Open magazine TruePDF 11 march 2019

Had this deadly ambush of an Indian po-lice convoy been plotted by amateurs, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan , expecting intense retaliation from India, would not have reacted so appe

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11 march 2019 / rS 50

MODI'S MASCULINE NATIONALISM FACES UP TO PAKISTAN

THE RISE OF

NOTA POWER THE SHOWDOWN IN TAMIL NADU ZOYA AKHTAR THE ART OF

Not PeoPle liKe Us

No screen coupling yet

Reopening an old file involving the

Indian Air Force would decisively

help settle matters in Kashmir

By V Shoba

Cover by

Saurabh Singh

36

oNe Before all

Placing the individual, not society, at the heart

By Malini Nair

56

Zeitgeist Zoya

What’s it about the

Gully Boy director?

the fog of war

Modi’s masculine nationalism

pummel pakistan

MJ Akbar is right: enough is enough (‘The Last and Lost War of Pakistan’) It is the Indian Government’s soft ap-proach that has encouraged Pakistan over the past few decades to instigate terror at-tacks continually in Kashmir

The only long-term solution is for India to adopt a tit-for-tat attitude Imran Khan must remember that just like the captain of a cricket team is re-sponsible for his teammates,

as the Prime Minister he is responsible for the actions

of his citizens—directly or indirectly All diplomatic relations with Pakistan must

be cut off till it owns up to the role it plays in aiding terror-ism The global community

as a whole should boycott Pakistan economically as

well non-economically till it improves its ways and is able

to take responsibility for the terror outfits operating on its soil

M Kumar

MJ Akbar’s historical and thought-provoking essay on Pakistan clearly reveals the threat Pakistan-sponsored terrorism poses to peace and democracy on the Indian subcontinent It is high time

we started considering every terror attack against India

as an act of war and needless aggression The Government

of India needs to be firmer in its stance Pakistan needs to

be shown how a country with resolve responds to terrorism

Indian soldiers have been losing their lives in wars with Pakistan since Independence

Enough with peace How long will we continue playing their hide-and-seek game? Why do we not force them to play our game, the way Indira Gandhi did in 1971?

Vinod C Dixit

needless suspicion

It is unfortunate the tion tried to politicise the the visit of the Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman because it came close

opposi-on the heels of his visit to Pakistan (‘A Partnership for the Future’, March 4th, 2019) Relations between India and Saudi have been cordial for a long time, therefore there is

no need to view the sequence

of his visits this time with suspicion In fact, New Delhi and Riyadh are inking agree-ments in tourism, broad-casting and infrastructure Moreover, the Saudi prince has not only affirmed his country’s position to not support terrorism but has also agreed to share intelli-gence with India

KR Srinivasan

the leader in the east

Sunanda K Datta-Ray’s essay was a balanced portrayal of Mamata Banerjee (‘The Iron Sister’, March 4th, 2019)

A Surendran

MJ Akbar’s article on Pakistan’s reaction to the Pulwama attack by its agents revealed our neighbour’s long history of deception and subversion (‘The Last and Lost War of Pakistan’, March 4th, 2019) We mourn the tragic deaths of our gallant CRPF jawans even as we are deeply hurt Had this deadly ambush of an Indian po-lice convoy been plotted by amateurs, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan , expecting intense retaliation from India, would not have reacted so appeasingly In the recent past, India has underestimated Pakistani ter-rorists, preferring to use the euphemism ‘cross-border terrorism’ for what were ‘acts of war’ by Pakistan We have further compounded our mistake by describing Pakistani agents as ‘non-state actors’, giving Pakistan

an opportunity to declare terrorists in Kashmir dom fighters’ We have three probable solutions One, declare Ladakh a Union Territory, as it is least affected

‘free-by Pakistani terrorism This will let the Jammu &

Kashmir government concentrate on counter-terrorist operations in the Kashmir Valley Two, make the J&K administration more sympathetic to Kashmiris to change its public perception Or three, repeal Article

370 of the Constitution giving J&K autonomous status

to put an end to the terror economy there

Jaideep Mittra

Editor S Prasannarajan

managing Editor Pr ramesh

ExEcutivE EditorS aresh Shirali,

ullekh nP

Editor-at-largE Siddharth Singh

dEPuty EditorS madhavankutty Pillai

(mumbai Bureau chief) ,

rahul Pandita, amita Shah,

v Shoba (Bangalore), nandini nair

crEativE dirEctor rohit chawla

art dirEctor Jyoti K Singh

SEnior EditorS lhendup gyatso Bhutia

(mumbai), moinak mitra

aSSociatE EditorS vijay K Soni (Web),

Sonali acharjee, aditya iyer,

Shahina KK

aSSiStant Editor vipul vivek

chiEf of graPhicS Saurabh Singh

SEnior dESignErS anup Banerjee,

veer Pal Singh

Photo Editor raul irani

dEPuty Photo Editor ashish Sharma

aSSociatE PuBliShEr

Pankaj Jayaswal

national hEad-EvEntS and initiativES

arpita Sachin ahuja

gEnEral managErS (advErtiSing)

rashmi lata Swarup,

Siddhartha Basu chatterjee (West),

uma Srinivasan (South)

national hEad-diStriBution and SalES

ajay gupta

rEgional hEadS-circulation

d charles (South), melvin george

(West), Basab ghosh (East)

hEad-Production maneesh tyagi

SEnior managEr (PrE-PrESS)

cfo anil Bisht

chiEf ExEcutivE & PuBliShEr

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11 march 2019

ords are everything

Words build nations stronger with raw material drawn from fear

Words make being great possible when the wretchedness of the present is of the enemy’s making

Weaponised and deployed in a terrain caught between excessive patriotism and liberal scepticism, words unify, inspire,

divide and frighten Words make all the difference, for the kinetic

force of history is preceded, or followed, or powered, by the

politics of language—all those theologies of liberation, all those

ideologies of resistance Words take us into the minds behind

change they add poetics to the hopes and anxieties of an age

so we hear Churchill, the war poet in power, telling them that

“without victory, there is no survival”, that he has “nothing to

offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat” We hear gandhi telling

them that “the weak can never forgive [because] forgiveness is the

attribute of the strong”, that “an eye for an eye only ends up making

the whole world blind.” We hear an Fdr simply shrugging that “i

hate war.” Words are at play at a time when we are nervous; words

that emotionalise the mood, obfuscate the intent, tap into our

anxieties, and nevertheless tell a story of our time i choose some

The counTry is in safe hands

so speak the strongmen, here and anywhere, and their legion is

growing, in democracies and the grey zones beyond some of the

most obvious ones are autocrats, like a Putin or an erdog˘an, busy

creating their own mythologies as the safest hands in homelands

scarred by a bad history they need the legitimacy of a doctored

democracy—which their apologists would say is preferable to

free-for-all versions—to play the ruler-deliverer, always tapping

into grievances of the past the ‘safe hands’ of india, it must be

said, do have democratic legitimacy

they reach out to the people in a manner

set by the Constitution; and their legend

is built on the assumption that we are

still paying for the sins of weaker hands

of the day before safe hands announce

the masculinity of hope, the action

hero-ism of the ruler the safe hands of india,

we have been consistently reminded, are the cleanest ones too, and this is certainly a big deal in a country where the traditional political hand stands for the entitlements of power safe hands also bring out the vulnerabilities of the country they promise to protect in the face of extra-territorial adversity the strongman, the action hero, alone can make the country stronger—and safer

it is powerful imagery in the politics of the-nation it overwhelms india today, for better or worse

stronger-the-leader-safer-i’ll noT leT The counTry bow down

they won’t, ever, for the strongmen in power are alpha nationalists they, in their self-portraits and the wall paintings

by the awe-struck, are the arbiters of our present, the custodians

of our future, and the most authentic restoration artists of our past the so-called populist, the sorcerer of the mass mind in the post-revolution age, is a hyper-nationalist and a reborn nativist narendra Modi is not exactly one of them he is not your textbook populist; his sense of the nation verges on the spiritual the Prime Minister’s job, as he tells you, is to keep the nation’s head high When his opponents attribute the expediency of realpolitik to what he considers his nationalist mission, he doesn’t project himself as a nationalist under attack he stands there as the dutiful protector of a nation under attack—and he sees to it that no one misses the point: pitted against him are those who think patriotism is a milder form of jingoism this is

a portrait of the nationalist as warrior monk, still the only stopper in indian democracy

show-Guess who’s poliTicisinG iT

silly things are said when the rhetorical urge overcomes political realism War is politics, war-speak is politics, and peace, too, is politics it gets outrageously political only when don’t-politicise-it

is uttered with sanctimonious detachment Politics has an emotional quotient; so does history When countries are under attack, or when the defender plays the no-nonsense nationalist, the political is inevitably emotional it gets exploitative only when demagoguery creates a simulated oneness We are not there yet, thankfully, but the holy smoke emanating from the grand alliance

of doves is bad politics nationalists assume they alone can play the politics of resistance and retribution, though we are not sure

leT’s Talk peace

From the other side of the border, someone aspires to be statesmanlike the problem is the state, which has made terror

a religion no amount of ‘reasonable posturing’ can hide the fact that almost every other attack in the name of the Book since 9/11 has a connection with islamabad What it has

internalised as an ‘insufficiently imagined’ state, as salman rushdie called it, continues to express itself in the only language it knows—and it’s not made of words

Words still make all the difference

is politics

An interesting fAcet

of the Pulwama bombing of

february 14th has been the popular

reaction to the deaths of over 40 crPf

soldiers

Any terror attack—regardless

of the casualties—generates anger

At times, this is not merely directed

at terrorists but is often channelled

against the government for either

security lapses or ‘intelligence failure’

Along with this anger, however, are

the contrived outpourings of human

solidarity—expressed through peace

marches, multi-faith prayer meetings

and candlelight vigils in Mumbai, a

city that experienced a spate of

devastating terror attacks from the

serial bombings of 1993 to the 26/11

attacks in 2008, a ‘spirit of Mumbai’

industry took shape its main objective,

or so it seemed, was to dilute popular

anger in sanctimoniousness and divert

attention from the hard questions that

needed to be asked to me, it was akin

to turning the other cheek

After Pulwama, i have found a

paucity of candle marches—Mamata

Banerjee staged one in Kolkata, but

it was an exception More often, and

particularly in the non-metro and

small towns, the tone of the

demon-strations have been quite vengeful

the ‘Vande Mataram’ and ‘Bharat

Mata ki Jai!’ chants have been

accom-panied by a desire to lynch the nearest

available Pakistani Unfortunately, in

some places, Kashmiri students and

traders have been harassed and some

have left town Hopefully they will

return soon and resume their normal

lives But these have been isolated

incidents that, at best, have allowed

some liberals an opportunity for

anti-nationalist grandstanding the

attacks have extended to social media

trolling of those who either urged

restraint or used the Pulwama killings

to mock Prime Minister narendra Modi Here too some intellectuals and media celebrities milked the abuse they got on social media to draw attention to themselves, as if their unquestioned right to be contrarian, rather than terrorism, was at the cen-tre of popular anger it was a remark-able display of self-indulgence

Public memory is woefully short and an impression is often given that sharp and nasty attacks on the social media is a feature of right-wing resur-gence in india, if not globally in Britain,

a country in the midst of existential soul-searching over its future outside the european Union, both the right and the left have charged each other

of making the lives of some members

of Parliament intolerable Pro-eU conservative MPs have been trolled by Brexit supporters for being unmindful

of grassroots opinion and moderate Labour MPs have been pilloried by the left for different sins, including being sceptical of the leadership of Jeremy corbyn On top of all this, there have been claims that at least two foreign powers—russia and china—have quietly and surreptitiously worked

to mould public opinion and even influence the course of elections

i doubt if Pakistan has the technological competence and the intellectual astuteness to be able to mould india’s public discourse, even

remotely the high point of Pakistan’s soft-power diplomacy was in the pre-liberalisation days when it banked

on two things first, sponsored trips

to Pakistan where, apart from the generous hospitality the country

is famous for, the guests used to be showered with expensive carpets and onyx lamps second, the local High commission used to provide generous supplies of free scotch to the so-called opinion-makers in the media As a young journalist in the 1980s, i was both horrified and disgusted by the extent to which some editors were compromised by supplies of booze and biryani Mercifully, after the easy availability of good scotch in indian shops, Pakistani diplomacy has run out of ammunition even the spon-sored trips of the likes of ghulam nabi fai have come to an end following his exposure and conviction in the Us as

an isi functionary

nevertheless, courting and influencing public opinion, apart from funding disruptive movements

of Khalistanis, Maoists and islamists,

is a declared objective of Pakistan’s global outreach the methods have probably changed and gone below the radar, but to discount this influ-ence just because it is no longer that obvious is wrong Pakistan hates india, has relentlessly pursued the

‘war of a thousand cuts’ and its more islamist functionaries believe in the ghazwa-e-Hind prophecy—invoked, incidentally, by the Pulwama bomber

in his boastful video message—that puts faith in the islamic conquest of Hindustan We may not be able to stop Pakistani subversion altogether but there is absolutely no reason why,

as a country, we should make its task easy this means showing Pakistan’s

‘useful idiots’ their place n

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o penings

remembering with glory

The NatioNal War Memorial was inaugurated

on February 25th the next day, early morning, in

retali-ation to the suicide-bombing attack at Pulwama, the

indian air Force targeted terrorist camps in Pakistan,

taking hostilities between the two countries to a level not seen in

decades the Pakistanis launched air attacks a day later across the

border, escalating the issue the two countries are now perilously

poised with war, even if not necessarily imminent, a greater

prob-ability now Whether one is a peacenik or warmonger, the

se-quence of events is a testament to the case for the war memorial

the decades before the World War i were called a time of great

peace among warring european imperial empires if mankind

was then thought to have outgrown its warring tribal

proclivi-ties, then the illusion was shattered in 1914 a quarter century

later World War ii proved even more barbarous the

technologi-cal, psychological and philosophical leaps of the 21st century

had not changed anything in the instincts of societies to mobilise

themselves towards an endgame in which tens of millions of

lives would lay strewn across ruins So long as there is going to

be war—and there is nothing to show even now any permanent diminution in humanity’s appetite for it—those who partici-pate in it on behalf of nations must be feted and remembered this is to show gratitude to them and also to keep the emotion that makes people volunteer to be soldiers going strong a war memorial is public architecture with a purpose

one reason it took india more than 60 years from the time the idea was first mooted to finally having a national war memo-rial is its ambivalence towards war its ideals are pacifist but in practice violence is intrinsic to its nature as illustration, consider the freedom movement, touted to be based on non-violence but whose real history is another thing From Chauri Chaura to the bloodletting of Partition, violence followed step by step with the beginning of the indian nation-state after independence,

we have had three formal wars, not counting the Kargil ment to remember those who died in wars should have been the natural priority of governments but there was never a social

engage-or political impetus fengage-or it beyond demands from leaders of the armed forces this was General VP Malik, chief of army staff

11 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 9

during the Kargil war, writing in 2010 in The Tribune: ‘historically

and culturally, despite having to go to war so often for external

and internal security, we indians never take pride in our military

achievements or our military heroes it is a strategic cultural

weakness the military is sidelined as soon as the conflict is over

till date, there is no national war memorial Questions are raised

whenever the military wishes to celebrate an event to maintain

military traditions and to inculcate regimental spirit and esprit

de corps that is also the reason why our long-term defence

plan-ning continues to suffer Kargil heroes and martyrs like those

of 1971 and other previous wars are facing the same neglect.’

on February 26th, he tweeted his delight thus, ‘28 Jan 14 Was

privileged to attend public function ‘aye Mere Watan Ke logo’

with PM candidate N Modi & lata Ji in Mumbai asked N Modi

to make public commitment for construction of War Memorial

in Delhi Glad promise kept thank you PM!’

an egregious element in the delay of the war memorial is

that it had long been an agreed project only inability to

ex-ecute it made it remain a noting in files even the land for it had

been earmarked in the vicinity of india Gate, itself a memorial

for indian soldiers who fought in World War i the location in

lutyens’ zone, at the heart of the indian Government, was as

apt as it could be Spread over 42 acres, the memorial competes

with india Gate in being gloriously and solemnly imposing

the design was the result of a global competition that

Chennai-based WeBe Design lab won about the location, its

website notes, ‘the lutyens plan had another garden planned

to terminate the axis in the rear side of india Gate which never

got built the proposed memorial is designed as an extension

of the india Gate as a huge public open space with garden as a

closure point of this Central axis.’

For the design, it took inspiration from the chakravyuh battle

formation, a series of concentric circles entrapping an enemy,

alluded to in indian mythology ‘the Design intends to create an

experience of walking amidst soldiers in a war field in its varied

layers the concept is interpreted as five concentric circles of

varied elements as layers with its own functionality and

convey-ing different emotions (protection-bravery-sacrifice), at different

levels.’ the circles so imagined are the ‘Circle of Protection or the

rakshak Chakra, followed by Circle of War or the Yudh Path the

next layer is the Circle of Sacrifice or tyag Chakra, then the Circle

of Bravery or Veer Chakra and finally rebirth or Punarjanam’

War memorials are not signals of military triumph the US

has a memorial to the Vietnam war it lost two years ago the

UK unveiled one to soldiers of the iraq and afghanistan wars,

which no one terms a victory for the allied forces now among

the 25,942 names of martyred indian soldiers on our memorial

are also of those who died in the lost war against China a

na-tion is an artificial construct existing purely by an agreement of

its people it can be both resilient and fragile for this reason to

those who died to protect this idea, remembering with glory is

the least even a peaceful nation can do n

By Madhavankutty pillai

Earlier thiS MoNth the Supreme Court

passed a judgment ordering the eviction of tribals and other traditional forest dwellers in different states who could not prove their ownership of land in forests across india approximately one million people were affected by the judgment this led to a chorus

of protests across india on February 28th, the court stayed its judgment

the court’s earlier judgment came in response to a challenge to the validity of the 2006 law that granted rights

to forest dwellers who had lived there for a long time but could not produce formal titles to land and their home-steads the law was challenged in 2008 and the litigation has continued for a long time the number of claims that have been rejected are huge in states such as odisha, West Bengal, andhra Pradesh and telangana Ultimately, the Union Government woke up when the court passed eviction orders had these orders been implemented, a near chaotic situation would have developed across india Now the Centre has asked various state governments to file appeals against the judgment

apart from the inherent problems in uprooting people from their habitat, implementing the order would have created serious internal security problems

as well Most tribals dwell in precisely those locations where left-wing extremism remains entrenched the displaced and disaffected population of tribals would have simply turned into a recruiting pool for Maoists

a flick of a pen would have created a major headache for the paramilitary forces

there is, however, another aspect to the matter that has been highlighted in the petition: conservation of india’s vast but imperilled forest resources there has been some debate on the matter whether the poor are the key

to conserving forests on one side are ranged civil society activists who claim these dwellers of forests have lived there for hundreds of years and have played an active role

in conserving their habitat on the other side are forest conservation activists and state governments who have implicitly argued that it is cruel to expect poor people to give priority to conservation over consumption of forest resources there is some truth in the latter assertion: at very low levels of consumption, there are few incentives to save, be it money, resources or environmental assets this

is a vexed debate that is unlikely to be resolved by evidence and pronouncements by courts n

mAn AnD nAtUre

eviction of forest dwellers is not an answer

AFTERTHOUGHT

The sanitary napkin/pad is an odd object it, or a version of

it—whether it is the menstrual cup or tampon—is used by every

woman from puberty to menopause she will menstruate roughly 500

times in her lifetime, yet the pad is dealt with in whispers the current

attention is vital and fundamental because it could mean that the pad is

finally being normalised the sooner it is seen as ordinary as an item of

clothing, the better for millions of women

the two recent events that have brought the pad into the limelight are

the Oscar-winning 26-minute documentary period end of sentence and

the sabarimala temple verdict While the pad itself is not the pivot

of these two events, both deal with the miasma of taboo and stigma

around menstruation and both seek to reinforce a simple truth—

menstruation is a universal truth for women, and bleeding can never

be desecration

pads are as common as a toothbrush in a bathroom but are treated as

polluting as a baby roach it exists, we all know, but it must be always kept

out of sight if it ever comes into one’s line of vision, chhi-chhi is considered

a befitting response But it would seem that finally,

and deservedly, the pad is having its moment in the sun the pad which has always been handed out over the counter in a black plastic bag, then kept in the nooks of cupboards, and scrunched into a ball and ferreted into bathrooms is finally getting the attention it deserves

Melissa Berton, a producer on the film Period,

delivered the best line of the Oscar night when she said, “a period should end a sentence—not

a girl’s education.” an affordable and durable pad can often be a girl’s visa to school as the movie itself illustrates, in the absence of sanitary products and toilets, girls are often forced to drop out of school a grey-haired grandmotherly figure

in the film shabana—who takes it upon herself to convince other women about the benefits of their in-house pads called Fly—says, looking into the camera, “a lot needs to change.” and that really is the crux

Period, set in hapur, just 100 km from delhi,

shows us how woefully ignorant men and

wom-en are about this natural human function Whwom-en asked, ‘What are periods?’, one boy says that it

is an illness of women; an old woman says that only god knows the answer to that question; and

a young woman says babies are born because of it the movie wonderfully captures the embarrass-ment, misconceptions and stigma that surround menstruation When society is ill-informed about this biological process, it is little surprise that the pad itself is seen as shameful

While many antiquated believers oppose the supreme Court’s verdict of allowing women

of reproductive age entry into the sabarimala temple, and while that debate rages on, what

is undeniable is that the case has brought struation into the headlines While menstrual blood has always been dealt with as a mysterious blue liquid that needed to be spoken of in whispers, battle lines were now being drawn through it in the court, streets and tV studios pads which were seen as mystifying things, which came with wings and in various types like ‘ultras’ and ‘thins’, are now being peddled by Bollywood superstars

men-if the humble sanitary pad can be seen as something mundane yet essential, quotidian yet necessary, if the conversation around it progresses from impure and sacrilegious to natural and life-giving, then we can, finally, dare say, change

is here n

By nandini nair

period drama

Playing it out on a global stage

11 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 15

ANGLE

Premium error

SpOtiFy has OFten been

de-scribed as a business that seeks to be

the netflix of audio it is one of the biggest

music streaming servicesthat has lately

through acquisitions also got into the

podcasting arena this gives it scope to

make exclusive content, like netflix does

with video, which then leads to the

abil-ity to set itself apart from other players

it is in the fitness of the

world-conquering ambitions of such digital

ventures that they must be in india the

Western market is long saturated and

can only be gamed for icing, the cake

has already been consumed there that

leaves China and india for any new-age

business that needs rapid growth to be

future-ready spotify this week finally

launched in india and it is interesting

how they chose to diverge from netflix

in its strategy

spotify is charging a little over

rs 1,000 for a year of its premium service

that is less than what it charges for two

months in the Us and is the only way to

get a real footing here Contrast this with

netflix, whose lowest price point is

rs 550 for a month and lest you think

that is the difference one pays for video,

competitors of netflix like hotstar

charge what spotify does amazon

prime Video is also in the same range

While netflix arguably has better

con-tent, to assume that a sufficient number

of indians will pay between rs 5,000 and

rs 10,000 for quality is optimistic such

pricing can signal two things—that it

wants only a small slice of the market

that has the ability to pay, or it thinks a

business model that led to extraordinary success in the Us is replicable elsewhere

at the same charge the end result in a country like india for both assumptions

is the same: a large number of consumers turning away with a shake of the head

it does not bode well to step into india with a mindset blind to price this is most exemplified by apple’s dilemma With iphone sales finally flagging in the places where it has already cornered the market,

it is desperate for new markets but just can’t seem to crack india earlier, you could have ascribed it to disinterest but that is no longer the case now Because

it is unwilling to price the iphone more reasonably, it experiments with palming off refurbished models or pared-down dated versions that has not helped india remains a blank spot for apple while a Chinese company like Xiaomi, which understood that price is the overriding consideration here, makes billions as the

top smartphone seller a recent Forbes

re-port said, ‘the poor sales results have led

to apple being lumped into the dreaded

‘Other’ category in phone sales statistics, behind obscure (to westerners) com-panies like trassion analysts estimate apple has just 1% of the world’s fastest-growing smartphone market.’

india is always going to be a volume market there might be a huge middle class but they just don’t have the iphone-level money and even the rich here look for deals in snob-value items to bring a Western story lock, stock and barrel is just postponing a price-rationalising strategy that will eventually be forced on them n

‘Most ball games

are lost, not won’

Casey stengel

american baseball player

WORd’s WORTh

Why Spotify’s india pricing heeds the lessons of

Apple’s dismal performance in india

By madhavankutty pillai

RIvALRy

either india will forfeit their cricket match against pakistan at the World Cup, which many indians were call-ing for after the pulwama attack (a much more distinct possibility now),

or the match will take place and its ratings will go through the roof how

do we reconcile such contradictory urges? We have people whose first demand after a terrorist attack is that our team ‘boycott’ pakistan, even

if that jeopardises our chances of qualifying to the next round (What

if india forfeits the match and meets pakistan at a knockout juncture?) yet these very people—who would have taken a magnifying glass the moment the World Cup fixture was available to see if there were a salivat-ing prospect of an india-pakistan match—would turn to their tV sets

if the match took place probably this

is because of just how rarely these two teams play each other We give cricket far more symbolic value than due Cricket is no bridge between hostile countries in times of relative peace there’s no way you can burn that bridge in times of conflict n

IdEAs

Of all the bequests of social media, the utterly

extraordinary influence of imagery appears

the most obvious; the speed at which images are

transformed, less so Perceptions of popular

politicians are particularly volatile; those of faceless folk slapped

with group labels, far less so: a Whatsapp video clip of an

anonymous ‘Kashmiri girl’ that went viral last fortnight, with

a young woman clad in nothing but a clingy kurta all asquirm

and agurgle on a random rooftop in the sheer abandon of a

winter drizzle, for instance, seems to have startled rather than

spurred Whatsappers to think of individuals as individuals (as

liberals would) alas, what people make of ideas tends to change

at a pace much too sclerotic for any good; how the rabble

responds to slogans that appeal to hoary old beliefs, no less so

leave aside ideologies of leftist and rightist extremes, perhaps

the most remarkable recast story of the past decade is that of an

Indian concept called jugaad Scorn-worthy till not so long ago,

it has almost acquired the status of a business buzzword now

early familiarity counts, and my first impression of jugaad

as a wiseguy workaround was formed back in boarding school

as a reckless teenager for coffee at midnight, a cricket cup

taken off our hostel’s trophy wall would act as a vessel, and a

Sandoz eraser pinned at both ends by a divider—taken out of a

geometry box, snapped apart and wired to an electric socket—

would be used as a make-do water heater It was a survival aid,

as we saw it, but the thought of jugaad being offered as advice

for CEOs, no less, would’ve made us splutter over our brew.

Yet, it’s not a word thrown

around just in jest today, it’s

an actual subject for analysis

at Cambridge University’s

Judge Business School, among

others a big role in its ascent to

academia has been played by the

2012 book Jugaad Innovation by

Jaideep Prabhu, Navi Radjou and

Simone ahuja, who portray it as

a form of ingenuity that’s both

flexible and frugal, best deployed

against adversity this is

some-thing that clever companies

don’t merely resort to, they argue,

but also apply as a strategy

Well, well Could ‘jugaad

innovation’ set the world of

business abuzz the way that

Japan’s kaizen perfectionism did

in the 1980s? Don’t bet on it

Critics see little in jugaad beyond an exotic name for scrimpy

operations Others accuse the authors of conceptual overstretch for citing examples of CeOs flying by the seat of their pants, so to speak, even though that’s what dynamic entrepreneurs say they

do anyway: reshape their strategy on the basis of live market inputs as they go along What few dispute, however, is that it’s

a snappy word for a scrappy way to solve a problem Why, it has even found itself in Oxford Dictionaries, an inclusion for which credit was swiftly claimed by a hindi flick that had a song-and-farce sequence in the concept’s honour, a movie best recalled

only for its quip, Yeh duniya ummeed pe nahin, jugaad pe qaiyyum hai’ (the world survives not on hope, but on a quick fix)

for all its new respectability, it has long been the stuff of winks and nudges attribute this to the broad sweep of its use as

a term in India, covering everything from chewing gum acting

as an adhesive to high-level bribery bending a rule or two While urgency is usually what calls such an approach into play, it often draws upon the sort of ethical ambiguity that goes with an

‘anything-goes’ attitude this throws up an ends-and-means

per-plexity that champions of jugaad have left largely unaddressed

Indians are famous for working in the grey zone between moral relativism—where it’s okay to be economical with the truth, say,

or give safety norms the go-by—and categorical imperatives that specify distinct no-nos in rejection of the notion that noble ends could justify ignoble means On this spectrum, recent years have seen a spectral shift for the former in this country

If sticklers for propriety react with dismay, it’s for the same

reason that nobody should wire

up an eraser for a caffeine shot: safety may not make for a heroic self-image, but the risk of lives lost far outweighs the gains of slapdash action against a ‘crisis’, and it’s hard to believe that similar trade-offs don’t operate

on higher-order forms of jugaad,

whatever the aim

all in all, while the West’s academia has done well to welcome this desi concept, any such scramble for a fix needs the restraint of calculated clarity on what risk is worth how much No

one would want a jugaadu job at a

nuclear facility, for example, even

if the stakes are sky high at least

one no-no does exist that ought to

find a global consensus n

Scrappy Stuff as Strategy

alamy

A makeshift band wagon trundles along a rural road

he IndIan aIr strikes on February 26th on targets inside Pakistani-held territory cannot obscure the re- surfacing of India-China tensions following the Valentine’s day terrorist attack in Pulwama that killed dozens of Indian paramilitary troops China’s culpability in the attack—and in previous lethal cross-border terrorist strikes, such as on the Pathankot airbase—is apparent from its shielding of Pakistan’s export of terrorism to India The message from India’s use of air power for the first time against cross-border terrorist sanctuaries is that

it is not afraid to escalate its response to the aerial domain in order to call Pakistan’s nuclear bluff This could potentially mark a defining moment in India’s counter-terrorism efforts against Pakistan’s strategy to inflict death by a thousand cuts

The air strikes, however, are likely to reinforce Beijing’s determination to bolster Pakistan as a weight to India, especially because China incurs no strategic or trade costs for containing India Beijing is not only propping up the Pakistani state financially and militarily, but also has repeatedly blocked United nations action against the chief of the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammad terrorist group, which was quick to claim responsibility for the Pulwama massacre

counter-The paradox is that China, the world’s longest-surviving autocracy, has locked up more than a million Muslims from Xinjiang

in the name of cleansing their minds of extremist thoughts, yet is simultaneously protecting Pakistan’s export of deadly Islamist terrorism to India While Pakistan employs terrorist groups as proxies to bleed India, China uses Pakistan as a proxy to box in India.The plain fact is that, for China, Pakistan is not just a client state, but a valued instrument to help contain India So, is it any sur-prise that since the april 2018 Wuhan Summit between Prime Minister narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping, Beijing has actually stepped up its use of Pakistan as an India-containment tool, including by accelerating the so-called China-Pakistan economic Corridor (CPeC) and playing the Kashmir card against new delhi? In fact, China is steadily encircling India, as several developments underscore—from its new military base in Tajikistan that overlooks the Wakhan Corridor and Pakistan-held Jammu and Kashmir to its increasing encroachments on India’s maritime backyard

It is extraordinary that China has been able to mount pressure on India from multiple flanks at a time when its own economic

China’s shielding of Pakistani terror is integral

to its India-containment strategy

the new axis of evil

By Brahma Chellaney

T

11 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 19

and geopolitical fortunes are taking

a beating By China’s own statistics,

its economy last year registered the

weakest pace of growth in nearly

three decades add to the picture

a new phenomenon—the flight

of capital from a country that,

between 1994 and 2014, amassed a

mounting pile of foreign-exchange

reserves by enjoying a surplus in its

overall balance of payments

now faced with an unstoppable

trend of net capital outflows, Xi’s

regime has tightened exchange

controls and other capital restrictions to prop up the country’s

fragile financial system and sagging currency The regime has

used tens of billions of dollars in recent months alone to bolster

the yuan’s international value not just capital is fleeing China,

but even wealthy Chinese prefer to live overseas in a vote of

no-confidence in the Chinese system

China’s internal challenges are being compounded by new

external factors Chinese belligerence and propaganda, for

example, have spawned a ing international image problem for the country More signifi-cantly, China has come under international pressure on several fronts—from its trade, invest-ment and lending policies to its human-rights abuses The US-led pressure on trade and geopolitical fronts has accentuated Beijing’s dilemmas and fuelled uncer-tainty in China as long as the US-China trade war rages, flight

grow-of capital will remain a problem for Beijing Its foreign-exchange reserves have shrunk by about

$1 trillion from a peak of just over $4 trillion in mid-2014

at a time when China’s imperial project, the Belt and road Initiative (BrI), is running into resistance from a growing number of partner countries, Beijing is also confronting a US-led pushback against its telecommunications giant, huawei Meanwhile, China is alienating other asian nations by throw-ing its weight around too aggressively

Beijing has pursued

a trouBling three-pronged policy

to Build pressure on new delhi over j&K, where the disputed Borders

of india, paKistan and china converge

This trend is likely to accelerate with the restructured

People’s Liberation army becoming less of an army and more

of a power projection force, the majority of whose troops now

are not from the army but from the other services Indeed,

the PLa’s shift toward power projection foreshadows a more

aggressive Chinese military approach of the kind already

wit-nessed in the himalayas or the South China Sea, where China

has fundamentally changed the status quo in its favour.

More fundamentally, it is China’s open disregard of

interna-tional rules and its penchant for bullying that explains why it

remains a largely friendless power Leadership in today’s world

demands more than just brute

might Beijing lacks any real

stra-tegic allies other than Pakistan

When China joined hands with

the US at the United nations to

impose new international

sanc-tions on north Korea, once its

vassal, it implicitly highlighted

that it now has just one real

ally—Pakistan

China today is increasingly

oriented to the primacy of the

Communist Party, responsible

for past pogroms and

witch-hunts and the current excesses

Under Xi, the party has set out

to demolish Muslim, Tibetan

and Mongol identities, expand

China’s frontiers far out into

in-ternational waters, and turn the

country into a digital totalitarian

state Consequently, four decades

after it initiated economic

reform, China finds itself at a

crossroads, with its future

trajec-tory uncertain

It is against this background

that the Xi regime’s increasing

use of Pakistan against India

stands out Beijing not only

continues to bolster Pakistan’s

offensive capabilities, including

in weapons of mass destruction (WMd), but is also working in

tandem with that country to militarise the northern arabian

Sea Chinese-supplied warships have already been pressed into

service to secure Pakistan’s Chinese-controlled Gwadar port,

the flagship project in the China-Pakistan economic Corridor

(CPeC), which, in turn, is the centrepiece of BrI

Through CPeC, China is seeking to turn Pakistan into its

land corridor to the arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean and, as a

US defense department report in 2016 forewarned, Pakistan—

‘China’s primary customer for conventional weapons’—is

likely to host a Chinese naval hub intended to project power

in the arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean Such a naval base is expected to come up quietly next to the Gwadar port, directly challenging India’s maritime interests

China, meanwhile, has actively aided Pakistan’s strategy to the Indian military’s supposed ‘Cold Start’ doctrine Pakistan’s counter is a mobile WMd capability centred on tactical nuclear weapons for use against enemy battle formations The ‘Cold Start’ doctrine is reportedly the idea

counter-of a quick and limited Indian conventional strike in response

to a Pakistan-scripted terrorist attack, so as to deny Pakistani generals the ability to raise conflict to a nuclear level

That doctrine remains tional with no indication that India has either integrated it into its military strategy or

no-reconfigured force deployments

in order to execute it in a gency Yet Pakistan, with Chinese support, has fielded tactical nukes, creating a dangerous situation Let’s be clear: Pakistan’s recklessness has been egged on

contin-by China a full-fledged war

on the Subcontinent will open opportunities for China against India that Beijing seeks

Beijing has repeatedly declared that China and Pakistan are ‘as close as lips and teeth’

It has also called Pakistan its

‘irreplaceable all-weather friend’ The two countries often boast of their ‘iron brotherhood’ In 2010, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Yousuf raza Gilani waxed poetic about the relationship, describ-ing it as “taller than the moun-tains, deeper than the oceans, stronger than steel, and sweeter than honey”

In truth, China has little in common with aid-dependent Pakistan other than a shared enmity against India China and Pakistan are revisionist states not content with their existing frontiers Both lay claim to vast swathes of Indian territory Their ‘iron brotherhood’ is about a shared interest in containing India The prospect of a two-front war, should India enter into conflict with either Pakistan or China, certainly advances that interest

India will never be able to break the China-Pakistan nexus, however hard it might try Yet successive Indian governments have failed to grasp this strategic reality Virtually every In-dian prime minister has sought to reinvent the foreign-policy wheel rather than learn the essentials of statecraft or heed the

while encouraging Modi’s overtures to help instil greater indian caution and reluctance

to openly challenge china, Xi has eMBarKed on

a Major Military Build-up along the hiMalayan Border with india

Modi with Xi in Wuhan

11 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 21

lessons of past national mistakes

In fact, an economically rising India seeking to chart an

independent course only gives Beijing a greater incentive to use

Pakistan as a surrogate against it For China, the appeal of

propping up Pakistan is heightened by the latter’s willingness

to serve as a loyal proxy Given that Pakistan is an economic

basket case dependent on Chinese lending, Beijing treats it as

something of a guinea pig For example, it has sold Pakistan

outdated or untested nuclear power reactors (two such

aC-1000 reactors are coming up near Karachi) China has also sold

weapon systems not deployed by its own military

Less known is that Pakistan’s

descent into a jihadist dungeon

has benefited China, as it has

pro-vided an ideal pretext for Beijing

to advance its strategic interests

within that country For

exam-ple, China has deployed

thou-sands of troops in Pakistan-held

Jammu and Kashmir since the

last decade, ostensibly to secure

its strategic projects The Chinese

military presence there means

that India faces Chinese troops

on both flanks of its portion of

Jammu and Kashmir, given that

China occupies one-fifth of the

original princely state of J&K

This presence also explains why

India faces a two-front theatre

scenario in the event of a war

with either country

More fundamentally, Beijing

has pursued a troubling

three-pronged policy to build pressure

on new delhi over J&K, where

the disputed borders of India,

Pakistan and China converge

First, it has enlarged its

foot-print in Pakistan-occupied J&K

through CPeC projects, despite

Indian protestations that such

projects in a territory India claims as its own violate Indian

sovereignty Second, Beijing has attempted to question India’s

sovereignty over Indian J&K by issuing visas on a separate leaf

to J&K residents holding Indian passports and third, it has

of-ficially shortened the length of the himalayan border it shares

with India by purging the 1,597-km line separating Indian J&K

from Chinese-held J&K

add to the picture China’s shielding of Pakistan’s export

of terrorism and its indirect encouragement of separatism

in India’s J&K The then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh

cautioned in 2010 that “Beijing could be tempted to use India’s

‘soft underbelly’, Kashmir.”

While building projects in Pakistan-occupied J&K, a designated disputed territory, China denied a visa in 2010 to the Indian army’s northern Command General BS Jaswal, who was to lead the Indian side in the bilateral defence dia-logue in Beijing, on grounds that he commanded ‘a disputed area, Jammu and Kashmir’ at the same time, Beijing has signalled an interest in cleverly inserting itself as a mediator

Un-in the India-Pakistan tensions over Kashmir This is part of China’s long-standing efforts to obscure the fact that it is actu-ally the third party to the J&K dispute

While playing the Kashmir card against India, China offers

Pakistan security assurances and political protection, especially diplomatic cover at the United nations For example, China has repeatedly vetoed Un ac-tion against Masood azhar, the Pakistan-based chief of the Jaish-e-Muhammad, which, backed by Pakistani intelligence services, has carried out several major terrorist attacks on Indian targets, including the Pathankot air base in 2016 and the Parlia-ment in 2001 and in 2016, Sartaj aziz, the then Pakistani prime minister’s foreign-policy advi-sor, said that China has helped Pakistan block India’s US-sup-ported bid to gain membership

of the nuclear Suppliers Group, the export-control cartel.Pakistan has secured other major benefits from China as well For example, China pro-vided critical assistance in build-ing Pakistan’s arsenal of nuclear weapons, including by reducing the likelihood of US sanctions

or Indian retaliation China still offers covert nuclear and missile assistance, reflected in the more

recent transfer of a launcher for Shaheen-3, Pakistan’s

nuclear-capable ballistic missile, which has a range of 2,750 km

In this light, a grateful Pakistan has given China exclusive rights to run Gwadar port for the next 40 years—a period in which it will receive, tax free, 91 per cent of the port’s revenues The port operator, China Overseas Ports holding Company, will also be exempt from major taxes for more than 20 years Pakistan has also established a new 13,000-troop army division to protect CPeC projects and it has deployed police forces to shield Chinese nationals and construction sites from Baloch insurgents and Islamist gunmen China’s stationing of its own troops in the Paki-stani part of J&K for years, however, betrays its lack of confidence

paKistan’s descent into a jihadist dungeon has Benefited china, as

it has provided an ideal preteXt for Beijing

to advance its strategic interests within that country

Imran Khan with Xi in Beijing

in Pakistani security arrangements—and suggests that China

will continue to enlarge its military footprint in Pakistan

The Chinese strategic penetration of Pakistan, meanwhile,

continues to be aided by the US factor, despite President donald

Trump’s suspension of american security aid to that country

last year

although Trump publicly declared that Pakistan provides

the US with “nothing but lies and deceit”, his desperation to

get american troops out of afghanistan has led to Washington

cosying up to Pakistan again so as to clinch a final deal with the

Pakistan-backed afghan Taliban Indeed, the US tentative deal

with the Taliban in Qatar in late

January was struck with

Paki-stan’s active support Pakistan,

in effect, is reaping rewards

for sponsoring cross-border

terrorism, thanks to

unflinch-ing Chinese support and the

renewed US dependence on the

Pakistani military in relation to

afghanistan

Make no mistake despite

slowing economic growth, a

grinding trade fight with the US

and an international pushback

against BrI, China is able to bring

India under greater pressure

If anything, it is a reflection of

India’s pusillanimity that China

continues to contain India

with-out incurring any costs Far from

seeking to impose any costs on

China, India is doing the opposite

For example, external affairs

Minister Sushma Swaraj’s

pres-ence in Wuzhen, China, in late

February for the

russia-India-China (rIC) initiative meeting

sent the message that new

delhi, for tactical reasons, was

willing to whitewash Beijing’s

culpability in the Pulwama

massacre rIC is actually a

meaning-less and worthmeaning-less initiative for India, and the least new delhi

could have done is to force a postponement of the Wuzhen

meeting at a time when the Indian republic was mourning

the Pulwama mass murder

Given that new delhi is loath to impose any costs, including

trade-related, why would Beijing cease protecting the Pakistani

deep state’s terror campaign against India? In fact, India

has allowed China to reap ever-increasing rewards while

systematically undermining Indian interests

Just consider one fact: China’s trade surplus with India,

on Modi’s watch, has more than doubled to over $66 billion

annually By comparison, India’s new defence budget unveiled

in February totals $42.8 billion, or just 65 per cent of China’s bilateral trade surplus This underscores the extent to which India is underwriting China’s hostile actions against it India should be willing to employ trade as a tool to help reform China’s behaviour Yet new delhi continues to ignore calls from Indian industry and consumer groups for protection against the rising tide of Chinese imports that is undermining Indian manufacturing and competitiveness Thanks to China’s large-scale dumping of manufactured goods, Modi’s Make in India initiative has yet to seriously take off

In fact, Modi has little to show from his personal diplomacy with Xi For Xi, the Wuhan sum-mit has served as a cover to kill two birds with one stone While encouraging Modi’s overtures to help instil greater Indian caution and reluctance to openly chal-lenge China, Xi has embarked on

a major military build-up along the himalayan border with India The build-up includes deploying offensive new weapon systems and advertising live-fire combat exercises Meanwhile, Pakistan’s status as China’s economic and security client has been firmly cemented and Chinese encroach-ments on India’s maritime backyard have increased

as China treats Pakistan more and more as a colonial outpost, with a government on Chinese payroll, the challenge for India from the Sino-Pakistan nexus is mounting Indeed, just as Pakistan wages an unconven-tional war by terror against India, China is pursuing its own asymmetric warfare against India, both by economic means and by employing Pakistan as a proxy.The hype from India’s latest counter-terrorism airstrikes

on Pakistani targets cannot cloak this reality Without looking and proactive diplomacy that seeks to systematically combat the China-Pakistan nexus, India will continue to be weighed down Only through more vigorous defence and for-eign policies can India hope to ameliorate its regional-security

forward-situation, freeing it to play a larger global role n

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water, Peace, and War : Confronting

the Global Water Crisis

chinese-supplied warships have already Been pressed into service

to secure paKistan’s chinese-controlled

gwadar port , the flagship project in the cpec, which, in turn, is the centrepiece of Bri

MODI’S

MASCULINE

NATIONALISM FACES UP TO

PAKISTAN

By Ullekh NP and Siddharth SiNgh

“Shame on you, George W Bush”, referring to his nod to that sale of new F-16s.

America, meanwhile, came under tremendous diplomatic pressure globally to put its roguish south-eastern ally on a leash even as Trump faced trouble at home as his former fixer and lawyer Michael Cohen prepared himself to plead guilty in a Congressional testimony of complicity in frauds at the behest of the US president in breaking campaign finance laws Cohen also called Trump a conman and a racist Trump denied any wrongdoing

Dangerous Liaisons

Pakistan’s use of stealthy F-16s—which Americans claim they

do not sell to untrustworthy nations—to target India was in response to New Delhi’s February 26th offensive deep into Pakistan where 12 Mirage 2000 fighter jets pounded what In-dia said were camps run by terrorist outfit Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), which, headed by terrorist Maulana Masood Azhar, had taken responsibility for the suicide attack that killed 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel at Pulwama in Kashmir

on February 14th

Edward Luttwak, cold warrior, military historian and strategist, has always shared the anger that many Indians had of their leaders not doing enough to stop Pakistan from waging a proxy war on their soil through non-state actors such

as Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) and JeM He has often poked fun

at India for not modernising its outdated weaponry and has described the use of MiG-21 Bisons of 1960s vintage as “putting lipstick on an old hag”

He is of the view that India’s failure to retaliate in the past—after the Mumbai terror strikes of 2008, popularly called 26/11, which were carried out by Hafiz Saeed-led LeT—had created a lot of “confusion”, which, he insists, is now over thanks to the clarity offered by the “measured retaliation” of

February 27th, when Pakistan

used US-made, agile, new F-16 aircraft to

unsuccessfully bomb Indian military

facilities in Kashmir, American President

Donald Trump was away in Hotel

Metro-pole in Hanoi, Vietnam, to hold parleys

with the recalcitrant North Korean leader

Kim Jong-un, offering to make the East

Asian country an “economic powerhouse”

if it became friends with Washington The

irony was inescapable: it was his

Repub-lican predecessor George W Bush who,

in the face of stiff opposition within,

de-cided to sell new F-16s to Pakistan as an

incentive for cooperating with the US on its

‘war on terror’ in response to the 9/11 attacks,

just as his own predecessors—especially

Ron-ald Reagan—who promised to make India’s

dodgy neighbour an economic and military

power had sold it an earlier version of F-16s in

the 1980s Christine Fair, author, academic and

expert on Pakistan’s military and non-state

actors, thundered on an Indian TV channel,

ON

11 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com27

the early morning of February 26th It was for the first time in

48 years that Indian fighter planes crossed over to Pakistani

territory to bomb JeM targets in multiple locations, including

Balakot, which falls in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province

(KPP) of that country Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale

said in a press briefing in Delhi that the fighter jets that

launched the pre-dawn attack eliminated a “large” number of

JeM cadres, trainers and senior leaders

A day later, Pakistan, which claimed there were no

casualties in the Indian attack, launched strikes on India only to

be repulsed immediately, according to Foreign Ministry

spokes-person Raveesh Kumar While the Indian Air Force (IAF) shot

down a Pakistan Air Force (PAF) aircraft, Kumar said, India lost

one MiG 21 in air combat “The pilot is missing in action

Paki-stan has claimed that he is in their custody We are ascertaining

the facts,” he disclosed in the afternoon of February 27th, hours

after video clips of the pilot, Wing Commander Abhinandan

Varthaman, were circulated online by Pakistan in gross

viola-tion of the Geneva Convenviola-tion, an internaviola-tional code brought

in after World War II to restrict the barbarities of war

Most military experts and diplomats that Open spoke to on

the day India launched aerial strikes across the border were

of the view that Islamabad would not retaliate through

con-ventional ways, suggesting that it would, at the most, resort

to punitive diplomatic options Even someone as incisive as

Christine Fair had downplayed a Pakistani retaliation to India’s

avenging of the Pulwama terror strike

US analyst and the Wilson Center’s Director of Asia Program Michael Kugelman said Pakistan would perhaps recall its high commissioner from Delhi It was most likely,

he said, that Pakistan would stick to its tried-and-true tactic of having non-state actors stage attacks in India “The latter tactic,

in fact, could be intensified,” he noted

However, Indian Defence Ministry officials said they had anticipated a counter-attack, considering the pressure from opposition groups within Pakistan that had goaded the Imran Khan-led dispensation to retaliate

strange obsessions

Pakistan has always wanted to live by what it considers its structive military goal to ‘bleed India by a thousand cuts’ Islam-abad had been at it for long Which is why at least three armed

de-forces officials that Open spoke to on February 28th contend

that, so far, the actions of poll-bound India and an India-weary Pakistan were along expected lines “Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan was under intense political pressure You have to bear in mind that it is a country where the army calls the shots and where non-state actors are considered prized assets, cheap-

er and perhaps more effective than the officers,” says a senior army officer JeM, in fact, is crucial to what Luttwak, author

of Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, calls “Pakistan’s grand

strategy to hide behind jihadists” Fair writes in her recent book,

the Current Situation Can be framed in Simple termS: how doeS a Country that haS to live under a nuClear Shadow of a neighbour

reSpond to terroriSt attaCkS by that very neighbour?

Prime Minister Narendra Modi chairing the meeting of the Cabinet Council of Security in New Delhi on February 15

In Their Own Words: Understanding Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, that the

deep state—players who manipulate the policies of the

govern-ment—in Pakistan ‘has continued to invest’ in JeM because

‘revitalizing JeM was a cornerstone of Pakistan’s strategy of

managing its own internal security challenges as well as a

cor-nerstone of its policy of terrorism backed by nuclear blackmail

to achieve its ideological objectives in Kashmir’ She writes in

the book that ‘in 2015, individuals from internal organizations

tasked with monitoring these groups told me that since 2014,

JeM activists have long been posed for infiltration into India

along the line of control in Kashmir’

Nuclear blackmail has always been the clincher for

Paki-stan, until February 26th when an impatient India struck

back with force That explains why on Pakistan’s TV

chan-nels—such as Dawn News, Samaa TV and Geo News which

were surveyed by Open—there was a sense of disbelief as the

day began The immediate reaction on TV channels that had

experts and politicians on panel discussions was of shock And

then, slowly, wounded pride—a recurring theme in Pakistan

since the humiliation it suffered at the hands of India in the

1971 war—set in Since then, the Pakistan government and

the military has used non-state actors and religious schools

run by them to meticulously drill into the minds of young

stu-dents a totally distorted picture of India as a satanic, anti-Islam

entity that is home to kaafirs (unbelievers) On February 26th,

Pakistani parliament—called the National Assembly—was chaotic, with leaders of all political persuasions appealing to Imran Khan to give India a befitting reply Tweets by various politicians were as aggressive as their posturing in public Bi-lawal Bhutto, Pakistan People’s Party leader and son of the late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, tweeted, ‘India has chosen

to respond to a homegrown, organic freedom fighters attack

in Indian occupied Kashmir by conducting an airstrike on Pakistan soil for the first time since 1971 This outrageous and unprecedented act of aggression should be condemned internationally Pakistan is well within our right to retaliate’.For his part, Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) President Shehbaz Sharif—who happens to be former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s brother—said that if India tried to launch a war, Pakistan would hoist its flag in New Delhi Syed Fakhar Imam, a senior leader of the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) called for a joint session of parliament to discuss how to respond to the Balakot attack He said that the coun-try had remained silent when the US discredited Pakistan

by grabbing and killing Osama bin Laden at his mansion in Abbottabad, a Pakistani township that houses retired military officers Imam argued that while Pakistan was bogged down

by various compulsions back then, this time around, abad must respond sharply to the violation of the country’s air space by another country

Islam-on february 28th, even aS the SituatiIslam-on remained tenSe, modi

addreSSed bJp booth-workerS in a Calibrated, interaCtive,

televiSed event where he pledged the nation won’t bow down

imran khan waS

under preSSure in a

Country where the

army CallS the ShotS

and non-State aCtorS

breaking new grounD

On closer scrutiny, the Indian response to Pulwama and the

Pakistani reaction have another aspect to them; one that

was lost in the din for ‘de-escalation’ after Wing Commander

Varthaman was captured in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK)

The issue can be framed in simple terms: how does a country

that has to live under a nuclear shadow of a neighbour respond

to terrorist attacks by that very neighbour?

India has faced this dilemma for almost a quarter century

now In the years after the Pokhran nuclear tests of 1998, it was

felt that wars between India and Pakistan would become

his-tory as both countries would desist from attacking each other

But within months, the Kargil conflict broke out That was the

first time the two countries went to war after having acquired

nuclear weapons They had done so thrice in the past—in 1948,

1965 and 1971 Both took away very different lessons from the

Kargil encounter For Pakistan, it was clear that India could be

stopped against considering any legitimate response to

terror-ist attacks India erred on the side of caution and in return had

to face a number of Pakistani terrorist atrocities that included

an attack on Parliament in 2001, the 2008 mayhem in Mumbai,

the killing of 18 soldiers in Uri in 2016, and the suicide bombing

by a Kashmiri youth who was a member of the JeM on

Febru-ary 14th It was this last attack that finally forced India’s hand

If all this was about terrorism on the ground, it was also

about ideas In the two decades since the 1998 tests, Pakistan

has steadily redefined its nuclear ‘redlines’ At one point, in

2002, the Pakistani general in charge of its nuclear weapons

programme, Khalid Kidwai, clearly spelt out the

circum-stances under which his country would use these weapons

against India These included: India conquering a large part of

Pakistani territory; destruction of a large part of its army or air

force; economic strangling of Pakistan and pushing Pakistan

into political destabilisation or its internal subversion These

clear redlines were quickly disowned when it was said that the

decision to use nuclear weapons lay with political authorities there, and the latter would define the conditions under which they could be used

Since then, these redlines have been consistently graded to the point that even the possibility of a least intru-sive anti-terrorist operation against Pakistan is considered a

That threshold was first tested in the aftermath of the Uri attack At that time, it was held that the Narendra Modi Gov-ernment ‘used’ the opportunity to buttress its national secu-rity credentials The shallow Indian ingress across the Line of Control (LoC) into PoK was the first demonstration that even under a nuclear overhang, there was an upper limit to what India would tolerate

Barely two years later, a similar situation emerged in the wake of the Pulwama attack This time India enlarged the enve-lope and carried out a military operation in Pakistani territory across the International Border and not merely the LoC This distinction is held important by scholars of nuclear theory, the claim being that any action across the LoC and the Inter-national Border will elicit different Pakistani responses To an extent, events have proved this to be correct: In Uri, Pakistan denied that any military operation had ever taken place, except

a bout of intense artillery fire across the LoC

PoLes aPart

This time around, the contrast between the positions of

In-Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan addresses his nation on February 27

C o v e r S t o r y

getty images

dia and Pakistan was glaring India was careful—as clearly

spelled out in Foreign Secretary Gokhale’s statement—that

India was hitting “non-military” targets from where the

coun-try faced the danger of further terrorist attacks, and hence the

“pre-emptive” nature of these strikes In contrast, Pakistan

said that it had the right to respond to Indian “aggression” But

it chose to hit Indian military targets in Jammu and Kashmir

The nature of this response has been the subject of a

schol-arly debate Asfandyar Mir, a Stanford University specialist

on Pakistan’s military affairs, looked at the situation

imme-diately after the Balakot operation in terms of credibility costs

it imposed on Pakistan’s military and political leaders and the

strategic damage: if India thinks it can get away with action

in Pakistani territory, it will be emboldened to strike again

He made a clear distinction between the two: in case of

the ‘audience costs’—damage to the credibility of Pakistan’s

leaders—a slightly weaker response could be expected while

the reaction strategic damage would be more severe Where

the scholarly narrative went off ramp was in assuming that

India would not react to the atrocity in Pulwama

It remains to be seen whether India can break out of the

jam imposed by a nuclear overhang Rajesh Rajagopalan, a

professor of international relations at Jawaharlal Nehru

Uni-versity, looked at the costs of escalation and de-escalation after

Varthaman was captured In his analysis, this is a dangerous

moment for India If India escalates without adequate

mili-tary preparation, it courts disaster But if India de-escalates, it

risks getting into a long-term strategic stasis that will impose

equally severe costs: terrorist attacks will continue unabated

But much more dangerous for India will be the undoing of its

efforts in the Balakot operation, leaving it in a far worse

posi-tion These are not ordinary calculations that can be made in

a detached manner, but are high-level decisions for India’s

political executive

As Open goes to press, the situation remains fluid After

Pakistan’s attacks early on February 27th, there has been no

major military escalation Reports of heavy firing across the

LoC continue to pour in But this is a situation that has

re-mained more or less constant over the last two decades

bar-ring a temporary interlude after 2002

The other aspect of the situation is the diplomatic

sup-port India has received after the operation in Balakot, a place

considered holy by jihadists In her work, Partisans of Allah:

Jihad in South Asia, Harvard University historian Ayesha

Ja-lal talks of the warriors who fought a Sikh army: ‘Accolades

showered on the martyrs of Balakot and reverential accounts

of the movement written by [holy man] Sayyid Ahmed’s

followers and admirers have since 1831 assumed such

pro-portions that separating the myth from history is a difficult

enterprise’ Now, one of the early supporters for India was

France that promised to help India’s case on terrorism at the

United Nations Soon after that, support poured in from other

countries as well Just after the Pulwama suicide bombing

John Bolton, the US National Security Adviser, phoned his

n the morning of May 6th, 1831, one of

the most decisive battles in India’s tory took place at Balakot, the very site

his-in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa which became

a household name after the Indian Air Force destroyed terrorist training camps between 3 am and 3.21 am in the early hours of February 26th They were not

the first fidayeen to be routed in Balakot.

In 1831, an army of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, under the command of his son Sher Singh, destroyed a great force led

by Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi before it could enter Punjab on its way to Delhi Barelvi, the self-styled Sayyid Badshah, had launched a jihad for the restoration of Muslim power, but this time in an Islamist manifestation

Barelvi was born in 1786 in Rae Bareli, now more famous

as a parliamentary constituency He became an ideological heir of Shah Waliullah, whose theories for Muslim revival after Mughal decline resembled the thinking of his Arabian contemporary, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahab, founder of the Wahabi movement Waliullah’s most famous prescrip-tion was what might be called the ‘theory of distance’ in which he advised Muslims to live so far from Hindus that the former could not see the smoke of the latter’s household fires This was the only way they could avoid falling under Hindu cultural and doctrinaire influence Once Muslims returned to ‘pure’ Islam, he said, they would also return to

‘pure’ power Those who did not were condemned as

apos-tates, guilty of shirq.

In 1818, Barelvi proclaimed his manifesto, Sirat ul taqim, or ‘The Straight Path’, which claimed that Indian Is-

Mus-aN area Of darkNess

Balakot and the backstory of jihad

By MJ akBar

o

lam had been ‘polluted’ by both Hinduism and by the

syncre-tism of Sufis This was why it had lost to the British, who now

had the effective control of Delhi, although a feeble Mughal

pseudo-emperor still sat on a wobbly throne, reduced to

beg-ging for a pension Muslims had become sinful,

commemorat-ing the death anniversaries of Sufi saints in an urs, or scommemorat-ingcommemorat-ing

and dancing at weddings They could be cleansed only by the

heavenly rain of jihad

Barelvi first went on Hajj, reaching Mecca in May 1822,

where his manifesto was translated into Arabic On his return

in 1824, he declared that Hindustan had become a ‘House of

War’, and mobilised a group of some 600 followers, the martial

core of which he described as a Muhammadi Order They left

Rae Bareli on January 17th, 1826, and took the long route, via

Sind, to the Frontier regions in the north-west, where he hoped

to get the support of tribes for his jihad On January 11th, 1826,

he declared himself an Imam and Khalifa Coins were struck in

his name, with the title of Ahmad the Just, ‘the glitter of whose

sword scatters destruction among infidels’ Such was his

suc-cess that his army swelled to around 80,000

The British watched, waited and gave the holy warriors a

nickname: Crescentaders As it turned out, they were slightly

less holy than they pretended to be, and achieved a reputation

for assault and loot that did not add to their religious lustre

And the tribes did not want to hear instructions that

inter-fered with their local customs, like bathing naked in the river

or marrying daughters to the person offering the most dower

Barelvi’s attempts to impose an Islamic nizam, or rule, also

met resistance in tribes where the chief ruled by traditional

consensus

Barelvi chose Balakot as his base because as a hilltop

dif-ficult to access, it was considered impregnable I cannot say

whether the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad jihadis set

up their training centres at the same spot, or for the same

rea-sons; for we do not know such specific details as yet But logic

suggests that this might well be true It was certainly a major

strategic consideration for the Sikh army which suddenly

ap-peared at Balakot that May 1831 morning They had to take a

winding uphill route to Barelvi’s encampment, which was

done under cover of darkness

One-hundred-and-eighty-eight years later, surprise and the

cover of darkness still remain integral to success

No one saw Barelvi being killed in battle, and, as so often

happens, stories began to float; inevitably some of his

follow-ers thought he had disappeared and would re-appear But his

head and body were found in different places and are,

appar-ently, buried in Garhi Habibullah and Telhatta These graves

became shrines, attracting religious tourism till today Those

who believe in a jihad for Delhi have a saying: the blood of

Bala-kot runs in their veins

In 2019, as in 1831, it would be a mistake that the challenge

has been extinguished In the 19th century, the jihad continued

till the 1880s

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has thought through his

response to Pulwama with careful precision, patience and a measured plan for how to deal with the international reaction The brilliant pre-dawn strike itself was clean, quick, credible and safe All aircraft returned safely because of the element of surprise While terrorists and their mentors, still limited by conventional wisdom, waited for action on the ground, they quite forgot that the air was available for surgery as well India’s foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale used very clear and concise language to define the chosen parameters to prove that this action was limited to terrorists, and did not extend to the Pakistan military, and there was certainly no overflow into civilian casualties The operation was “intelligence-led” and that this was a “non-military pre-emptive action” Chatter from the target areas picked by our equipment indicated that Yusuf Azhar, a close relative of the notorious head of Jaish, Maulana Masood Azhar, was on location Pakistan has repeatedly done nothing about these camps, although they cannot function without the knowledge of sections of the establishment Our intelligence agencies also learnt that the training for hundreds

of suicide bombers would end by mid-April

This fits into the political calendar of the terrorists as well It can be surmised that they intended to launch a series of attacks

in the middle of India’s election process The political objective

of that would be to weaken the image of Prime Minister Modi when the voter goes to the polling booth Terrorists do not want

a strong government in Delhi; and certainly not Modi as Prime Minister But what they want is not what they will get.February 26th will go down as a memorable day in the nar-rative of the long campaign against terrorism But the war is not over We can be certain of one thing, though: with Narendra Modi as Prime Minister, Delhi will not be complacent n

barelvi ChoSe balakot aS hiS baSe beCauSe aS a hilltop diffiCult to aCCeSS, it waS ConSidered impregnable

11 march 2019

n the morning of January 25th, 1990,

mo-torcycle-borne terrorists fired at a group of unarmed Indian Air Force (IAF) personnel waiting for their bus on the outskirts of Sri-nagar in Kashmir Valley Four personnel—

Squadron leader Ravi Khanna, Corporal DB Singh, Corporal Uday Shankar and Airman Ajad Ahmad—were killed in the attack

In the last three decades, the IAF or Indian Government has

shown no interest in pursuing the case The main accused in the

case is Yasin Malik, the chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir

Liberation Front (JKLF), a militant organisation which

spear-headed militancy in Kashmir in 1989-90; he is one of the four

men who crossed the Line of Control in Kashmir to receive arms

training in the late 80s and returned to start armed insurgency in

the Valley The case is with the Central Bureau of Investigation

(under file S/90-SCU.V/SCR-II) But no charge sheet was ever filed

in the case or in at least two dozen other cases in which he is an

accused In all these cases, Malik is on indefinite bail The JKLF

now depicts itself as a political organisation

As India used its air force to strike in Pakistan as retaliation to

Pulwama suicide attack, it is a good time to visit the 1990 case of

the slain air force personnel and begin some forward movement

towards bringing the guilty to justice

It doesn’t have to become yet another exercise in tokenism

Now that India has decided to change its policy and conduct

retaliatory strike in Pakistan, it also presents New Delhi a great

opportunity to decisively settle matters in Kashmir

Right after Pakistan was carved out of India, it fashioned

itself as the saviour of the Kashmiri awaam (people) That year

in October, Pakistan sent tribesmen from its North-West

Fron-tier Province, aided by its army, to occupy Kashmir The Indian

Army’s timely intervention saved

it from marauders In later years,

Pakistani leadership would

con-tinue with its policy to foment

trouble in the Valley In the 60s,

Pakistan’s President Ayub Khan

launched Operation Gibraltar,

sending its troops inside Kashmir

to launch an attack from within

The same policy was followed by

General Zia-ul-Haq in the early 80s

as well In 1990, as full-scale

mili-tancy erupted in Kashmir, Benazir

Bhutto offered her full support to

militants, calling them ‘mujahideen’ and ‘destroyers of infidels.’

The speech boosted the morale of militants and their porters In that euphoria, one of Yasin Malik’s associates, Hamid Sheikh, who had been injured in a gunfight with Indian security forces, was shifted from one hospital to another This hospital was under the control of JKLF sympathisers and here Sheikh was treated as a VIP Later, when he was released in exchange for the kidnapped daughter of the then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, a senior doctor lifted him on his shoulders and carried him through a cheering crowd

sup-By the mid-90s, however, most militant leaders had stood that no Azadi was ever possible But they also realised that keeping the fire burning paid dividends While Pakistan kept many of them on pay rolls, Indian intelligence agencies also filled their pockets in the hope that they would someday turn into assets New Delhi’s licensed separatism in Kashmir, to quote

under-a Kunder-ashmiri journunder-alist, becunder-ame under-a lucrunder-ative business

From a certain section of intellectuals in Delhi and beyond, many of the Kashmiri separatists also got moral legitimacy The pro-Pak separatist leader SAS Geelani would attend public meetings along with influential writers and activists such as those organised in Delhi to oppose the Government’s security operations in Maoist areas Those who claimed to be fighting for democracy ignored the fact that Geelani stood for the idea of Pakistan and wanted to establish Islamic rule in Kashmir

In 2014, the Narendra Modi Government came to power Many believed that with the advent of an ‘ultra-nationalist’ party, there would be an end to soft secessionism in Kashmir But instead, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chose to join hands with the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in Kashmir, seen as a party nourishing separatism Soon after becoming Chief Minister as part of the BJP-PDP alliance in 2015, Mufti

Mohammed Sayeed ordered the release of Massarat Alam, a radical Islamist who had been in jail since his involvement in the unrest of

2010 He also had plans to release Qasim Faktoo, a Hizbul Mujahi-deen terrorist and the husband of separatist leader Asiya Andrabi

On April 16th, soon after his release, Alam organised a big re-ception for his mentor Geelani As the reception took the form of a procession, it passed by the Director General of Police’s office in Srinagar

Reopening an old file involving the Indian Air Force

would decisively help settle matters in Kashmir

By rahUl PaNdita

BeyONd BalakOt

o

Kashmiri protestors hold

a Pakistani flag in Srinagar

11 march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com33

Indian counterpart Ajit Doval and supported “India’s right

to self-defence against cross-border terrorism” In the wake

of the Balakot operation, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement saying, “I also spoke to Pakistani Foreign Minister [Shah Mehmood] Qureshi to underscore the priority

of de-escalating current tensions by avoiding military action, and the urgency of Pakistan taking meaningful action against terrorist groups operating on its soil.” He also said, “I spoke with Indian Minister of External Affairs (Sushma) Swaraj to emphasise our close security partnership and the shared goal

of maintaining peace and security in the region.”

The Russian and Chinese reactions were muted and brated to maintain equal distance between India and Pakistan

cali-In the case of Russia, the statement did not even mention stan while the Chinese reaction was about the necessity of de-escalation and terrorism being a global problem, an anodyne formulation whose political emphasis was not lost on India

Paki-As regards the US, Kugelman says, “Privately, you can be sure Washington is working the phones with interlocutors

in both Delhi and Islamabad While the US likely was portive of India’s strike, it won’t want India to do anything else.” He adds that Washington can ill-afford a war on the subcontinent while it desperately tries to hammer out a deal with the Taliban that enables it to leave Afghanistan “The

US has a tough balancing act: It will want to express its port to India as Delhi seeks to eliminate terrorist threats, but

sup-it won’t want to alienate Pakistan at the very moment when

it needs Islamabad’s assistance in helping launch formal peace talks with the Taliban,” he avers Meanwhile, a diplo-matic effort has been mounted to designate Masood Azhar

of JeM a global terrorist Azhar was released by the then NDA Government of AB Vajpayee along with two others from

an Indian jail after a week-long crisis in December 1999 in exchange for passengers of Indian Airlines Airbus IC-814, which was hijacked by Pakistan-based terrorists

The crowd shouted: ‘Pakistan se kya paigaam, Kashmir banega

Pakistan’ (What is the message from Pakistan? Kashmir will

turn into Pakistan) and ‘Jeeve, jeeve Pakistan’ (Long live Pakistan)

After trouble in 2008, 2009 and 2010, the Kashmir Valley

had settled for a considerable calm Youngsters had returned

home, grudgingly accepting that the idea of Azadi or a merger

with Pakistan was a utopia

What happened afterwards is now well recorded in

Kash-mir’s bloodied history By the time the terrorist commander

Burhan Wani was killed in an encounter, Kashmir had slipped

into a terrible chaos It is this chaos that has become so big that

now we are dealing with Jaish suicide squads successfully

re-cruiting Kashmiri boys

Journalist friends in Kashmir speak of an instance when

during a meeting with Malik in a Srinagar hotel, one of them

told him that he was lucky that militancy in Kashmir was dealt

by a soft state like India “Otherwise, no country forgives the

killing of its Air Force personnel,” one of them told him

It is with the same softness of approach that New Delhi

has practised through 30 years of militancy in Kashmir There

has hardly been any conviction of any person for terrorist

activities all these years The JKLF terrorist, Farooq Ahmed

Dar, alias Bitta Karate, who confessed on television soon after

his arrest in June 1990 that he had killed at least 20 people (a

majority of them minority Hindus) spent 16 years in jail and

was finally let out on indefinite bail without conviction The

Judge, ND Wani, while releasing him, remarked that the

“al-legations levelled against the accused are of serious nature and

carry a punishment of death sentence or life imprisonment,

but the fact is that the prosecution has shown total disinterest

in arguing the case.”

Dar returned to a hero’s welcome to his home Activists who

filed an RTI application on his terrorist past with the Union

Home Ministry were simply told that the ministry had no

in-formation about him He is now under arrest in a terror funding

case But there is no mention of his earlier cases

It is a good time to show a certain resolve and consistency

in Kashmir To begin with, reopen all cases against the likes of

Malik and Dar In the aftermath of Pulwama, 150 members of

the radical Jamaat-e-Islami have been picked up But there has

been no attempt so far to strike at the fountainhead of

radical-ism – certain madrassas and mosques, particularly in South

Kashmir, that fill the minds of young men with poison Many

Jamaat members and sympathisers have been inducted as

teachers in government schools over the last three decades

It is time to identify them and weed them out of the system

In the minds of many Kashmiris, Pakistan remains a

saviour As the support structures of terrorism and

radical-ism begin to collapse, this belief in Pakistan will wane too

By sending jets into Pakistan, the first step has been taken

Now the same shedding of softness needs to be followed in a

‘war on terror’ after 9/11

The wreckage of a Pakistani F-16 jet in PoK that is believed

to have been shot down by an Indian MiG-21

C o v e r S t o r y

PoLiticaL overtones

Amid chest-thumping and sabre-rattling on both sides of the

border in TV studios, on social media and in public, India’s

ruling BJP came under sharp attack from the Opposition for

using military action to gain a political edge Though it was

clear that the BJP, which is seeking a re-election after a

five-year term that expires in a few months, will use the war-like

situation in its poll campaigns, certain statements of senior

leaders have invited criticism Though the irony of an NDA

Government freeing Azhar cannot be whitewashed, the Modi

Government has won accolades for breaking the habit and

acting decisively to warn Pakistan that its use of non-state

actors would not be tolerated from now on Yet, remarks made

by the likes of former Karnataka Chief Minister BS

Yeddy-urappa that India’s air strikes have created a wave in favour of

Modi and will help the BJP win over 22 of 28 seats in his state

in the General Election due by May, are being frowned upon

Similarly, in Ghazipur in eastern Uttar Pradesh, BJP President

Amit Shah raised a question for the crowds on February 27th,

hours after Pakistan targeted Indian installations for a foiled

attack, asking if it is leaders of the gathbandhan or Modiji

who can assure security His assertion attracted criticism for

being insensitive to the plight of the pilot under Pakistan’s

custody—Imran Khan announced only in the evening of

February 28th that he would free Varthaman as a peace

ges-ture to de-escalate hostilities The 21-member Opposition that

met on February 28th had lashed out at Prime Minister Modi

for busily campaigning while the nation was faced with a

security crisis Modi was earlier criticised for taking part in a

shoot for a TV channel on February 14th in a national park

when the Pulwama attack took place The ruling coalition

dismissed the Opposition charge as frivolous On February

28th, even as the situation remained tense and the IAF pilot’s future was still uncertain, Modi addressed BJP booth-workers

in a calibrated, interactive, televised event—where he pledged the nation won’t bow down—attracting some flak for what his critics called his ‘skewed priorities’ at such a time Mean-

while, writing in The Independent, author and journalist Robert

Fisk warns India against allowing its military ties with Israel, its biggest arms supplier, to influence the country’s politi-cal interests He claims it was not by chance that the Indian press trumpeted the fact that Israeli-made Rafael Spice-2000

‘smart bombs’ were used by IAF in its strike against alleged JeM camps He points out, quoting analysts, that right-wing Zionism and right-wing nationalism under Modi should not become the foundation stone of the relationship between the two countries That is a disastrous proposition for a democ-racy like India, he argues

Clearly, jingoism seems to have gained in fervour in a tion of the television media, if not in the Government, which, many pundits believe deserves praise for being unprecedent-edly stern on terrorism A tweet by former Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao critiques the apparent 24x7 war-mongering thus: ‘The western front is not a TV studio anchored by those who are unqualified to dictate strategy and are unconscionable flame throwers Our political leaders should not take the na-tion’s temperature-readings from the seizure-like screaming on some media’ Winning a war is not all about making loud noises and trending hashtags on social media In a modern war, very

sec-often, less is more After all, in his Art of War, Sun Tzu says that

‘the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without ing’ This makes immense sense at a time in history when war

fight-is not merely a military assault but also a diplomatic offensive Perhaps it is time to learn to unlearn n

pakiStan’S uSe of f-16s to target india waS in reSponSe to new delhi’S february 26th offenSive on a Camp in pakiStan run by JaiSh-e-mohammad, whiCh had taken reSponSibility for the february 14th pulwama attaCk

pay tribute to martyrs of the Pulwama

tragedy in Bhopal on February 16

sanjeev gupta

.

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