Every few years, the machinery of statecraft creaks to life, a court in Mumbai issues fresh warrants, and headlines declare that justice is closing in on the architects of the 26/11 attacks. The latest move—initiating trials in absentia against conspirators sitting safely across the border—is being hailed by talking heads and official spokespersons as a bold stride toward accountability.
It is nothing of the sort. It is expensive, performative theater designed to soothe an electorate while changing precisely zero operational realities on the ground.
I have watched diplomats, defense analysts, and legal theorists applaud these symbolic gestures for over a decade. They mistake noise for signal. They confuse the issuance of an arrest warrant in a domestic courtroom with the actual projection of state power. If you think an empty chair in a Mumbai courtroom bothers a handler sitting in Lahore or Rawalpindi, you are fundamentally misunderstanding how modern proxy warfare works.
Let us dismantle the lazy consensus.
The Illusion of Extraterritorial Jurisdiction
The mainstream narrative peddled by the Ministry of External Affairs and echoed by cable news pundits relies on a comforting fiction: that international law and domestic criminal procedure have teeth against hostile sovereign states harboring non-state actors.
They point to the trial in absentia as a triumph of judicial persistence. The argument goes that documenting evidence, recording witness testimonies, and securing formal indictments build an unassailable global dossier.
Here is the inconvenient truth. Jurisdiction without enforcement is just paperwork.
When a court conducts a trial where the defendant cannot be extradited, cannot be cross-examined by effective defense counsel, and will never serve a day of the sentence, the proceedings cease to be a legal instrument. They become political liturgy. You are holding a trial for an audience that will never watch, presided over by a judge whose writ stops dead at the international border.
Adversarial justice systems require presence. They require the friction of confrontation. When you remove the defendant from the room, you turn a trial into an affidavit reading session with extra steps.
What the Pundits Miss About Asymmetric Deterrence
The conventional analysis treats terrorism purely as a criminal law enforcement problem. That is a category error.
Cross-border terrorism backed by a nuclear-armed state is a strategic instrument of foreign policy. Treating it like a mafia hit or a serial killer case means you are applying nineteenth-century domestic legal tools to twenty-first-century hybrid warfare.
Imagine a scenario where a municipal traffic court attempts to fine a satellite orbiting in outer space. That is roughly how effective a Mumbai court order is against a handler protected by an institutional security apparatus in a neighboring country.
The pundits love to cite the dossier counts, the red corner notices, and the Interpol bulletins as metrics of progress. Bureaucrats measure effort by the weight of the paper generated. Realists measure progress by changed behavior. Have these trials stopped a single handler from planning the next infiltration? Has any mastermind lost sleep over a non-bailable warrant that requires them to simply never book a flight to India?
Of course not. In fact, these public legal maneuvers often provide domestic intelligence agencies with a convenient alibi. They offer the appearance of relentless pursuit without requiring the high-risk, high-stakes kinetic or covert actions that true deterrence demands.
The Cost of Performative Legalism
There is a real downside to this endless cycle of symbolic prosecutions. It creates moral hazard and strategic complacency.
When the state tells its citizens that justice is being served through empty-chair trials, it dampens the pressure for structural, systemic reform in intelligence sharing, maritime border surveillance, and inter-agency coordination. It replaces hard security upgrades with soft public relations wins.
Worse, it cheapens the very concept of justice for the victims of 26/11. True justice for an atrocity of that scale requires dismantling the infrastructure that produced it, imposing crippling economic or diplomatic costs on the host state, or utilizing clandestine disruption methods that make state-sponsored terrorism unprofitable.
Paper tigers do not bite. Handing down life sentences to ghosts does not deter anyone who calculates that the geopolitical upside of proxy warfare vastly outweighs the risk of a strongly worded diplomatic demarche.
Stopping the Cycle
If India wants to alter the calculus of cross-border terror, it has to stop playing a game where the opponent does not even acknowledge the rulebook.
First, stop treating legal indictments as strategic victories. An indictment is a prerequisite, not an outcome.
Second, align the cost of harboring terrorists with the survival of the regime doing the harboring. That requires economic pressure, diplomatic isolation, and covert operational deterrence that leaves no fingerprints but extracts a heavy price.
Until the state abandons the comforting delusion that a courtroom in south Mumbai can reach across a heavily militarized border and snap handcuffs onto a protected asset, these trials will remain what they have always been.
A distraction.
