| Dear Express Explained reader, These are extraordinary times for Indians. Even for those who have always believed that the periodic calls by hotheads for a final, aap-ya-paar battle are reckless and self-defeating, it is clear that something needs to be done about Pakistan – and what a veteran Congress MP and former Union minister described this week as the “fundamentally criminal disposition” of its deep state. To this MP, India has no choice but to plan for the “permanent extinction” of Pakistan’s state-sponsored terrorism against India that began with Independence. Right now, after the massacre of happy, innocent tourists just because of their religion, and the way the Pakistanis have responded to the terrorist attack, not many Indians will disagree. Former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran explained the reasons for Pakistan’s desperation at this moment, foreign policy and strategic affairs expert C Raja Mohan laid down the possible step-by-step escalation ladder in New Delhi’s response, and political philosopher Pratap Bhanu Mehta described the stark reality of our times: India will bring the killers of Pahalgam to justice, but the consequences of their religious violence will persist, and will put our collective future even further out of our grasp. As the first steps in its response, India has put the Indus Waters Treaty on hold, delivering the threat, in theory, of stopping the flow of water into Pakistan at some point in the future. Harikishan Sharma put in perspective India’s decision to take a step that it has avoided through three wars and decades of cross-border terror and killings from Pakistan, and laid out the broad contours of what it means for the two countries. On its part, Pakistan has sought to hit back at India by putting the Simla Agreement in abeyance. It is not clear what it is seeking to achieve or invite with this step, because the agreement established the LoC as the de facto border, and committed both countries to attempt to talk out their differences in the first instance – conditions that Pakistan has repeatedly violated in any case. Apurva Vishwanath wrote about the complex general set of international laws that govern treaties between sovereign nations and the inescapable bottom line: the former cannot be enforced against the will of the latter parties. There are two other interesting and informative explainers that I’d like to draw your attention to this week. With the passing of the Pope and the beginning of the race to elect the new leader of the world’s Catholics, Arjun Sengupta mapped the geographical distribution of the followers of the pontiff, and the long-term trends of how these regional populations are growing. The answer is interesting, and could determine the leadership of the Catholic Church in the years and decades to come. Separately, Arjun wrote about the importance of Crimea to Russia and the war in Ukraine, the context being the reported promise by the Donald Trump administration to formally recognise and endorse the claim of Moscow over the Black Sea peninsula that Russian forces seized in 2014. Thank you for reading The Indian Express Explained. There is a large body of explanatory journalism, on a wide range of topics, on our website, and I hope you will check it out soon if you haven’t already. Also, many of our best explainers are now behind a paywall, so I hope you will subscribe. Sincerely, Monojit | 
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