"Op. Sindoor is new baseline on how India will respond in future," says Walter Ladwig :::: "India is not a country to turn the other cheek"

 "I think it's shown that it is willing to be and can be successfully assertive in its immediate neighbourhood. 

I think we should assume that Operation Sindoor is the new baseline in terms of how India will respond in the future to terrorist attacks that are reasonably credibly linked to Pakistan or perhaps any of its neighbours. This is not a country that is going to turn the other cheek or simply rely on diplomatic measures...," says Dr Walter Ladwig, senior lecturer of International Relations at King's College London and security expert.

He was asked during an interview in London on what ways significant shift might be seen in India's strategic approach in the coming years.

Asked about the geopolitical landscape in the aftermath of the India-Pakistan conflict of 2025;

he said:

"...The United States has shown a clear preference for India and the steps that it has taken over the last two decades to really cultivate a strategic partnership with India. 

I'm somewhat surprised that the Pakistanis will still seek to deal with the Americans as interlocutors right that they don't see them as being simply on the side of India in the way that Russia is in the way that France is and then of course you have the Chinese kind of clearly in Pakistan's corner as their principal military patron... 

There does not seem to be one single actor necessarily who can really cajole the two sides to the table," says Dr Walter Ladwig.  

He also said:

"...This is a really watershed event. We are in undiscovered territory in the sense that we have no historical examples of multiple uses of air power by two nuclear-armed states against each other. I think some of the media rhetoric around nuclear risk and so forth is overblown. 

And again, the two sides in practice actually seem to operate in a quite restrained and carefully calibrated manner. But there's a lot to study and learn from this particular episode because this is the first time we've had this happen in history." 

"...The US and many European countries have been working to forge strategic partnerships with India because they see a reasonable degree of geopolitical alignment both today and going forward..," says Dr Walter Ladwig.