New Delhi: India must keep the cost of Pakistan’s proxy war high, former chief of defence (CDS) staff Gen Anil Chauhan (retd) said on Saturday, September 5. Delivering the annual G.B. Pant memorial lecture, he said Pakistan’s recent defence pacts could push it towards “some kind of miscalculation again,” The New Indian Express reports. At the same time, he said China was “an absolutely different and more long-term and comprehensive challenge” for India.“Deterrence must operate across the spectrum. India must be able to raise the cost of proxy war,” the former CDS said, referring to Operation Sindoor and India keeping the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance as possible ways to change Pakistan’s behaviour.Chauhan suggested that such steps could curb Pakistan’s “confidence” following the Saudi-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement signed last year and the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement signed last month.Even if India targets sites it considers parts of terrorist networks in Pakistan, the ideological, financial and physical infrastructure that support such outfits may still thrive, he said. As a nuclear power, Pakistan has created stability at the apex, meaning it would refrain from all-out war, while the space for terrorism and cross-border activity would “expand,” he added.Referring to China a week before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s much-anticipated but not yet announced visit to attend the BRICS summit in India, Chauhan described both nations as “major Asian powers, large economies and civilisational states”.“The future of Asia, I believe, will depend substantially on how India and China manage it,” he said, TNIE reports. Chauhan also said the India-China relationship cannot be held hostage to “only boundary issues”.He again struck a different note from Deputy Chief of Army Staff Lieutenant General Rahul R. Singh, who had said a year ago that Pakistan’s references during DGMO-level talks to the status of Indian assets indicated that it was receiving information from China in real time.“When DGMO-level talks were going on, Pakistan was actually mentioning that we know your important vector is primed, and it is ready for action…He was getting live inputs from China,” Singh had said.As The Wire earlier reported, Chauhan said on August 25, 2026, while delivering a lecture at the Vivekananda International Foundation, that any assessment that China had provided Pakistan with real-time intelligence during Operation Sindoor was “speculation”.He drew a distinction between three possible forms of Chinese support to Pakistan – servicing Chinese-origin military equipment, commercially available satellite imagery and possibly transmitting real-time information through secure channels.On the last option, he said there was no way for India to establish whether it happened. “That could be falling under the thing of speculation,” Chauhan had said.Cautioning against treating Pakistan’s access to satellite imagery as proof of Chinese intelligence support, Chauhan had said that it was impossible to determine whether the information came from satellite or human intelligence.