The Iron Lady's Clay Feet: Myth, Memory, and Modi’s Pakistan Problem

Comparisons flow with numbing regularity in India's political discourse. "Indira Gandhi would have responded more forcefully." "Indira knew how to handle Pakistan."

With tedious predictability, this refrain surfaces from certain quarters of India's right wing whenever tensions with Pakistan escalate as they have after the recent Pahalgam attack and Operation Sindoor.

But myth is not memory. And 2025 is not 1971.

Let’s dispense with the hagiography. The India of 1971, which Gandhi led to victory over Pakistan, was a different beast from the India of 2025. Start with the obvious: nuclear weapons. Pakistan in 1971 was a conventional power, prickly but manageable.

Today's Pakistan possesses a substantial nuclear arsenal. The strategic doctrine that guided Gandhi's hand simply cannot apply in a nuclear environment. India’s purported airstrike at Kirana Hills is a signal of doctrinal evolution. But the deterrent architecture is no longer a blank slate to be written upon with boldness. It's a tripwire. And lest we forget, WikiLeaks documents later revealed that Indira Gandhi had offered to share nuclear technology with Pakistan in 1974, following India's first nuclear test.

Second, the global architecture that enabled Gandhi's boldness has dissolved. In 1971, the Soviets supplied not just matériel but insurance. Diplomatic, strategic, and psychological. The United States was neck-deep in Vietnam. China was internally mired in Cultural Revolution. India had room. Today, Russia is a threadbare friend, China an assertive adversary, and the United States an ally in principle but not in practice.

Third, the nostalgists conveniently elide the aftermath of the 1971 conflict. Gandhi's India may have won decisively on the battlefield, but the subsequent diplomatic settlement at Shimla represents one of the most egregious capitulations in modern diplomatic history.

As General JFR Jacob (who secured Niazi's surrender in Dhaka) later confided to my maître à penser, Dr Gautam Sen, India's singular achievement was obtaining Pakistan's signature on the surrender document before the Polish resolution at the UN Security Council on 15 December 1971 could mandate a ceasefire.

Indira should have handed over Pakistani prisoners of war to Mujib and got him to start war crime trials that would have lasted for years and heaped untold ignominy on the Pakistani rapist army. Instead, India repatriated 93,000 Pakistani prisoners with remarkable haste and little tangible gain.

What the Gandhi romantics fail to understand is that power in democratic systems is never absolute; it exists within constraints. Gandhi's position in 1971 was the culmination of a remarkable political consolidation.

A compliant parliament, a fragmented opposition, and a political narrative built on the ruins of the Congress “old guard” gave Gandhi extraordinary leeway. 

Modi, by contrast, governs in a more atomised republic: noisier, more federal, and constitutionally allergic to centralisation. Modi's awareness of these limitations reflects political realism.

Perhaps most crucially, unlike his loudest supporters, Modi seems to grasp the volatility of the Indian voter. The same electorate that deified Gandhi in 1971 had turned against her by 1973. By 1975, she had declared an Emergency just to keep the show running.

Most Indian voters live close to the bone. Their priorities, such as jobs, prices, and basic services, are immediate and narrow. Their strategic patience is elastic until the price of onions crosses ₹100 a kilo. They want dignity, yes, but first they want dinner. These concerns are entirely rational, but they rarely align with the long-term strategic needs of a nation aspiring to great power status. And it is this domestic arithmetic, not cowardice, that guides Modi’s calibrated response. Of what use is it to lose power to someone who has explicitly Maoist ideals and is likely not to respond at all to a future attack?

The uncomfortable truth is that much of what Modi does, whether in reform, diplomacy, or statecraft, happens despite his voters, not because of them. Their instincts, more so than voters in developed countries, are transactional and often resistant to necessary but painful change. Real leadership in India means moving faster than the electorate is ready for, and often further than it wants to go, but without the electorate knowing too much about it.

Operation Sindoor has made its point. Pakistan's strategic calculus has been scrambled just enough. A period of uneasy calm may now follow. We did it after Balakot. It brought 6 years of relative quiet. Perhaps this will, too.

In this context, restraint is not a retreat. It is an asset. Escalation imperils growth. Growth is the real weapon. International capital is allergic to volatility. Supply chains hate drama. The real victory lies in increasing the gap between India and Pakistan while simultaneously reducing the gigantic gap in industrial capacity which exists between India and China.

The Iron Lady ruled in an age of telegrams and trench maps. Modi governs in an age of chip fabs and capital flows. It is easy to confuse noise with resolve, escalation with courage. But India’s current situation demands not impulsiveness, but maturity. Real leadership means not just acting decisively, but knowing when to hold back, lest you lose power and end up handing the reins to a Maoist.