By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan summoned India’s top diplomat in Islamabad on Wednesday and lodged a formal protest after an Indian Navy vessel made contact with a Pakistani warship in disputed waters, the most serious naval confrontation between the two nuclear-armed nations since a four-day war last year brought them to the brink of wider conflict.
The Foreign Office said the collision occurred on Tuesday in Pakistan’s Exclusive Economic Zone in the Arabian Sea, during a biennial Pakistan Navy exercise known as SEASPARK-26. According to the ministry’s account, the Indian vessel executed “aggressive manoeuvres” in dangerously close range of a Pakistani naval ship, and the two vessels made contact.
Foreign Office spokesperson Sajjad Haider Khan announced the protest in a statement, saying his ministry had called in the charge d’affaires of the Indian High Commission to hear Pakistan’s objections directly. Khan characterized the episode as a “highly provocative and unacceptable” breach of international maritime law and of a 1991 accord between the two countries requiring advance notice of military exercises and troop movements.
The confrontation marks the first overt military friction between the neighbors since May 2025, when a strike on tourists in Indian-occupied Kashmir’s Pahalgam region set off four days of aerial combat, missile strikes, and cross-border shelling. That conflict ended only after direct American intervention produced a ceasefire on May 10 of that year, following claims from Islamabad that it had downed multiple Indian aircraft, including Rafale fighter jets, and Pakistani accounts describing nearly 87 hours of hostilities.
Khan said the Indian diplomat was told that Pakistan “strongly rejects” what the ministry called a “belligerent Indian action,” and was pressed to relay Islamabad’s position back to New Delhi. He said Pakistan expects India to observe both international law and the bilateral notification agreement, particularly its provisions meant to prevent exactly this kind of maritime incident.
Pakistan’s charge d’affaires in New Delhi is expected to deliver an identical protest to India’s Ministry of External Affairs, according to the Foreign Office. India’s own ministry, for its part, summoned Pakistan’s envoy in New Delhi on Wednesday as well and issued its own demarche over the incident, though Indian officials have not publicly detailed their version of events.
The Foreign Office statement went beyond the bilateral protest to appeal to the broader international community, urging other nations to press India to abandon a “belligerent posture” and to avoid “irresponsible actions” that risk further destabilizing South Asia. “The region can ill afford to remain perpetually hostage to India’s reckless pursuit of conflict and instability,” the statement read.
The incident lands at a moment when the security relationship between the two countries remains raw. Pakistan has repeatedly accused New Delhi of using last year’s Pahalgam attack for political purposes without producing evidence tying Islamabad to it — a claim Pakistani officials renewed as recently as April, on the attack’s first anniversary, when the Foreign Office accused India of “weaponising its false narrative” amid an unrelated regional crisis touched off by the United States and Israel’s war with Iran.
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