Duelling diplomacies: India and Pakistan offer competing narratives at defence forum in Singapore

SINGAPORE: Fresh off their nerve-jangling, four-day conflict in May, top Indian and Pakistani military delegations have been making the rounds at the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, billed as Asia’s premier defence forum. While much of the attention was on US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s first visit to the gathering since taking up his post, and his warnings of the “imminent” threat he says is posed by China – along with China’s response that the Americans should not “play with fire” and make “groundless accusations” – the longstanding tensions between these nuclear-armed neighbours also grabbed attention. India blames Pakistan for a deadly terror attack on tourists in the part of the disputed region of Kashmir that it controls, while Pakistan denies any involvement and says India has presented no proof. And just as these nations sit next to each other geographically, some of their top generals sat in neighbouring conference rooms inside the Shangri-La Singapore, taking part in simultaneous sessions late on Saturday (May 31) afternoon on topics ranging from defence innovation solutions to regional crisis-management mechanisms. “What India has done is politically they have drawn new red lines of the tolerance against terror,” said General Anil Chauhan, Chief of Defence Staff with the Indian Armed Forces. “That should bring about some lessons for our adversary also and, hopefully, they learn that this is a limit of India’s tolerance. We’ve been subjected to this proxy war and terror for the past almost about two decades, or maybe more, and we’ve lost a lot of people and … we want to put an end to it.”

General Sahir Shamshad Mirza, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee of the Pakistan Armed Forces, warned of what could happen should another clash occur, especially given that the fighting took place not just in the disputed region of Kashmir, but also in Pakistan itself. “The strategic stability with the lowering of this threshold to the dangerous levels if next time such a conflict occurs and the cities are targeted first and the borders become irrelevant mostly, so what you will see is that there could be a chance – I’m not trying to create an alarm but I’m speaking based on logic – there could be a possibility that before the international community intervenes because of the restricted or constricted times window, the damage and destruction may have already taken place.”