The spectacle of war distracts us from real issues

Going by another act of provocation and another war, it is a no-brainer that the rivalry between India and Pakistan has proven to be one of the world’s most intractable international conflicts. The provocation came at a time at the peak of the tourist season, at a time of apparent complacency as there has not been a significant upsurge of violence after the revocation of Article 370 in 2019 which, many thought, was largely due to the iron fist of a repressive internal security dragnet.

The terrorists delivered a body blow to any pretension of normalcy harboured by the security establishment. They chose and hit targets with an abandon that beggared belief that Kashmir happens to be one of the most militarised zones of the world. By communalising the targets by hand-picking them, they wanted to plant seeds of discord in a country where secularism is being constantly challenged as its founding principle. India’s secular claim over Kashmir within the spirit of a secular federal multicultural polity had always challenged the two-nation theory; now due to many insurgencies arising from within, Pakistan is threatened with dismemberment. While Pakistan’s subcontinental Muslim nationalism based upon the ideology of pan-Islamism and the two-nation theory has always coveted Kashmir as part of the homeland created for the Muslims of South Asia, the Indian nationalist leadership chose to hold on to this Muslim-majority state to prove that minorities could thrive in a plural, secular polity.

The problem of this rivalry for a far wealthier and more plural country with democratic roots such as India is that the time of an Indo-Pak face-off breeds a hysteric brand of nationalism that almost distracts our attention away from the more real problems that bedevil us. Swept up by a maniacal frenzy, we wish for a nuclear Armageddon, even though Pakistan has been diminished from its promising origins as the world’s largest Muslim state into an almost failed fragment of itself. However much we recall the attempt to flee their ancestral homes by more than ten million terrified Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, one million of whom died before reaching safety, in a mad act of communal frenzy, we are steadfast in carrying an unbroken legacy of hatred and engaging in chronic everyday vituperation as a matter of our national pastime. The routine sabre-rattlings about destroying each other, with dark hints of nuclear annihilation from both sides, are bandied about with gay abandon whenever there is a face-off on the horizon.

Besides hatred, there is always a spin. Pakistan, incidentally, celebrates Defence Day on September 6 to honour the soldiers and civilians who fought for it during the 1965 India-Pakistan war. The war ended in a stalemate with neither side achieving a decisive victory yet claiming it. It was primarily over Kashmir and resulted in a UN-sponsored ceasefire. This time as well, the leading daily of Pakistan The Dawn reports that Pakistan is treating the outcome of the conflict as a victory.

History lends context

The unfortunate thing is that when winning the perception war becomes more important than realising the implied objectives of a military operation, or when optics become more important than substance, we don’t address the disease. The larger question is if such cross-border and aerial strikes by India and spectacles of grand justice can achieve its goals. Since India’s retaliatory strikes in 2016 and 2019, the threshold for escalation has shifted dramatically – a departure from the days when India produced dossiers of documents to establish the complicity of Pakistan, usually with little effect. However, there is no guarantee that Pakistan will behave responsibly in the future even after such punitive airstrikes since the trail is bloodied by a seemingly endless cycle of standoffs, severely strained diplomatic and economic relations, a savage proxy war, and a looming nuclear threat. The assumption that the nuclearisation of the subcontinent neutralised any possibility of open conflict and that Pakistan would continue with “infiltration” of militants into Kashmir but would not attempt a military “intrusion” was proved wrong during the time of Kargil.

Can Operation Sindoor force Pakistan to reconsider its audacious strategies? Such actions, if history is any guide, have not stopped cross-border attacks in the long run. The electorate in the sub-continent seems to thrive on mutual hatred and optics, as a military victory is sure to reap rich political dividends; therefore one feels wary that the short-term gain will precede over the long term. In late 2001 and 2002, New Delhi responded to a reckless Pakistani-supported terrorist attack
on the Indian parliament by fully mobilising its military forces on
the international border and the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir. It proved that a spectacle of bravado or a policy of coercive diplomacy alone would not work.

We have come to the brink of more lethal wars before. In 1984, the Indian government considered launching preventive air strikes to destroy Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities. Pakistani leaders warned that they would respond to such an attack by ordering air strikes against India’s nuclear facilities, and thereby spread lethal radioactive materials into populous areas. At that time, both countries restrained themselves and subsequently, reached an agreement not to attack each other’s nuclear sites. This time, India launched a missile strike on Rawalpindi’s Noor Khan Airbase, perhaps to drive home the message that it has the wherewithal to decapitate Pakistan’s Nuclear Command Authority (NCA), the body overseeing its nuclear arsenal.

The real test of whether we won would surely be to have Pakistan desist from another misadventure both in the short and the long term by raising the stakes unsustainably high.

(The writer is a Kolkata-based commentator on geopolitics, development, and culture)