Operation Sindoor, launched by India in May 2025 following the Pahalgam terror attack, represents a critical moment in the legal and diplomatic engagement with state-sponsored terrorism.

India’s targeted strikes on Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) infrastructure in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) were framed not merely as retaliatory or defensive actions, but as a form of legal protest against Pakistan's prolonged complicity in fostering terrorist groups.

This article focuses on the doctrine of state responsibility under international law, which provides a foundational framework for holding states accountable for harms committed through or enabled by non-state actors.

As Tal Becker notes in the introduction to his work Terrorism and the State: Rethinking the Rules of State Responsibility, “terrorists operate beneath the radar of the international system," often committing violence that is indistinguishable in impact from traditional inter-state aggression, but evading responsibility due to the non-state identity of the perpetrators.