Framing the Digital Threat: Cybersecurity and Strategic Narratives in India-Pakistan Relations

Abstract

The cyber confrontation between India and Pakistan has become major features for the strategic rivalry between both states. It is shifting their neutral use of digital advancements to critical cyber-espionages and attacks. This research is going to explore securitization of cyberspace by India and Pakistan under the lens of Securitization Theory, which tried to explain how both states framed cyberspace as a existential threat and it requires extraordinary measures. It examines the key cyber-attacks between 1999 and 2025 like hacking of websites, malware activities, espionage activities, as well as government and military network attacks. This study provides an overview of the core components of securitization process using qualitative content analysis of cybersecurity reports, academic research, government documents, and open-source intelligence to estimate the cases of referent objects of digital sovereignty and critical infrastructure, the presence of securitizing actors (national security agencies and political leadership), and a process of framing cyber threats as existential in character. The study describes the incidents in which both nations have cited cyber incidents as a justification of widened surveillance, the development of offensive capabilities in cyberspace, and cyber militarization. The significance of this research is that it couples cyber conflict and the concepts of strategic regional instability and that the digital world should adhere to some rules of conduct. The study also helps to understand cyber deterrence, dynamics of escalation and lack of formalization in the interstate interactions in the cyber sphere in South Asia by tracing the strategic rationality of the specified cyber operations. It comes to the conclusion of the research that unless both states show common interest in some bilateral cyber confidence-building measures and become a participant of global cyber norms, cyberspace will be an unsafe unregulated battlefield in the already weak security system.