-OpEd-
NEW DELHI — The Indian Express‘s headline last week, spread across six columns, announced: “PM: Armed Forces have complete freedom to decide mode, targets, timing of our response” to the carnage in Pahalgam.
On the face of it, the announcement carries with it a promise of a muscular response that may be enormously satisfying, if not soothing, to a nation bristling with anger and frustration at our collective helplessness in making Pakistan shut down its terror-farms.
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Because the headline simply followed an official announcement, after a meeting between the prime minister and senior defence officials, it signals the classic approach that seeks to substitute military boldness for civilian hesitancy in a crisis – or at least making it look that way to the enemy. The prime minister also reiterated “complete faith and confidence in the professional abilities of the armed forces.”
In case you didn’t notice, that’s a subtle shift from the threat of unrestrained retaliation Modi held out at an election rally two days after the Pahalgam horror.
Gently, the onus for bringing Pakistan to heel has been passed on to the armed forces. It is not clear if the armed forces have been given a carte blanche to “retaliate” or to end up getting us sucked into a regular, conventional war with Pakistan.
We need to remind ourselves that making war or peace is the sole preserve of the civilian authority in our constitutional scheme of things. And that is the way it should be. At one level, it should be reassuring that the armed forces leadership is not driven by the politicians’ penchant for demagogic overkill; nor does a professional solider mistake the screaming anchors on our national television for an authentic collective voice.
The bottom-line of the “free hand” ploy is that it provides the prime minister an honorable way to dismount the high horse of faux machoism. He had crowbarred his way to national stage by marketing himself as the toughest guy on the block, whose very name functions as a formidable strategic deterrence.
The 2019 Balakot strike (the bombing raid conducted by Indian warplanes on Feb. 26, 2019 in Balakot, Pakistan, against an alleged terrorist training camp) perpetuated this myth. So much so that now, ordinary citizens and even his supporters are asking how the Pahalgam attack could take place under his watch.
Not-so-innocent
That not-so- innocent a man, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat, is reminding the “king” of his duties to punish the enemy. The leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha lower house of Parliament, Rahul Gandhi, has categorically asked the prime minister to “take action.”
On their part, our so-called security experts are also baffled that Pakistan would even dare attempt a Pahalgam-style attack, fully aware that Prime Minister Modi would face immense political pressure to deliver a “kinetic” response — one demonstrably beyond Balakot.
All that Modi has been able to do is to get a new National Security Advisory Board.
In this “free hand” decision, the army leadership has been asked to pick up the gauntlet. A clever but ignoble sleight of hand to wriggle out of any kind of demands for political accountability for Pahalgam. That a senior minister has admitted to “security lapses” is in itself being touted as a great concession to hurt public sensibilities. Of course, the hard realpolitik equations within the ruling party do not permit the prime minister much elbow room to seek the resignation of his home minister; nor for that matter can the prime minister gather the courage to oust his national security adviser. All that Modi has been able to do is to get a new National Security Advisory Board, replacing one set of retired security officials with no line function with another. As usual, the claque is working over-time to applaud the display of prime ministerial “will.”
The ”free hand” decision is a sophisticated ploy by the political leadership to shield itself behind the enormous respect the armed forces enjoy in the country. If the impending “action” produces marketable success, the political leadership will surely take credit. Let us recall how after the Balakot strikes, the prime minister went out of his way to tell the nation that it was he who had micromanaged the sortie into Pakistani air space.
Resurrecting Modi’s image
The Balakot “surgical strike” became the BJP’s ticket to a resounding electoral victory in 2019. Today, the armed forces are once again being called upon to undertake some form of “action” to restore national esteem — to compensate again for a jaded and failing political leadership.
It can only be hoped that the armed forces leadership would not in any way feel obliged to resurrect this or that politician’s image. It would be a national tragedy if the armed forces allow themselves to be coopted into the political masters’ shabby calculus of national glory.
It is perhaps comforting to believe that in taking this “free hand” decision, the Modi regime has also factored in the extreme ugliness that has been openly directed at minorities after the Pahalgam failure. Almost all sober voices, including the few who remain in Modi’s corner, have cautioned against creating conditions of a civil war at home, pushing ourselves into a black hole of bigotry and divisiveness.
Caste census
A convergence between the Hindutva die-hards and the authors of the Pahalgam massacre is all too obvious. The prime minister’s national responsibility – indeed, duty – was and remains not to allow the lunatic fringe to define the national mood.
It is now up to other stakeholders, including the armed forces, to steer us out of the post-Pahalgam posturing.
Unfortunately, even in this difficult time, Modi remains unconcerned with the requirements of rallying the nation across party lines. He chose to absent himself from the all-party meeting; nor has there been any response to the opposition’s reasonable demand to call an emergency session of parliament.
And, within 24 hours, the Modi cabinet was asked to take the “historic” decision to allow a caste census – the very proposal the ruling party has spent the past few years denouncing as “casteist” and “divisive.” Even a junior political reporter can discern the duplicity at work here – to shift attention away from what Pahalgam means: a glaring collapse of the “post-370” strategy (i.e., beyond Article 370 of the Indian constitution that gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir).
Our national well-being has become hostage to a cynical regime, always wallowing in calculations of electoral advantage and power grab. It is now up to other stakeholders, including the armed forces, to steer us out of the post-Pahalgam posturing without doing grave damage to our national interests. Testing days lie ahead for the republic.
