Syed Qamar Afzal Rizvi
OSTENSIBLY while rejecting Indian Premier Narendra Modi’s hostile rhetoric as irresponsible, Pakistan Foreign Office has warned Delhi against underestimating the unmatched capability and unflinching determination of Pakistan’s armed forces to defend the country. Our armed forces will not take more than seven to ten days to make Pakistan bite the dust,” Modi had declared while speaking at the National Cadet Corps Rally in Delhi on Tuesday last, Modi lamented the “inaction” of his predecessors who were reluctant to use military force against Pakistan. Pakistani Foreign Ministry statement said that Modi’s “irresponsible and war-mongering” remarks reflected India’s “incurable obsession” with Pakistan and an attempt to divert attention from growing internal challenges facing the Indian leadership. “We urge the international community to take cognizance of the Indian leadership’s continuing belligerent rhetoric and aggressive measures which pose a threat to regional peace and security,” the statement said.
The critical India view holds that Narendra Modi government’s Pakistan policy has largely stood on three pillars—increasing pressure on Pakistan, avoiding talks with the Pakistan army, and getting the world to trust India’s judgment on the regional situation. This policy is yielding diminishing returns and, beyond a point, these pillars are not compatible with each other. If New Delhi keeps raising the temperature, the next crisis will be scarier and more dangerous than the last one. Frustrated by its failure to deal with escalating raging violent protests over India’s highly divisive new citizenship, the Narendra Modi-led government could stage a ‘false flag operation’ in an attempt to fire up Hindu nationalism against Pakistan – something he has repeatedly done in the past for political gains.
Here one may rightly argue that the February-2019 Balakot strike was designed to demonstrate that India had the upper hand because of its conventional military superiority and that it had the space to escalate if it wanted to. If India had been able to do this successfully, it could have fundamentally changed the India-Pakistan dynamic, because it could have set up a template for future Indian military action. By the same token, an Indian failure does not return the situation to status quo ante, but to a much worse place for India. “Statements by Indian COAS to undertake military action across LoC (Line of Control) are routine rhetoric for domestic audience to get out of ongoing internal turmoil,” Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) (then) DG Major General Asif Ghafoor said in a tweet. “Pakistan’s armed forces are fully prepared to respond to any act of Indian aggression,” he added. PM Khan war scenario holds considerable weightage for the international community as Crisis Management in South Asia is hugely consequential.
Undeniably, albeit a limited nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would be disastrous for people in the region, but the effects could spread well beyond South Asia. Prime Minister Imran Khan has warned the international community that if India staged a false flag operation, it would receive a “befitting response” from Pakistan. Preventing the next crisis from escalating to a point at which nuclear weapons might be used is, therefore, a global imperative. Here one could also argue the implications of the doctrine of ‘truncated asymmetry’— explaining the India-Pakistan conundrum where, albeit a materially and conventionally stronger India could hardly and unilaterally force the solution it wanted, despite India’s greater power capability than Pakistan’s, a number of factors mitigate and reduce that disparity, especially in Kashmir where the Kashmiri struggle for freedom is gaining global recognition and Pakistan imparts its moral, legal and traditional support for the genuine case of Kashmiri freedom, this estimate is endorsed even by the Hindu strategists who think that Modi war doctrine— being theologically borrowed through the Shishupala Doctrine— would be absolutely unworkable as far as Pakistan case is concerned.
Clearly seen from Modi’s combination strategy— of rising retribution and seeking rapprochement via private quarters— while at the same time pushing wide the asymmetry gap of the Shishupala Doctrine arguably creates an expedient space for urging a peace dialogue with Pakistan, a dialogue advocating the peaceful solution of decades’ old Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan. And yet the so-called New India of Narendra Modi, Amit Shah and Jaishankar is zealously unabashed in its embrace of power politics and contemptuous of its critics. The Modi’s war rhetoric and its new doctrine of redefining its security policy is nothing but a theological reflection on his insidious political and psychological motives against Pakistan. Undeniably, leading Indian newspapers have already raised serious academic concerns regarding the recently passed Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, which explicitly favours non-Muslim refugees, labelling it unequal, unsecular, “a poisonous bill and flawed and dangerous.
Inevitably, the next South Asia crisis needs to be managed, to the extent possible, with careful planning and preparation, rather than counting on felonious motives. Obviously, under the Modi regime, the Indian strategist K. Subrahmanyam argued that the power status quo is convenient to all stakeholders, “politicians enjoy power without any responsibility, bureaucrats wield authority without any accountability and the military assumes responsibility without any direction.” To his credit, the premier prioritized emotive issues like building a war memorial and made it a point to visit troops serving in difficult areas during important festivals — an unheard-of tradition within India. However, from the perspective of defense policy, he has had lacklustre progress, failing to live up to his own vision.
However, a fair assessment of Modi’s Kashmir move suggests, there is little evidence that the Kashmiris hailing from the Vale have had any fragment of rethinking of their allegiance to Delhi; much evidence the contrary, while a huge and costly security presence remains, threats of separatists’ attacks persist, and economic development initiatives have not gone according to plan. And also a critical Indian assessment says that Delhi’s post-August 5 Kashmir policy “is proving to be a disaster and there appears no way out other than having a peace dialogue on Kashmir wherein the Kashmiris, the Indian Government and the Pakistani Government representatives must make a framework of the Kashmir resolution.
—The writer, an independent ‘IR’ researcher-cum-analyst based in Pakistan, is member of European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on IR, Critical Peace & Conflict Studies, also a member of Washington Foreign Law Society and European Society of International Law.
