India’s provocative and illegal military campaign against Pakistan, “Operation Sindoor,” has brought South Asia’s rival nuclear-armed states to the brink of all-out war.

Emboldened by India’s anti-China war alliance with US imperialism, its far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is attempting to “change the rules” of the game in the reactionary strategic conflict between the Indian and Pakistani bourgeoisies.

After four days of aerial combat, including Indian attacks deep inside Punjab and massive cross-border artillery barrages, a ceasefire was declared last Saturday. But the two sides continue to exchange bellicose threats, while boasting that they bested their rival in battle and whipping up aggressive communally-infused nationalism.

In an address to the nation Monday evening, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi insisted that India has only “paused” Operation Sindoor. He and other top Indian officials have poured cold water on the claims of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the ceasefire will soon be followed by negotiations in a third country. New Delhi is insisting that all the “retaliatory” actions it took after it blamed Pakistan, without supplying a shred of evidence, for a brutal April 22 terrorist attack in disputed Kashmir, will remain in place for the foreseeable future. These include India’s suspension of its participation in the Indus Waters Treaty, which threatens to deprive water-scarce Pakistan of access to the water that irrigates 80 percent of its agriculture and accounts for much of its power generation.

Any future negotiations, Modi vowed in his nationally-televised Monday speech, would be restricted to India’s demands relating to Pakistan’s support for terrorism and New Delhi’s claim to sovereignty over all of disputed Kashmir, including Pakistan-occupied Azad Kashmir.

Even under the threat of an all-out war that could spiral into a catastrophic nuclear conflict, all India’s opposition parties have rallied behind the Modi-led BJP government in the name of “defending the nation.” They are supporting its hawkish stance against Pakistan and joining with it in trumpeting the prowess of India’s military. They all promote New Delhi’s false narrative that the reactionary strategic conflict between India and Pakistan and the mass disaffection of the population of Indian-held Kashmir are due solely to the machinations and malevolence of Islamabad.

The Congress Party, till recently the bourgeoisie’s preferred party of national government, has effectively attacked Modi from the right. It has led much of the opposition in accusing the BJP government of ceding to US pressure by agreeing to the ceasefire, pointing to comments from US President Donald Trump and Rubio in which they boasted that US intervention was critical in brokering the May 10 ceasefire and claimed that Washington had threatened to suspend trade with both countries if they didn’t comply.

A particularly foul role has been played by the Stalinist parliamentary parties. They claim to be the fiercest opponents of the Hindu supremacist BJP and the Modi government. In the name of fighting the Hindu far right, they have for decades suppressed the class struggle and harnessed militant workers and socialist-minded youth to the Congress and a host of right-wing ethno-regionalist and caste-ist parties.

Yet they have all extended their support to the government in labelling Islamabad as the “aggressor.” The Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, and Communist party of India (CPI) lauded the military for its “professionalism” in raining missiles and artillery shells on Pakistan.

The opposition parties have given their support to the Modi government throughout the war crisis that it has whipped up over the past three weeks with the aim of asserting India’s primacy over Pakistan and promoting authoritarianism and communal reaction at home.

Indeed, the BJP, which commonly labels the opposition as “anti-national” and appeasers of Pakistan and China, has repeatedly commended it in recent days for its staunch support.

The Congress and its INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) opposition bloc allies all followed the government’s lead in immediately proclaiming Pakistan responsible for the brutal April 22 terrorist attack. All supported the provocative “retaliatory” measures the government announced within 24 hours of the attack, including the suspension of India’s participation in the Indus Waters Treaty—an action that Delhi had never before taken in 65 years, despite having fought two declared wars with Pakistan, several undeclared wars and numerous border skirmishes. Similarly, they have all either explicitly backed or made the most muted criticisms of the campaign of repression the government and security forces have mounted in Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir—dragnet searches, mass arrests, home demolitions and other collective punishments—in the name of suppressing terrorism.

And the opposition parties have all hailed “Operation Sindoor.” No sooner did the government announce that on the night of May 6-7 Indian missiles had struck targets in nine towns and villages deep inside Pakistan, including in the country’s Punjabi heartland, than the Congress Party Working Committee declared its “full support.” Congress Party leader Rahul Gandhi posted on X, “We’re proud of our armed forces. Jai Hind! (Victory to India)”

Similar comments were made by one opposition leader after another, and they would continue as the conflict escalated in the ensuing days, as both countries breached what they knew to be the other’s “red lines” to target military bases and ultimately the air base attached to Pakistan’s national military headquarters in Rawalpindi.

“Saluting our forces and every braveheart in uniform. India is proud of you,” wrote Aam Aadmi Party leader and former Delhi Chief Minister Kejriwal. Speaking at the pro-Operation Sindoor rally his Tamil Nadu state government held last Saturday, Chief Minister, DMK leader and close ally of the Stalinist CPM and CPI, M.K. Stalin declared, “This rally reflects the sentiments of every Tamil—our deep respect, gratitude, and solidarity with the Indian Army, which continues to protect the nation’s sovereignty with unmatched courage.” 

Opposition leaders, including from the largest Stalinist party, the CPM, dutifully attended the all-party meeting that the BJP government summoned last Thursday. As they had at a similar meeting held on April 24, two days after the terrorist attack in Pahalgam, they gave their full support to the government.

“In this hour of crisis, we are with the government,” Gandhi told reporters at the meeting’s conclusion.  The only complaint from the Congress—one shared by all the parliamentary Stalinist parties, including the Maoist CPI-ML (Liberation)—was that Modi did not personally attend the all-party meeting, leaving it to Home Minister Amit Shah, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, and others to brief the opposition parliamentarians.

The belligerent stance of the opposition parties and their indifference to the threat an all-out war between India and Pakistan would pose to the people of South Asia and the world highlights their class role as ruthless representatives of the Indian bourgeoisie and defenders of its state.

All of them tout that state, even today when it is led by the would-be Hindu strongman Modi and is riven by the deepest class divides, as a fount of democracy and “conquest of the people.”

In reality, it was founded through a reactionary deal with British imperialism, whereby the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947-48 along communal lines to create an avowedly Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu India, so as to stabilize bourgeois rule and suppress the mass anti-imperialist movement that had convulsed South Asia in the preceding decades.

As India’s governing party for some 55 of its 78 years as an independent state, the Congress Party has faithfully pursued the Indian bourgeoisie’s strategic rivalry with its Pakistani counterpart through war, intrigue and mass repression in Kashmir, while adapting to and conniving with the Hindu right at home.

Led by the Congress Party, the INDIA alliance backs to the hilt India’s “global strategic’ partnership with US imperialism. In fact, it was initiated by the Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance government as the US waged neo-colonial wars of plunder and conquest in Iraq and Afghanistan and, in the name of Obama’s “Pivot to Asia,” began to redeploy its global military resources to prepare for war with Beijing.

In 2019, the Congress Party leadership expressed certain reservations about the “surgical” strike Modi ordered on Pakistan following the attack on the Pulwama military base in Indian-held Kashmir, which pushed the subcontinent to the brink of war. The BJP cynically exploited the incident to launch its re-election campaign. Later that same year, Gandhi and the Congress claimed to oppose Modi’s constitutional coup, whereby—through executive order in the dead of night—his government stripped Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only majority Muslim state, of its special autonomous status and reduced it to a central government-controlled Union Territory.

The Congress leadership’s full-throated support for Modi’s even more reckless attempt to change the dynamic of Indo-Pakistani relations and assert India as the regional hegemon is indicative of the sharp shift of the entire ruling class and all of its political representatives to the right under the impact of intensifying capitalist crisis.

As always, the role of the Stalinists is to put a left face on the actions of the ruling class and channel the opposition of workers and toilers behind its parties and institutions.

By supporting the BJP government’s attack on Pakistan, the Stalinists have given a boost to the Hindu-supremacist far right, allied with the military-security establishment, and assisted the ruling class in covering up the predatory economic and geostrategic interests it is pursuing in its conflict with Pakistan.

The CPM’s May 7 Polit Bureau statement on Operation Sindoor gave full support to the largest Indian attack on Pakistan in decades. Repeating the line of the government almost word for word, it declared the attack “was carried out by the Indian Armed Forces with the objective of destroying terrorist camps and infrastructure in PoK (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir) and Pakistan. According to the armed forces, these strikes were focused, measured, and non-escalatory.”

In its press release, the CPI asserted that the “targeted nature of the strikes—avoiding Pakistani military assets and focusing solely on terrorist infrastructure—demonstrates a calibrated and non-escalatory approach, prioritising accountability without provoking full-scale conflict.”

Workers in India must resolutely oppose their government and ruling class, their military actions, intrigues and war mongering. They must establish their class unity with the workers and toilers of Pakistan in the common fight against imperialism, the venal rule of the rival national bourgeoisies and their communal state-system, and for the United Socialist States of South Asia.

This requires the building of a Trotskyist, that is genuine socialist internationalist, party of the working class in opposition to the CPM and the other counterfeit “communist” parties. For decades they have functioned as part of the Indian political establishment, while propagating the nationalist-Stalinist perversion of Marxism that was developed by the privileged bureaucracy that usurped power within the workers’ state established by the 1917 October Revolution, and ultimately restored capitalism and dissolved the Soviet Union.