Spoiler: mostly paperwork, occasionally a hotline call, and a fairly reliable rendezvous back here in six months.
So what actually happens next. Based on precedent, not much, at least not visibly, and that is worth understanding rather than lamenting.
The immediate steps are already underway, and they are mirrored on both sides. India summoned Pakistan’s chargé d’affaires in New Delhi, lodged a formal protest, and instructed its own chargé d’affaires in Islamabad to lodge a matching protest with Pakistan’s foreign ministry, citing both the specific 1991 treaty article allegedly breached and the broader pattern of close encounters over the past six months.
Pakistan did the same in reverse: its Foreign Office summoned India’s chargé d’affaires in Islamabad and lodged its own protest, instructing the Indian envoy to convey that Islamabad “strongly rejects” what it called a “belligerent Indian action.” This is the standard opening sequence for a naval incident between the two countries, and it played out almost identically, on both sides, in 2011 after the PNS Babur-INS Godavari episode.
What typically does not happen is anything resembling accountability with teeth. There is no independent bilateral naval incident investigation body that both India and Pakistan defer to for episodes like this one. Each navy conducts its own internal review, if it conducts one publicly at all, and neither side has strong incentive to publish findings that could be read as an admission of fault. Pakistan has offered a public countercharge, but has yet to issue a detailed, bridge-level account of what its own crew aboard PNS Hunain believed was happening in the minutes before the collision, just as India has not offered independent verification of its own sequence beyond official sourcing.
Behind the public statements, there is a quieter mechanism worth noting: the Directors General of Military Operations hotline between the two countries, a direct line connecting military headquarters in New Delhi and Rawalpindi that has existed for decades and was used as recently as the ceasefire following last year’s four-day conflict. Along with other established communication channels, it exists precisely to de-escalate incidents like this one without it spiralling into something larger. Its use in this specific case has not been publicly confirmed, but its existence is part of why a naval collision, even one alleged to breach a bilateral treaty, is unlikely on its own to trigger anything beyond diplomatic friction, particularly against the backdrop of an already tense post-Operation Sindoor relationship where both governments have strong incentive to avoid a maritime incident becoming the spark for something neither side wants.
The most likely near-term outcome, going by the 2011 precedent, is this: the mutual protests sit on the diplomatic record without further public escalation, neither side substantially revises its account, both navies resume normal patrol patterns within days, and the incident becomes another data point cited the next time this happens, which, if the six-month pattern Indian officials have described continues, may not be very far off.
That is not a satisfying ending for a piece that started with a warship ramming another warship. But naval diplomacy between nuclear-armed neighbours rarely produces satisfying endings, only manageable ones, and a collision with no casualties, no structural damage on the Indian side and a clearly documented sequence of events, at least from one side, is, by the standards of this particular relationship, about as manageable as maritime near-misses get. Whether either navy treats it as a lesson or a footnote is the only genuinely open question left on the table.
