicly call out Beijing’s encroachments represented a departure from the studied ambiguity that characterised Indian China policy for most of the 2000s.

What India has not done well is tell this story internationally. The cumulative pattern of China’s toponymic campaigns, its physical encroachments in Nepal, its manufactured Bhutan disputes, and its administrative restructuring in Xinjiang is not a series of bilateral irritants. It is a coherent grey-zone strategy whose logic would be recognised—and should concern—any government that has watched Beijing deploy the same playbook in the South China Sea.

India has tended to treat each episode as a bilateral matter, protest, and move on. It has not systematically built the international narrative that would make Beijing’s methods legible and costly in global opinion.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.