By Matthew Chance, CNN
Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) activists hold placards and wave Pakistani national flags as fireworks explode during a march expressing solidarity with the country's armed forces as they celebrate after a ceasefire between Pakistan and India, in Larkana, Sindh province on 11 May 2025. Photo: Ahmed Raza Soomro / AFP
Analysis - Victory has a thousand fathers, as they say, but defeat is an orphan.
And so it goes after the brief but bruising conflict between nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, with both sides loudly talking up their successes while quietly downplaying losses.
On India's frantic television news channels, minutes after a US-brokered ceasefire came into force, the headline "Pakistan Surrenders" was splashed across the screens.
India's military action against Pakistan, sparked by the killing of tourists in India-administered Kashmir last month, sent a bold message to terrorists, India's defence minister, Rajnath Singh, said later.
Meanwhile, in Pakistan, crowds gathered in the streets of the capital to celebrate what Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif described as "military history" achieved by "our brave army in a spectacular fashion."
"In a few hours, our jets silenced India's guns in a way that history will not soon forget," Sharif said, while an effigy of his Indian counterpart burned outside.
But this was an eruption of violence between two nuclear-armed neighbours in which both sides delivered and suffered heavy blows.
Pakistan has trumpeted successes in the skies, claiming its pilots shot down five Indian fighter jets in aerial battles, including three advanced French-made Rafales in what would be a stinging humiliation for the Indian air force.
As CNN earlier reported, two planes crashed in Indian states that border Pakistan around the time Pakistan claimed to have shot down the jets, and a French intelligence source told CNN that Pakistan had downed at least one Indian Rafale.
But Indian officials are still refusing to acknowledge even a single aircraft loss.
Meanwhile, India has released new satellite images showing serious damage to air strips and radar stations at what Indian defense officials say are multiple Pakistani military bases crippled by massive Indian airstrikes.
In other words, political and military leaders in India and Pakistan can spin it how they like, but there is no clear winner in this conflict.
There's even a struggle to take credit for what were clearly US-brokered negotiations that led to the ceasefire, announced almost out of the blue by US President Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform.
Amid a rapidly deteriorating security situation over the weekend, which threatened to spin out of control, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he and Vice President JD Vance called political and military leaders on both sides, urging them to hold back.
Pakistani officials expressed gratitude for the intervention. But Indian leaders are playing down any US role, saying the truce was worked out between India and Pakistan directly.
The reason is likely to be driven by national pride, with Indian officials loath to admit a truce was imposed on them, or even brokered, by the US.
India also has a long-standing policy of refusing to allow foreign mediation when it comes to the status of Muslim-majority Kashmir, a disputed region claimed by both India and Pakistan in its entirety, which has been at the centre of the latest conflict with Pakistan and which India regards as a strictly internal matter.
Nevertheless, perhaps buoyed by his quick ceasefire win, President Trump has offered to help the two countries find a lasting solution "after a thousand years" concerning Kashmir. Inevitably, Pakistan has welcomed the idea, while in India it has fallen on deaf ears.
The offer is a stark reminder, though, that the US-brokered truce is little more than a quick fix, a band-aid that is unlikely to remotely address the fundamental grievances fuelling what is actually a decades-long dispute, over the status of Kashmir.
And if you think the Indian and Pakistani claims of victory both ring a bit hollow now, just wait until the simmering Kashmir dispute, inevitably, boils over once again.
- CNN
