No War! Trading Cuts And Bites With Pakistan Is Best

 No War! Trading Cuts & Bites With Pakistan Is Best

The ‘Dogs of War’ are baying on Twitter/Facebook, in editorials and TV debates, post the Uri massacre at the Indian Army’s brigade HQ.

But let us realise we are not going to fight Pakistan alone this time, their nuclear sabre-rattling notwithstanding.  

And the first casualty of an all-out war would be the sudden death of India’s ‘fastest growing economy in the world’ tag.

Without war, at 8% growth in GDP in 2016-2017 per Niti Aayog projections, the trend sustaining - and the forthcoming GST dividend could add another 2% by 2019.

A further 1% could come from a well-watered rural economy, this year, and for two going forward, thanks to the El Nina effect.

India could well grow its $2 trillion real economy and its $2 trillion stock market capitalisation for the next two decades, at compounded double digits. It has every chance of becoming a ‘low middle income economy’ within a decade, even given the size of its population.

But only if it does not take this bait of war.

It would then, over time, be in a much better position to sharply increase its military spending from the paltry 1.7% of GDP at present, contribute along the way towards regional security, and grow stronger with each passing year both economically and militarily.

China’s $ 50 billion CPEC in Pakistan is its meal-ticket to economic revival, and this is at the core of the true narrative of present developments.  

It has already occasioned joint protection of the work ongoing in Gilgit/Baltistan, and mass arrests of protesters there, even before India asserted its claim on PoK and the territory, just five weeks ago.

At the other end of the proposed CPEC, in Balochistan, thousands have been killed ever since India declared its support for its independence movement.

Many more ethnic Balochi men, women, and children have been abducted and gone missing. All this is now fodder to the mill at the UNGA in New York for the first time.

But apart from the likelihood that we would lose this war, given China’s vast military superiority, we would certainly set our economy back a decade at least.

Our GDP rates would plummet. A per day cost of war in 2016 would top Rs. 5,000 crores, considering Kargil, a one theatre operation, in 1999, was estimated to cost between Rs. 5000-10,000 crores a week.

A 14 day ‘short war’ today would cost  at least Rs. 250,000 crores, assuming multiple fronts and contingencies, and raise the nation’s fiscal deficit by 50% to about Rs. 8 lakh crores, up from 5.32 lakh crores in 2015-16. This was a healthy 3.9% of GDP, down from 4.1% the year before. This hypothetical war will also have a sharp knock-on inflationary effect.

It would also ruin the upward trend in FDI/ FII investment, take a 50% hit on the bourses, drop the rupee to Rs. 100 to the US dollar, put paid to our high tech manufacturing ambitions and render bleak the chances of revival in the near term.

War with Pakistan now would suit China very well though, and eliminate a strong rival from contention.

China’s determination to protect the JeM, keep India out of the NSG, shower nuclear power stations, military equipment, enter into defence pacts with Pakistan, has to be also viewed in this context.

However, this is not a ‘do-nothing’ prescription against Pakistan’s very competent ‘sub-conventional warfare’ model.

If India changes course, to stick, no matter how insolent the provocation, to responding likewise, we can give tit-for-tat indefinitely, and even make some pre-emptive thrusts and parries. Honour and blood will yet be served, while our economy keeps chugging forward.

India can ramp up its own ‘Defensive Offence’ programme, long advocated by spymaster and NSA Ajit Doval, and create mayhem in India’s legally owned  PoK/Gilgit-Baltistan.

We can also fan the revolt in independence-seeking Balochistan till success is theirs. With these regions breaking away as the ultimate objective, other regions, like NWFP, and Sindh, are likely to join the revolt.  

We can provide, men, materials, training, diplomatic and economic support long term. We can use proxies, ‘non-state actors’, specialised operatives, soldiers, commandos - but all in mufti and disguise with ‘plausible deniability’ stencilled on them.

 And this, with plenty of scalps taken to assuage what Pakistanis have been doing to us for over three decades.  This slow burn would also prevent China from wading in, and blaming us for the privilege!

Besides, our diplomatic effort to isolate Pakistan as a terrorist state is working. Not only is it under censure from America, Russia, Britain, France, Germany, but also from Afghanistan and Bangladesh, in the SAARC.

More condemnation, perhaps even economic sanctions, may well be on its way.

But not only does Pakistan and China want to seize the Kashmir Valley to secure the CPEC and water flows; humiliating India and trashing its global aspirations, are also important objectives.

This diabolical joint plan is meant to be decisive, but how can it be, when it is essentially a ‘war of a thousand cuts’, in operation since the 1980s?

For: The Quint

(842 words)

September 21^st, 2016

Gautam Mukherjee