India:
Staking Out A New Frontier
It is a well known truism that there are few rich pickings
in a place frequented by many. To strike the big gong, it is necessary for a
country with ambition to sometimes reboot its strategic thinking and strike out
in a direction it has never gone before. India might have had the wherewithal
to wrest PoK back, even as it was stolen from under its nose in 1948, but we
will never know for sure. Was a newly departed Britain in favour of our doing
so?
But now, if not then, a much stronger India has just
executed a new interpretation of an erstwhile imperial device called a “Forward
Policy”. This Indian version, applied not primarily to a hostile neighbour per se, but to its state sponsored
terrorists, could change both the power architecture and economic prospects of Pakistan.
This is a possibility with profound and far reaching consequences.
Can the Pakistan Army apparatus including the formidable
ISI, maintain its stranglehold on the benighted nation without its raison d etre? If it loses its
preeminent power, will the elected civilian authorities be able to lead
Pakistan into a future of peace, international cooperation and plenty?
India’s new frontier is an executed doctrine of preemptive
and post atrocity punitive strikes against institutionalized terrorists. Pakistan
has been conducting a low- cost, low- intensity war against India for decades,
ever since it dreamed up the strategy at the Quetta Military Staff College in
the seventies.
But now, with punitive strikes into PoK and Pakistan itself,
India has cut the very Gordian knot that its “strategic restraint” and any
amount of ameliorative diplomacy has failed to impress.
Not only this, but by this preemptive strike and what it
implies for the future, the very ground is being cut off from under the feet of
the separatist industry with its votaries ensconced both in the Kashmir Valley and in other parts of India,
including New Delhi.
Internationally, Israel may lash out at its neighbours, and
be acknowledged kings of the precision strike, but none of its adversaries are
nuclear powers, while Israel has its share of US given nuclear bombs and
delivery systems.
And the mighty US, victims of meticulously planned terror
strikes such as the 9/11 massacre and at sundry locations abroad, has been
careful about which countries and entities it chooses to pound into the dust.
It is heartening however that the Trump administration has
been most supportive of India’s attempt to take the battle to the JeM
terrorists. It has also upheld India’s right to self-defence. The same
sentiment has been echoed by almost all of the big powers. The preemptive
strike into Pakistan is seen as a task that needed doing for a long time and
who is better placed than India to do it?
Even since 1947, India has suffered the consequences of the
Partition in multiple ways – blood, anger, betrayal, humiliation, frustration
and being hyphenated diplomatically and strategically with its hostile neighbour.
This began to change with the end of the Cold War, and then India’s economic
ascent in the mid eighties. At the same time Pakistan, while being
strategically important to the West for a period, became a country abjectly
dependent on aid and grants for its very survival.
By 2019, the economic contrast between the two has grown
stark. Pakistan is now practically hand-to-mouth. It is dependent on China,
building its costly China-Pakistan Economic Corridor at a time when its own
economy is languishing. And help from traditional Islamic neighbours like Saudi
Arabia and the UAE, also no longer in the pink of financial health themselves.
In addition, Pakistan still tries to get some money from America which is in
the process of withdrawing from Afghanistan. And then there are the borrowings
and bail-outs from the multi-lateral agencies like the IMF, but these too are
guided and largely controlled by the US.
India, the fastest growing major economy in the world, has
chosen its strategic moment well. To execute a paradigm shift on its dealing
with cross-border terrorism is a major task that was long overdue. It has
killed over 80,000 people and injured even more over the last 30 years. But a series
of terror attacks followed by strategic restraint on India’s part, and periodic
talks with Pakistan have yielded no results. The Pakistan Army, it is
understood, cannot maintain its hold if there is peace between India and
Pakistan.
For the first time since both countries went overtly
nuclear in the late nineties, India has called Pakistan’s nuclear bluff. It has
attacked a terrorist training centre in Pakistan killing 350 terrorists in
their sleep. Pakistan, unequal to the task in conventional warfare,
demonstrated as much in short order. It was unable to cause damage to Indian
military establishments in the Nowshera sector of J&K, though attacking
with as many as 24 fighters on the 27th of February.
What India has done suggests that it will do so again in
future, as and when necessary, and this will surely raise both the physical and
psychological costs for Pakistan. The constant cease-fire violations along the
LoC, so routine as to have become unremarkable, are another area where Pakistan
may have to reassess its strategy. India is using much more sophisticated
surveillance technology now, and has begun to return fire using long range
heavy artillery more often than not.
International
pressure, brought about by tireless diplomacy, and India’s refusal to negotiate
till terror factories are dismantled and the offenders brought to justice, has
forced Pakistan’s hand. It had to adhere to the Geneva Convention and return a
captured Indian pilot in short order, something it was reluctant to do.
Though it will take some time for it to sink in, the reckless
Pakistani policy of bleeding India with a thousand cuts may well have run its
course. The UNSC including China, quite a few in the UN general assembly, and
even the OIC, have also weighed in. The next steps could lead to international
sanctions and boycotts if Pakistan does not pay heed.
For too long Pakistan has worked on and taken advantage of
the assumption of a pacifist India. Though India is a nuclear power, with a delivery
“triad” in place, it has neither been a proliferator, nor issued nuclear
threats to anybody.
But India does have conventional military superiority over
Pakistan, and is sharply escalating its military modernization programme to
protect itself from both Pakistan and China.
India is simultaneously cracking down, again for the first
time, on separatist elements and organizations within J&K and elsewhere in
India. There is also every possibility of the special status of J&K being
abrogated in order to achieve a fuller integration with the rest of India.
Much of the new paradigm and its continuance will depend on
Modi winning a second term in office, given his sharp policy departure from the
past. But with the nation’s patriotism aroused, this looks much more likely
than before the Valentine Day massacre of over 40 CRPF soldiers at Pulwama.
Pakistan, via the JeM, could not have chosen a worse time
to up the ante.
(1,183
words)
March
1st, 2019
For:
My Nation
Gautam
Mukherjee
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