On The Spot
Tavleen Singh
Let me begin with a deep and sincere salute to our Army Chief, General Bikram Singh. His calm and clear announcement last week that his commanders on the LOC (Line of Control) had orders to retaliate ‘offensively’ if provoked came as the voice of reassurance amid the hysterical cacophony that has risen from political circles and TV studios since the latest trouble with Pakistan began. The beheading of an Indian soldier is indeed cause for horror and revulsion but we have a right to expect a modicum of dignity in the response of our political leaders and this was missing. If the Prime Minister took refuge as usual in silence and Sonia and Rahul Gandhi in seclusion those they appointed to speak on their behalf ended up sounding pathetic and unsure. This created the impression that the government was not at all sure what it should be doing next and it did not take long for opposition leaders to take charge in an embarrassingly manic way. If Sushma Swaraj thought she covered herself in a mantle of valour when she demanded ‘ten heads’ for the one that the Pakistanis took she was wrong. She merely ended up looking stupid and childish.
Why is it that every time we have a problem with Pakistan our political leaders make idiots of themselves? Why is it that they always end behaving as if India was a small, feeble country and Pakistan a mighty superpower that could at any moment become the cause of our destruction? Whenever I have asked this question of high officials on our side of the border they reply that it is because India wants to be seen as a mature, responsible country. Well, they appear not to have noticed that this tactic has ended up making India look weak rather than mature.
Since Dr. Manmohan Singh became prime minister things have got worse. So although he may have thought he was behaving in a mature and responsible fashion in Sharm-el-Sheikh when he agreed to discuss ‘Indian terrorism’ in Baluchistan in the same breath as 26/11 he actually ended up letting India down. The 26/11 attack on Mumbai was a pre-meditated act of war and should have been treated as such instead we continued to behave as if it was just another terrorist attack. This gave Pakistanis politicians and military men the chance to repeat, ad nauseum, that ‘a Mumbai happens in Pakistan every day’. This is rubbish but nobody among India’s senior leaders seems able to say this loudly and clearly enough for Islamabad to hear.
If this were the first time India looked bad in a cross-border crisis it would not be worth writing about. But, it happens time and time again. After IC 814 was hijacked the government of Atal Behari Vajpayee sent our Minister of External Affairs to accompany the released terrorists. The Government of India may have thought this was a mature and responsible thing to do but Maulana Azhar Masood, one of the released terrorists, thought so contemptuously of the gesture that he wrote afterwards that he had refused food and drink on the special flight to show his disdain for India. He went on to organize the attack on our Parliament on December 13, 2001 and his companion in terror, Omar Sheikh, went on to organize the sickening murder of Daniel Pearl.
Both men had been in Indian jails for more than five years when they were released in exchange for the passengers of IC 814. Since these men operated freely once they returned to Pakistan we should have been able to assert confidently that this was clear evidence that they were under the protection of the Pakistani Army. Somehow this never happened and even after 26/11 so we now have Hafiz Saeed conducting his war against India publicly and we seem able to do nothing to stop him. Some opposition leaders said after the latest atrocity on the LOC that we need to ‘name and shame’ Pakistan in the forums of the world. Really? Have we not been doing exactly this since the 26/11 attack and has it made a difference?
What we need to do is show that India has the capacity to conduct the kind of covert operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. What we need to do is make it clear to Pakistan, and our other enemies, that if they conduct acts of terrorism against Indian citizens they must be prepared to die. Do we not do this because our intelligence agencies are not capable of conducting covert operations? If this is the case we need to know why since vast quantities of taxpayers’ money has gone into slush funds, safe houses and the training of special forces. Where are these special forces? Do they do anything more than guide VVIPs in Lutyens’ Delhi?
Since we seem finally to have an Army Chief who is more interested in the army than in politics it could be time to consider a strategy in which special units are raised to fight the new kind of war that Pakistan has imposed upon us. But, again this requires political will and a Defense Minister who is prepared to play more than a decorative role. Can we hope that this will happen now that the ceasefire on the LOC that has held for more than a decade has been breached? It would be so nice to be able to say yes to this question but, alas, it would be untrue. If there is a consensus in cold and foggy Delhi these days about anything it is that India has rarely had a weaker government than the one that we currently have. Not even senior ministers seem sure about who is in charge and nobody is absolutely certain either whether there will be elections this year or not. Some admit that there is such a dangerous sense of drift in the air that we might be better off if elections were held early. Meanwhile, Pakistan has as usual got away by blaming the latest atrocity on the LOC on militant groups and not the army. What we need to ask is if these militant groups were not a creation of the Pakistani army and if they are not still operating under the army’s auspices. But, in an otherwise bleak and murky scenario it was reassuring to see the Army Chief speak with such confidence and clarity.
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