by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
By giving a nod to a swift and target-based military retaliation in the early morning of September 28, Prime Minister Naraendra Modi has turned inside out India's long-established set of responses to provocations from Pakistan. The upending of the familiar Indian strategy is even more pronounced by India taking the initiative in declaring the authorship of the "surgical strike" on the terrorists' staging camps. The Indian Special Forces also inflicted "huge casualties" including killing "two Pakistani soldiers" who had come to the terrorists' rescue. If there were low-key line-of-control crossing episodes in the past, India never went public. Whether it was Operation Parakram in 2002 or India retaliating to the beheading of the soldier in 2013, the government never claimed that its forces crossed the LoC. India always treated armed reprisal as the last resort. It waited for 24 years till 1998 to turn its tested nuclear capability into a weapons programme. In 2008, following the most daring attack in Mumbai by Pakistan Army's proxies, resulting in the loss of 164 lives, public outcry for a retaliatory attack on Pakistan was at its shrillest pitch. Yet India did not budge from its commitment to "strategic restraint".
That Modi has finally moved away from that doctrine is consistent with his pre-election commitment of giving a "fitting reply" to Pakistan. Following terrorist attacks in Gurudaspur, Pathankot and finally Uri, failure to live up to his promise would have haunted him like albatross around his neck. It was a risk he could ill-afford, with the manufacturing struggling to pick up, unemployment haunting and elections to Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Goa & Manipur round the corner. His Man-Friday and BJP president Amit Shah is a hawk and played a key role in formulating political decision making. Even beyond electoral politics, inaction after the Uri attack would have put at stake his identity as someone "different" from the Nehruvian "peaceniks". His rating as a man of iron would have fallen even below that of his predecessor from BJP, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who, despite his reputed fondness for 'biriyani diplomacy' with Pakistan, had actually fought a costly and difficult war with it on the peaks and slopes of Kargil in 1999.
That Modi would choose the tough path was evident from his choice of Ajit Doval as his National Security Advisor. Doval is the bureaucratic architect of the current policy shift from strategic restraint to "offensive defence'. As early as October 2014, he summoned the BSF chief and advised him to respond to cross-border firing from Pakistan with "higher than proportionate" intensity. The BSF was also advised by Doval to desist from holding the usual flag meetings with Pakistan Rangers after such incidents. The policy shift began paying dividends in an indirect but purposeful way, by boosting morale of the armed forces after a decade of despondency and despair caused by the regular cycle of aggression from the Pakistan side and mere hot words from Indian politicians. The September 29 surgical strike by Indian Special Forces should be seen in this context. India desperately needed to come out of morass of helplessness against a bullying neighbour, and its territory being used, in the words of one of our diplomats in the UN, Eenam Gambhir, as the "Ivy Leagure of terrorism". In the past, such forceful phrases would have sounded hollow without any concrete action on the ground. But, after the 29 September reprisal, our DGMO was the first to declare that our forces had indeed penetrated inside PoK territory to carry out attacks. India was at last walking the talk.
Pakistan has so far refused to accept the incident, or its nature, brushing it aside as just another cross-border episode. But such reticence may be a ruse to buy time and collect strategic thoughts to deal with a more determined India which is no longer shy to step on the escalation ladder. It now seems that Prime Minister Modi and his security team led by Doval have seen through Pakistan's decades-long practice of military and nuclear blackmail, and they have decided to call the bluff. Though the flow of bluster from Pakistan is as usual—and India is battle-ready with strike forces and other units fully mobilized—the civil leaders of the neighbouring nation, and their military bosses, are certainly finding severe limits on their choices. The Indian action has shown that Pakistan cannot hide behind its plea that the terrorists on the prowl are "non-state actors", so it must remain prepared for full-scale military retribution for every mischief committed by the UN-designated terror groups it trains, arms and harbours. As a strategic expert in Delhi was explaining to me, "the next Mumbai attack from Pakistan may trigger a combined naval and air attack on Karachi on an epic scale".
The source of Pakistan’s confidence so far is two-fold: first, the belief that China, its “iron brother”, will do all it takes on India’s northern and eastern frontiers to force India to scale down; and the US will exercise its influence to de-escalate the confrontation before it reaches the nuclear ignition point. However, Pakistan’s recent lessons from responses from Beijing and Washington are disappointing. China, on its part, did not go beyond expressing concern about the confrontation and said “both nations should exercise restraint”. The US pinpointed the Uri terrorist attack as the “cause of escalation” and reiterated that Pakistan must de-legitimise the UN-designated terror outfits. Besides, Pakistan found itself bereft of friends in South Asia as it was compelled to cancel the scheduled November SAARC summit in Islamabad following unequivocal condemnation of terror by Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Sri Lanka.
Modi is inarguably a controversial leader, but, in the third year of his rule, his diplomatic and military gambits are paying off. Except an electorally defunct CPI(M) and politicians like Mamata Banerjee and Lalu Yadav, wedded to minority vote bank, every opposition leader, including Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, complimented Modi for his bold move.
