For PM & BJP, a reality check

At the BJP national meet at Kozhikode, Kerala, on Saturday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi broke a week-long spell of war-drumming that had broken out after the Uri terrorist attack. Leading the band were BJP leaders. They were merely being who they are — the natural representatives of the party’s rank and file who have been weaned on the idea of sounding “strong” and “raining blows” on perceived foes, especially Pakistan, on account of the religious dimension.

Bowing to their ideological compulsions, and following in the footsteps of the RSS and BJP leaders (Mr Modi himself is a good example of this when he was Gujarat chief minister, and later as he campaigned in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections), these cadres look for simple — even simplistic — solutions to complex problems, such as ties with Pakistan.

In the RSS-BJP lore, a heave and a blow is all it takes. We may recall that after the nuclear weapons test when Atal Behari Vajpayee was Prime Minister, a leading light of the BJP establishment in Delhi who had been a Cabinet minister, a fine but simple man, had invited Pakistan to a wrestle.

In an unwarranted show of belligerence he struck his thighs with his open palms in the North Indian manner to denote posing a challenge by the obviously superior side. When the news of the testing of the Pakistani nukes came days after, there was understandable silence. So that’s who they are.

This time television was dutifully obliging. Screens were filled with silly “debates” in which a nearly undifferentiated school of experts — chosen from the cadre of retired diplomats, former security bureaucrats, and ex-military folk who abound in Delhi — expanded on “strike options”. Thank God these guys exist, or our television will have to invent them to keep going.

At Kozhikode, the Prime Minister busted the narrative of the merry war-gamers. He showed a remarkable sense of realism and fell in line with what’s come to be known as “strategic restraint”, displayed by all his predecessors except Indira Gandhi in 1971.

Mr Vajpayee showed it in 2001 when Parliament was attacked, and Manmohan Singh in 2008 after the attack on Mumbai. Both ran coalition governments. But Mr Modi runs a government in which his party has more than a comfortable majority.

That’s the lesson. While war cannot be forsworn by any State as a matter of principle, in dealing with Pakistan it cannot come as an easy, obvious and only option to India whether a leader in Parliament heads a motley coalition or a triumphalist majority of “Hindu nationalists”, the expression Mr Modi favoured for himself in an interview two years ago.

This is for two principal reasons. Prosecuting even a short war (a country like Pakistan, even if it were foolhardy enough to use battlefield nuclear weapons against India, is unlikely to last a week) will extract sharp economic costs and push down our economic advance as a nation in the medium term.

Two, the external environment is not likely to accept an outbreak of hostilities for a variety of reasons, but essentially because the principal powers, specially China, the US and Saudi Arabia, are unlikely to want another possible fragmentation of Pakistan (after Bangladesh). Remember, when the Kargil misadventure was going badly for Islamabad, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif rushed to Washington to beg President Bill Clinton to urge the Indians to pull back, and they did.

In its own way, each of the above-named powers will be hurt from a prospect of intense political and territorial turmoil in Pakistan. Indeed, China, which has begun to invest massively in Pakistan, including in colonised Balochistan and in PoK (which is an Indian territory) for geopolitical and geo-economic reasons, and probably looks to build a naval base in Gwadar in Balochistan in addition to a major port, could conceivably enter a military engagement on Pakistan’s side, something it fell short of doing in 1971.

No matter how much delight we may take in highlighting Pakistan’s miserable state from world forums, and its use of terrorist proxies as state policy, any Indian planner will have to take note of these realities.

Another set of facts also needs to be considered. In 1971, the US and China were on the Pakistan side, and America especially showed India much belligerence. In the Cold War era, Indira Gandhi was enabled to counteract Pakistan with a full array of force on account of the treaty it signed with the then Soviet Union.

The picture today is more mixed and may have got worse for India. China and the US remain friends with Pakistan. Moscow too now holds military exercises with Islamabad. The US is solicitous of New Delhi, but not to the extent of jettisoning ties with Islamabad. China’s tilt towards Pakistan has become a lean and an embrace.

Some of these qualitative shifts have occurred under the Modi dispensation whose foreign policy trajectory looks to be different from that of past governments, including Mr Vajpayee’s. Mr Modi is shown up to be as having no policy worth the name toward Pakistan.

He first tried trading gifts with Mr Sharif. Then he arrived unannounced at the Pakistan leader’s door in Lahore to show goodwill after talks had unravelled. External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, who has no contribution to the making of foreign policy, gushed like a young girl, saying that this single gesture had made Mr Modi “a world statesman”. This is the BJP’s idea of world affairs. And after Uri, the Prime Minister has had to swallow the bitter pill and speak of waging a thousand-year war with Pakistan — to remove poverty.

Whatever the faithful may make of this, it is also evident that minding defence and security in relation to Pakistan has also suffered grievously under the present dispensation. After the event there is febrile talk of isolating Pakistan economically and taking it apart militarily, but little has been done to prevent major terror strikes and build military capability to check Islamabad’s ambitions.

Before Uri there was Pathankot, and there was Udhampur before Pathankot — all military stations. Not a single gap in defences found by inquiries has been filled. Unprecedented infiltration has been permitted in the Kashmir Valley in the past two years. Don’t just blame Pakistan, go do something worthwhile yourself.