So adversarial is the current climate and so hyper charged are sentiments, that there is little room for introspection on Pakistan’s behaviour in the past. The Mumbai terrorist attack of 2008 is a case in point. The reams of evidence then gathered and presented were being processed, although at a snail’s pace, through the Pakistan legal system. Lack of evidence was not really the issue and a number of distinguished Pakistani police officers and prosecutors built a strong case. But an all-pervasive defensiveness where India is concerned, made blocking that case into a kind of patriotic duty for a certain Pakistani mindset.

In the end, this defensive mindset meant that Pakistan found it more expedient to take action a decade later against some of the Mumbai conspirators to address the Financial Action Task Force stranglehold in the form of being put on the Grey List. Taking action in the face of a multilateral onslaught was thus preferred rather than follow the due process of its own legal system on the basis of the evidence presented by India. Abandoning the latter course had the bigger plus of showing defiance to India.

In the process, the bilateral relationship with India was sacrificed over the years 2014-17, notwithstanding all the efforts of the then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. From the fate of the 2008 Mumbai conspiracy case in Pakistan, there is a kind of linear trajectory all the way to the current crisis in India Pakistan relations.

The absence of any convergence in both the public and official narratives emerging from both countries, of course, underscores the seriousness of the current situation. The expectation that some manner of military kinetic action is next on the cards is also widely shared. In India, this is underlined by public sentiment that kinetic action at a higher notch than the Balakot action of 2019 or the post Uri surgical strike of 2016 is the minimum requirement given the scale of the outrage in Pahalgam.

Insofar as the mood in Pakistan can be deciphered and assessed, it is that its response would also be of a correspondingly higher intensity. This respective readiness to climb further up the escalation ladder summarises the present crisis situation although there is less attention being paid to what happens after the initial rungs have been climbed.

In India, it is also noteworthy how quickly all options other than military and kinetic steps are being discounted. This applies in particular to the package of diplomatic measures announced soon after the Pahalgam attack. Easily the most significant of these and far outweighing any other sanction ever deployed against Pakistan was the announcement on keeping the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance. Because this measure was packaged along with the routine victims of India Pakistan downsides — visas, trade, expulsion of personnel — to many in India this very significant step appeared as just one more diplomatic message. The fact that capacities do not exist to provide any kind of tangible animation to this step in any significant way, further degrades its efficacy in public estimation as being only a somewhat abstract measure.

In brief, that a very serious and significant sanction has been deployed is insufficiently recognised or even understood by many in India. In Pakistan, on the other hand, the import of this step is not only fully recognised but also greatly amplified. Water security has been a vital priority of Pakistan’s strategic mindset for as long as the country has been in existence. To many in its strategic community, Kashmir is essential to Pakistan not just for ideological, religious or historical reasons but also because this is the only way its water security can be ensured. In brief, placing the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance is very much akin to pressing a raw exposed nerve. The significance of the step is magnified by the fact that it has coincided with a particularly intense contestation in Pakistan regarding sharing of waters between Sindh and Punjab — one of the many federal fault lines that haunts Pakistan’s politics.

This disjunction between Indian and Pakistani moods is not in itself new and, in fact, is endemic to each of their past crisis situations. In Pakistan, there is an exaggerated sense of self-righteousness that it is being accused of having perpetuated a massacre without any evidence. This is accompanied by an equally exaggerated sense of injury that a severe water sanction has been imposed on it unjustly.

In India, the outrage over Pahalgam is real and natural. It is accompanied by the sense that so far, no real action has been taken against Pakistan, when, in fact, one of the strongest instruments available in both symbolic and real terms has already been deployed.

As we await the next steps, it is also perhaps of use to keep in mind this disjunction between assessments in India and in Pakistan.

It provides both an illustration of the risks attendant to the current situation, as equally a pointer that further steps envisaged should be based on clinical assessments and not simply on prevalent public moods.

TCA Raghavan is a former Indian high commissioner to Singapore and Pakistan. The views expressed are personal