NARENDRA MODI, India’s prime minister, spoke mainly in Hindi as he addressed supporters two days after last week’s deadly militant attack on tourists in the Indian region of Jammu & Kashmir. At one point, though, he switched to English to deliver what he described as a message to the entire world. “India will identify, track and punish every terrorist and their backers,” said Mr Modi, who rarely uses English, even when speaking abroad or with foreign media. “We will pursue them to the ends of the Earth.” The world now waits to see how Mr Modi plans to fulfill that promise. On April 27th the Indian Navy conducted long-range missile drills; India also said its troops had responded to small arms fire from Pakistani positions on the two countries’ disputed border for the third consecutive night.

NARENDRA MODI, India’s prime minister, spoke mainly in Hindi as he addressed supporters two days after last week’s deadly militant attack on tourists in the Indian region of Jammu & Kashmir. At one point, though, he switched to English to deliver what he described as a message to the entire world. “India will identify, track and punish every terrorist and their backers,” said Mr Modi, who rarely uses English, even when speaking abroad or with foreign media. “We will pursue them to the ends of the Earth.” The world now waits to see how Mr Modi plans to fulfill that promise. On April 27th the Indian Navy conducted long-range missile drills; India also said its troops had responded to small arms fire from Pakistani positions on the two countries’ disputed border for the third consecutive night.

India has yet to present clear evidence of who conducted the attack on April 22nd that killed 26 mostly Hindu men in Pahalgam, a popular tourist spot in the Muslim-majority region. But local police are searching for two Pakistani suspects and one Indian. Indian officials allege cross-border involvement from Pakistan, which (like India) claims all of Kashmir while controlling only one part. And though Pakistan denies any role, retired Indian military and security officials blame the Pakistani armed forces, which have long had close ties to militant groups in Kashmir.

India has already responded on the diplomatic and economic fronts, expelling some of Pakistan’s diplomats and all its citizens, closing the two countries’ only border crossing, and suspending a river-sharing treaty. Pakistan has also ejected several Indian diplomats, suspended bilateral trade, closed its airspace to Indian airlines and threatened to withdraw from a treaty defining the disputed border in Kashmir. Still, with diplomatic, trade and travel links already at a low ebb since India revoked Jammu & Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status in 2019, many of those moves were largely symbolic.

The big question is what, if any, military action India will take. The attack was the deadliest in Kashmir since a suicide bombing in 2019 that killed 40 Indian policemen, and the bloodiest strike against tourists there since an insurgency against Indian rule began in 1989. Mr Modi has already set two precedents for military responses. India sent ground forces into Pakistan-controlled Kashmir to hit militant targets 11 days after an attack on an Indian military base in 2016 and conducted air strikes on alleged militant sites in Pakistan 12 days after the suicide bombing in 2019.

So Mr Modi now faces pressure from the public (especially his Hindu nationalist support base) and from some parts of his own military and security establishment to take swift military action that goes a step further, possibly including missile or drone strikes. “In such a situation, the king must protect the people,” Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist group from which Mr Modi’s political party emerged, said in a speech on April 26th.

Yet India has few good options for more muscular kinetic action that would not risk provoking a bigger conflict. The nuclear armed-neighbours have already fought two wars and one more limited conflict over Kashmir. Pakistan has made it clear that it will respond in kind to any fresh Indian military action. Tit-for-tat missile strikes would be especially risky given the uncertainty each side would have about whether they were carrying nuclear or conventional warheads. And though India’s operations in 2016 and 2019 played well at home, the strategic outcomes were questionable. India’s response in 2019, especially, shows how unpredictable such operations can be: Pakistan shot down one Indian fighter jet and captured the pilot although it returned him unharmed after a few days.

Some retired Indian military and security officials are therefore calling for a more calibrated response that exploits India’s newfound strengths. That could still include limited military action—perhaps a combination of ground and air strikes against militant targets in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. “The military option is still on the table,” Deependra Singh Hooda, a retired general who led the Indian response in 2016, told one Indian television news channel. But he said India should take time to pick targets where it had a complete chance of success. “Revenge is best served cold,” he says. “Let’s not get swayed by public sentiment that we must do something immediately.”

A more calculated Indian response is also likely to include an expansion of covert action, including the assassination of Pakistani militant leaders and others that India accuses of involvement in attacks on Indian targets. Although India denies conducting any such activity, Pakistani officials have accused it of being behind an increase in such attacks inside Pakistan since 2021. American and Canadian officials have also accused Indian officials of involvement in the assassination of a Sikh separatist in Canada in 2023 and the attempted killing of another in America the same year.

At the same time, India could rally international support against Pakistan in an effort to isolate it diplomatically and put pressure on it economically. That could include attempting to disrupt its access to the next tranche of a $7bn bailout from the International Monetary Fund which it secured last summer. India will be trying, in particular, to leverage its friendly relations with President Donald Trump’s administration, which has voiced strong support for India since the attack and whose relations with Pakistan are less of a priority than during Mr Trump’s first term, given American forces’ withdrawal from neighbouring Afghanistan in 2021.

Indian advocates of such an approach say it will help to penalise Pakistan without provoking an unpredictable military conflagration. They fear that Pakistan’s army chief, General Asim Munir, may see such a conflict as an opportunity to draw international attention to Kashmir, to rally support for the Pakistani armed forces, and to undermine the popularity of the jailed opposition leader Imran Khan. Pakistan’s military leadership is also facing criticism at home over the escalation of a separatist insurgency in the western region of Balochistan, which it accuses India of supporting.

Still, even a more nuanced Indian response carries enormous risks. Pakistan is more politically and economically fragile and less susceptible to Western pressure than it was during the last standoff with India in 2019. Non-military Indian measures against Pakistan could have unpredictable consequences too. Following India’s suspension of the Indus Waters treaty last week, Pakistan said that it would view any Indian attempt to block or divert the relevant rivers as an act of war. And Pakistan still has close ties to China, which could slow or reverse a rapprochement with India that has been under way since Indian and Chinese authorities resolved a four-year standoff over their disputed border in October. Whatever Mr Modi decides in the coming days, this is a perilous moment for all.