The military clashes between India and Pakistan have thrown up questions still swathed in the fog of ambiguity. None of these is as significant, for socio-psychological reasons, as the question: outside the circle of experts, has the perception of Indians regarding Pakistan’s military capabilities changed?
It’s now widely believed Indian fighter jets were shot down, although Delhi hasn’t explicitly confirmed it. This was in addition to the people experiencing Islamabad’s raining of missiles and drones on India. Regardless of their ineffectiveness, Pakistan’s relentless attacks came as a rude awakening for those who naively believed Pakistan could be steamrolled, as Palestine repeatedly is by Israel.
This change in the popular perception should diminish the appeal of warmongers, who support Modi blindly. Although themselves disappointed at the cessation of the Indo-Pak clashes, they will not desert him. Not yet, at least.
So, what has India’s failure to bring Pakistan to its knees cost Prime Minister Narendra Modi? He has suffered a serious setback among those who describe themselves ‘neutral,’ a category distinct from those implacably opposed to him. They call themselves neutral because they voted for as well as against him in the past.
The neutrals are aghast that Modi should have agreed to a ceasefire at American President Donald Trump’s behest. And this, despite Trump not accusing Pakistan of fomenting terrorism, and offering to mediate between it and India over Kashmir. The neutrals feel India’s autonomy has been compromised. They’re neither convinced by Delhi’s projection that Islamabad first sought the ceasefire, nor by Washington’s belated statement that it wished to “encourage direct communications” between the two countries, not mediate between them.
Is Modi’s setback reversible? Certainly yes, for he overcame the disastrous fallout of his 2016 demonetisation policy, and even the horror of lakhs dying during the COVID pandemic. Yet his attempt to reverse the setback has had him unwittingly create a trap for himself, when he redefined the ceasefire as a mere suspension of Operation Sindoor, subject to Pakistan not sponsoring terror in India. The redefinition is a self-made trap because he has lowered India’s threshold for tolerating terrorism.
Since terrorism is unlikely to abate in Kashmir, what death toll would have India retaliate? Much would, in fact, depend on who dies. India struck Balakot in response to 40 CRPF jawans perishing in the 2019 Pulwama bomb blast. All the victims except one were Hindu. Operation Sindoor sought to avenge the death of 26 people in the Baisaran massacre, of whom 25 were Hindu.
Clearly, India won’t hit out at Pakistan in case Kashmiris are killed in a terror incident. This means a group, with or without Pakistan’s support, could create military instability by solely targeting Hindus, challenging Modi to react again. In case he doesn’t, he’d irreversibly alienate even his devotees. Indeed, Hindus have been rendered vulnerable because of Modi’s post-ceasefire speech.
An Indo-Pak conflict always has a Hindu-Muslim dimension. Delhi countered Pakistan’s Baisaran plan of exploiting India’s social faultline by deputing, among others, Colonel Sofiya Qureshi to anchor the briefings on Operation Sindoor. Qureshi has become a symbol of India’s inter-faith cohesion. Is this symbolism a harbinger of the Bharatiya Janata Party diluting Hindutva?
No, for Qureshi is the obverse side of the Hindutva coin, which is minted regularly to demonise Muslims and polarise India. She was deployed to taunt Pakistan that it can’t succeed in aggravating the Hindu-Muslim divide, which, mind you, the BJP itself has increasingly widened. The instrumental use of Muslims for scaring and consolidating the Hindus and, at the same time, hypocritically showcasing India’s religious plurality will continue. These two tendencies were combined in a Madhya Pradesh minister’s crass stereotyping of Qureshi, fooling none.
Likewise, turning foreign policy into a razzmatazz hasn’t impressed the world. Not only did Trump refuse to support India, he placed it on the same footing as Pakistan in his remarks on the ceasefire, despite Delhi’s revolting desperation to please him. The G-7 countries didn’t support Operation Sindoor, nor did our neighbours, nor did the global South.
Does India need to reorient its foreign policy? Certainly.
Does India also need to revamp its intelligence agencies, which have been blamed for Baisaran? Intelligence agencies can’t always succeed in pre-empting terror strikes, not even those of Israel, which was clueless about the Hamas raid of October 7, 2023. Baisaran was mostly about the regime believing in its delusional rhetoric of normalcy in Kashmir, the reason why security was absent there. That said, the downing of Indian jets suggests India underestimated Pakistan’s Chinese weaponry system.
India will increase its defence expenditure to match the China-Pakistan dyad, at the expense of the social sector. A country with a large percentage of its population poorly educated and unhealthy can’t realise its dream of becoming a great power. And, therefore, the question: Is India’s annihilation of Pakistan the only path to our security? No, the alternative to it is to resolve the Kashmir issue, by satisfying in some measure the political aspirations of its people. As I argued in my May 5 column, economic integration of Kashmir didn’t and can’t lead to its emotional integration with India. What can? Well, that requires another piece.
The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste
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