Between Dharma and Deterrence: India’s Civilisational Restraint in an Age of Expansive War

As the United States and Israel unleash wide-scale strikes on Iran, India’s tradition of measured force offers an alternative to Western doctrines of overwhelming dominance.

The reported killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei marks not merely the end of a man, but the possible unravelling of a system. For more than three decades, Iran’s Supreme Leader fused clerical authority with revolutionary militarism, anchoring a state whose reach extended from Beirut to the Bab el-Mandeb. His death, whether it produces reform, retrenchment or chaos, will test the resilience of institutions such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the latticework of militias that constitute Tehran’s forward deterrence.

Yet beyond the immediate drama lies a broader question about the nature of force itself. Over the past two years, the United States and Israel have conducted strikes across Gaza, southern Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran. The ostensible aims of these operations have been to degrade hostile capabilities, re-establish deterrence and reshape regional equations. Precision munitions, targeted assassinations and decapitation strikes have been deployed as instruments of strategic clarity.

But clarity on the map rarely translates into the same on the ground. In Gaza, whole neighbourhoods have been reduced to rubble. In southern Lebanon, the whine of drones has become ambient noise. In Yemen and Syria, air campaigns conducted in the name of deterrence have deepened humanitarian misery in landscapes already scarred by years of civil war. Even where militants are killed, a large number of civilians lie buried alongside them. The language of ‘collateral damage’ has grown anaemic beside the weight of human loss.

Inheritance of Force

Modern Western doctrine prides itself on precision and legal oversight. Yet it accepts an underlying premise that overwhelming force when applied decisively can apparently reset hostile systems. This belief descends from a long Western inheritance. From the Napoleonic wars to the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, industrial modernity has taught that victory often required crushing capacity and morale alike. The Second World War, with its total mobilisation, etched into strategic consciousness the idea that survival might demand unrestrained power.

To take the case of Israel. Its doctrine has evolved under even more acute pressure. Born amid war and shaped by existential threat since its birth in 1948, it internalised the imperative of pre-emption. The Six-Day War of 1967 became a canonical example to strike first, strike hard and disable command structures before the enemy can respond. In subsequent decades, targeted killings and air campaigns in Lebanon and Syria have ruthlessly extended this ethos.

The United States, for its part, globalised this approach. From Iraq in 2003 to the drone campaigns in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, it has sought to neutralise threats at source. Its vocabulary of shock and awe and regime change betrays a confidence that superior technology can compress wars into manageable episodes.

The result of these strikes has been a ledger of civilian casualties that dwarfs militant losses in raw human grief. Children are buried alongside militant commanders while entire families vanish in seconds.

Against this backdrop, India’s Operation Sindoor, launched last year in reprisal of the horrific massacre of 25 civilians in Pahalgam with the object of dismantling terror bases in Pakistan, was strikingly different. It was not punitive warfare but measured retaliation in every sense, carefully calibrated strikes aimed solely at terrorist infrastructure while scrupulously avoiding civilian targets. The emphasis was not on demonstrating dominance over a population but on isolating non-state actors from the societies in which they operate.

Civilisational Grammar

This did not stem from merely military or diplomatic prudence. Operation Sindoor unfolded within a far older civilisational grammar. Hindu philosophy, unlike many exclusivist Abrahamic traditions, does not posit a singular truth to be imposed upon others. Its metaphysical pluralism of “truth is one, the wise call it by many names” has long encouraged a social order capable of absorbing diversity without annihilating it.

In the realm of war, that sensibility evolved into the idea of dharma yuddha: a righteous war constrained by ethics. The Mahabharata, India’s vast epic of fratricidal conflict, does not revel in carnage. It portrays war as a tragic necessity, undertaken only after diplomacy collapses and moral order appears imperilled. Even amid its cataclysmic battles, codes of conduct are repeatedly invoked wherein warriors are not to strike the unarmed, combat is to cease at sunset and non-combatants cannot be considered legitimate prey.

And when such norms are breached - as they often are during the 18-day war - the violators are admonished, cursed or made to suffer consequences. The very fact that the rules are clearly articulated has established a moral perimeter that has long governed the code by which Hindu kings and prices have lived by.

Kautilya’s Arthashastra, often caricatured as ruthlessly pragmatic, nonetheless distinguishes between open warfare and concealed operations, urging rulers to consider long-term stability over immediate vengeance.

To invoke such precedents is not to claim civilisational innocence. Nor is modern India immune to excess. Insurgencies have been met with forceful counter-measures, mistakes have occurred and innocents have suffered.

Restraint as Virtue

Yet India’s strategic narrative, in contrast to other nations, has consistently returned to restraint as virtue. Surgical strikes across the Line of Control in 2016, the Balakot airstrike in 2019 and now Operation Sindoor have all been limited, defensive and discriminating. The objective of deterrence has been scrupulously followed.

No better example suffices here than India’s magnanimous treatment of Pakistani prisoners-of-war (POWs) after Pakistan’s humiliating defeat in 1971. After a swift and decisive campaign that led to the creation of Bangladesh, India found itself in custody of roughly 93,000 Pakistani prisoners of war - one of the largest surrenders since World War II.

Yet what followed was not vengeance. The prisoners were housed in camps across India and provided food and medical care. Within two years, under the Simla Agreement, India had repatriated them in full, despite the fresh memory of atrocities committed by the Pakistani army in East Pakistan, where hundreds of thousands of Bengali civilians had been killed and millions displaced.

The contrast with India’s conduct in modern wars and what is happening in the broader West Asian theatre is therefore philosophical as well as operational.

Abrahamic traditions are intertwined with imperial expansion or ideological confrontation. In secular guise, it seeks to frame conflicts as battles between ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ ‘freedom’ and ‘terror.’

Hindu thought, by contrast, rarely seeks to convert the adversary. It seeks equilibrium. There is always space for coexistence after conflict. Historically, this translated into a civilisation comfortable with layered identities. Buddhism, Jainism and later Sikhism arose within the Indic fold without annihilating what preceded them. Heterodox schools such as Charvaka, which denied metaphysical premises altogether, were debated rather than exterminated. Even when India absorbed waves of external influence – be they Greek, Persian, Islamic – it has always tended towards accommodation and synthesis.

Contrast this with the aggressive expeditions undertaken by agents of Abrahamic religions - from the violent medieval crusades to modern missionary enterprises, from the bloody Islamic invasions of India to today’s ‘secularised’ campaigns for the promotion of democracy.

In stark contrast, the concept of equilibrium runs deep in Hindu cosmology. The universe itself is sustained through cycles of creation, preservation and dissolution where Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva as metaphors of balance rather than linear conquest. Ethical life revolves around maintaining harmony between the competing obligations of personal duty, social responsibility and cosmic order. While conflict is acknowledged as inevitable in human affairs, yet our civilizational aim has always been restoration and never annihilation.

Modern India’s plural constitutional order, for all its imperfections, draws sustenance from this civilisational inheritance. Its democratic ethos has proved capable of accommodating multiple faiths, languages and ethnicities within a single political framework.

In a world increasingly tempted by moral absolutism, the Hindu philosophical tradition offers an alternative grammar that prizes restraint over retribution and coexistence over conquest. It is time the world acknowledged and learnt from this tradition.