Bleed India with a Thousand Cuts

Bleed India with a Thousand Cuts is a military doctrine followed by the Pakistani military against India. It consists of waging covert war against India using insurgents at multiple locations. According to scholar Aparna Pande, this view was put forward in various studies by the Pakistani military, particularly in its Staff College, Quetta. Peter Chalk and Christine Fair cite the former director of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) explicating the strategy.

In a 1965 speech to the UN Security Council, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, former Prime Minister and former President of Pakistan, declared a thousand-year war against India. Reetika Sharma writes that Pakistani Army Chief General Zia-ul-Haq gave form to Bhutto's "thousand years war" with the 'bleeding India through a thousand cuts' doctrine using covert and low-intensity warfare with militancy and infiltration. This doctrine was first attempted during the Punjab insurgency and then in Kashmir insurgency using India's western border with Pakistan. Pakistan has devised a malevolent strategy aimed at instigating religio-political turmoil in India's border states of Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab. This strategy involves supporting and fueling acts of terror-induced violence, with the explicit intention of causing significant problems for India.