Gandhi would weep

On May 12, 2025, the River Sutlej wept quietly at its banks. It had borne witness to centuries of civilisation, to the crumbling of empires, to the forging of borders with ink that smelt like blood. But never had it known betrayal like this, not from the empire, but from the child who once dared to break free from one.

India, the land that once raised the flag of non-violence, has now become what it once struggled to overthrow: a nation intoxicated by might, unrecognisable in its belligerence. It was the British Raj that once drew lines and enforced silence; it is New Delhi now that redraws maps and silences grief with missiles. Gandhi would weep.

India has long fashioned itself as a counterweight to China. Yet beneath the surface of Silicon Valleys and startup dreams lies a darker tale – of a republic quietly morphing into its own imperial adversary.

Operation Sindoor was not just an airstrike. It was a statement: that India no longer seeks accountability, only spectacle. Nine missiles rained down on Pakistani territory, striking a madrassa and a mosque in the early hours of May 7. The justification? A retaliatory strike for the Pahalgam incident, an attack in Occupied Kashmir that left several tourists dead. But here lies the paradox: there is, to date, no forensic link to Pakistan. No intercepts. No confessions. No cross-border infiltration trails. Only suspicion, shaped perhaps more by political necessity than by legal certainty. It was as if the state had grown too large for nuance. And too powerful for restraint.

The irony is almost mythological. Gandhi, whose soul was forged in the fires of peaceful defiance, led the Dandi March in 1930 against Britain’s salt laws. With bare feet and brittle bones, he walked 240 miles to the sea to pick up a fistful of salt, an act so defiant that the Empire trembled.

Ninety-five years later, it is India that has weaponised saltwater. On May 6, India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, a cornerstone of South Asian cooperation since 1960. The treaty, brokered by the World Bank, had survived three wars. It endured nuclear standoffs, cross-border terrorism, and global political realignments. But it could not survive India’s newfound imperial impulse.

With this unilateral suspension, India held Pakistan’s water supply hostage, violating both customary international law governing transboundary watercourses and the principle of pacta sunt servanda under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. To strangle a nation not with soldiers, but with rivers, what name does international law give to such warfare?

Modern India no longer speaks in the dialect of Nehru or Tagore. It speaks in the dialect of dominance, where dissent is ‘anti-national’, negotiation is weakness, and Pakistan is not a neighbour, but a punching bag. This rhetorical shift reflects a paradigm shift in state doctrine, from Gandhian restraint to Modian retribution.

We are witnessing the normalisation of pre-emptive force. A state doctrine rooted in the Bush-era reinterpretation of the Caroline Test, the 19th-century standard for anticipatory self-defence under international law, but now repurposed and expanded. Where an imminent threat need not be proven, only presumed.

India once wore its colonial scars with solemn dignity. It spoke of partition not to gloat, but to grieve. But under this new dispensation, what was once a collective trauma is now political currency. Pakistan, the ‘other’ born of the same womb, has become India’s perpetual villain, an eternal electoral issue. Whether in Pulwama or Sindoor, whether at the Line of Control or the Indus Basin, Pakistan is the canvas on which Indian leaders now paint their nationalist masterpieces.

And the West applauds. Because India, with its billion-strong market, its tech billionaires, its defence contracts, is too big to scold. It is problematic, powerful, profitable. So silence becomes complicity. And Gandhi weeps alone.

Operation Sindoor did not provoke a global outcry. Nor did the Indus Waters Treaty suspension. The UNSC, paralysed by India’s Western courtship, offered no rebuke, and the human rights groups, so vocal, offered only whispers here. The double standard is glaring.

Pakistan has, by contrast, not retaliated in kind. It has sought legal remedies. It has appealed to global institutions. It has done what Gandhi once asked of India: to resist, but not to mirror the oppressor.

India is a civilisation of saints, poets, and revolutionaries. But it is also a state with the world’s largest youth population, armed with rage and algorithms. If it continues down this path, of cartographic aggression, religious militarism, and extrajudicial strikes, it will burn the very moral capital Gandhi once bequeathed it.

Were Gandhi alive today, he would not be in the Indian Prime Minister’s Office. He would be in Kashmir, standing between a checkpoint and a classroom. He would be at the banks of the Sutlej, begging the river to forgive. He would be in Pakistan, accused of ‘sedition’ for preaching peace.

And yet, he would still whisper: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” But perhaps, today, even the blind can see what India has become. Gandhi would weep. The Empire has returned. Only this time, the crown is made in India.

The writer is the director of the Centre for Law, Justice & Policy (CLJP) at Denning Law School. He holds an LLM in Negotiation and Dispute Resolution from Washington University.