India-Pakistan relations yo-yo between engagement and tension engendered by terrorists or Pakistan military-led attacks. This happened twice during Atal Behari Vajpayee’s government — during the 1999 Kargil war and the December 2001 terror attack on the Indian Parliament — and again during Manmohan Singh’s prime ministership when the dialogue was shattered by the 2006 Mumbai train bombings and the horrendous 26/11 attack in November 2008. The last event still mires bilateral relations as India seeks and Pakistan ignores bringing its masterminds to justice.
The Narendra Modi government came to power in 2016 inciting public anger against a corrupt and helpless Congress government that was painted cowardly and incompetent in dealing with terror. Multiple heads were promised for each one that the Pakistani Army decapitated. This defied strategic and moral logic as mutilation of the bodies of combatants during war or otherwise is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, which no civilised nation’s military can espouse blatantly. But jingoism is heady medicine that may somewhat help electorally but creates a strategic trap, which the Modi government now confronts.
The Pakistan Army, having studied new US administration over its first 100 days and seeing the Sunni alliance resurrected for countering Iran and the Islamic State, is confident enough to resume its India-baiting. In addition, it has seen tension escalate in Sino-Indian relations, with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor as the sheet-anchor of Sino-Pakistani open strategic convergence. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is enfeebled by the inquiry against him over the Panama Papers and his India outreach needed sabotaging. Thus the border action teams were authorised to waylay Indian patrols and kill and mutilate to provoke India and push the Modi government into the jingoism trap, as it cannot but retaliate to satisfy the social media-led hordes baying for Pakistani blood.
The Modi government came to power realising that the past conundrum of terror alternating with engagement and undermining it needed to be overcome. It widened the options by developing new pressure points on Pakistan to condition the bad behaviour of its armed forces. It also implemented the so-called “zero tolerance” policy on terror, thus putting itself into a strategic corner. In the past mutilations by the Pakistan Army, including in respect of prisoners caught alive during the Kargil war, were dealt with at level of local commanders giving a tit-for-tat response that stopped such aberrant behaviour for some time. This was a tactical response to a rogue army that occasionally breaches international law and the Geneva Conventions.
The Modi government, elected on and continuing to use jingoism domestically and electorally, around which the persona of Narendra Modi the saviour and avenger is built, feels compelled to react forcefully to any Pakistani atrocity. This is necessary to satisfy the baying masses in the street and social media hordes and defenders on television seeking vengeance that is tangible and bloody. The tail thus wags the dog.
The so-called “surgical strike” was devised when many soldiers died in the Uri military camp attack. India targeted cross-LoC militant launch pads and not the Pakistan Army, although most vital training installations would adjoin Pakistani military encampments. This time that fiction will not work as the attack was directly by the Pakistan Army’s border action team. The punishment can be by unleashing an artillery barrage, which would heat up the Line of Control and start attracting global attention. That is precisely what the Pakistanis want as the Kashmir Valley teeters under a widespread uprising of youth and even women. Alternatively, another strike, surgical or brutal, may find Pakistan better prepared than last time and thus lead to an escalation. With his immediate domestic electoral calendar clear, Mr Modi may have hoped to play the statesman over the next few months as he goes to West Asia, the SCO meeting and later in July for G-20, when he could possibly meet US President Donald Trump. Kashmir in tumult and the LoC afire would undermine that foray. A meeting with Nawaz Sharif already stands blighted, for which perhaps industrialist Sajjan Jindal was laying the groundwork at his Murree meeting with Mr Sharif.
The Pakistan Army obviously has its own strategic calculus. Despite being handpicked by Nawaz Sharif, Gen. Javed A. Bajwa, the new chief, is beginning to act in line with his Army’s old pathologies of dominating the civilian government’s security and foreign policy as indeed the sponsorship of “friendly” jihadi groups. A story leaked to the Dawn newspaper about government pressure on the Army to downgrade links to anti-India jihadi groups has forced Mr Sharif to sack an aide. The sentencing to death of alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav and now the beheading is a response to what the Pakistan Army sees as the “Dovalisation” of India’s Pakistan policy (a reference to India’s NSA Ajit Doval) — which Mr Modi seemed to endorse from the ramparts of the Red Fort last year while making common cause with the Balochis and Baltistan.
Mr Modi thus confronts a “jingoism trap”. Can he dismount the tiger, silence his followers by calibrated punishment of Pakistani Army units that sent the border action teams, and yet meet Nawaz Sharif on the sidelines of the SCO summit? That would deny Gen. Bajwa a veto on India-Pakistan relations. The Modi government needs to escape the delusion that Pakistan is isolated and sinking. The Karachi stock market performed superbly last year. China’s open support, including the recent billion-dollar cheque and the $46-billion CPEC project, emboldens Pakistan. US President Donald Trump starts his diplomatic foray abroad with Saudi Arabia on May 19. As he addresses his Sunni allies to build a coalition against Iran and ISIS, Pakistan will surely be there. As the saying goes, the more it changes more it remains the same for Pakistan as an international mercenary. President John F. Kennedy asked after the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco: “How could that crowd at the CIA and the Pentagon be this wrong?” Mr Modi needs to similarly introspect, having allowed his Kashmir and Pakistan policy to be monopolised by intelligence and police advisers, public opinion and the BJP’s hawks.
