New Delhi

In a first-of-its-kind NatStrat, a Delhi-based NGO that researches strategic and security issues, has brought out a detailed list and analysis of the proxy attacks that Pakistan waged against India ever since its birth, culminating in a major punitive retaliation by India in the form of Operation Sindoor this year.

“From 2010 to the present, India has faced a persistent and adaptive wave of terrorism from Pakistan. Attacks ranging from the 2010 German Bakery blast to the 2016 Pathankot and Uri strikes, the 2019 Pulwama suicide bombing, and the 2025 Pahalgam massacre reflected a calibrated effort by Pakistan-based organisations, LeT, JeM, IM, and their proxies, to target India’s civilians, security forces, political processes, and economic stability,” the report by NatStrat says.

In this period, India confronted a shifting threat landscape - from cross-border infiltrations and high-profile assaults on military installations to drone-enabled smuggling, hybrid militancy, and narco-terrorism designed to finance militant networks.

New Delhi’s responses evolved accordingly, from leading an international campaign to cut terror financing and blacklisting Pakistan in the Financial Action Task Force to intelligence crackdowns and surgical strikes in 2016 to the Balakot airstrikes in 2019 and finally the punitive, doctrine-shifting Operation Sindoor in 2025, the report says.

According to the NatStrat report, the story of Pakistani attacks began with the tribal raiders who invaded the then princely State of Jammu and Kashmir on 22nd October 1947 to force the issue of the State’s accession.

A former Pakistan Army Major General, Akbar Khan, chronicles the entire plan and how the raiders were actually regulars of the Pakistani Army. Since then, Pakistan has adopted terrorism as its State policy against India.

From 1947 to 1971, Pakistan launched at least three major hybrid and covert attacks on India in Kashmir with the intent to wrest the Muslim majority state. It also lends active support to the insurgents in northeast India.

India defended its land and raised the issue of Pakistan’s aggression in the UN till it helped the East Pakistan’s rebels to break away from Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh.

“This has evolved into other forms of hybrid warfare, such as narco-terrorism, information warfare, cyber-attacks and fuelling social unrest in India. This document is a compilation of the major incidents, rather than a comprehensive listing of all incidents.

From 1972 to 1989, Pakistan continued to poke India and deepen its faultlines.  Unable to match India’s conventional power, Pakistan targeted Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir, India’s two sensitive border States. The ISI supported the Khalistani movement to the hilt.

 General Zia ul-Haq openly recognised the Khalistan movement as “an opportunity to weaken and distract the Indian government by miring it in yet another insurgent war of a thousand cuts.”

Operation Black Thunder that ended the siege of Golden Temple by Khalistanis

The period from 1989 to 2000 was marked by terrorism becoming a central instrument of Pakistani foreign policy towards India. An intensive wave of terrorist attacks was launched in J&K and across the rest of the country, deliberately designed to exploit societal faultlines.

Despite the scale and intensity of these operations, the Indian state and society displayed remarkable resilience, absorbing the shocks of large-scale terrorism while continuing to withstand Pakistan’s campaign of destabilisation.

Though Pakistan always sought to deny its culpability and refused to cooperate in investigations, several Pakistani-based organisations and individuals are listed as terrorists in UN Security Council Resolutions. Also, Pakistan was put on the grey list of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) for terror financing.

Kashmir's stone pelting armies is a bad memory today

Pakistan-based terrorists have also been involved in incidents across the world, in the United States, Europe and West Asia.

India's response has ranged from raising the matter bilaterally with Pakistan to taking the matter to the UN, the threat of use of force and, most recently, taking targeted military action against terror infrastructure and camps inside Pakistan.

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“The saga of the last nearly eight decades is one of tragedy involving the loss of tens of thousands of innocent lives,” the report says.