HARBINGERS of peace, pigeons carry messages of friendship. One that flew over India’s troubled border with Pakistan last week brought a handwritten note in Urdu warning Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi against any “misadventure”.
The South Asian neighbours are in denial mode. A terror attack on an Indian military camp in Uri emanates from across the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir. India blames Pakistan; the latter denies it.
Eleven days later, Indian forces carry out a “surgical strike” across the LoC on militants’ camps. India claims evidence. But Pakistan shows foreign media the purported spots to rubbish this claim. Presence and activities of the militants is not denied, though.
With its own doubtful record, Pakistan complains of “human rights abuses” in the Kashmir Valley. And India is loath to admit that in two months of street protests, a hundred people have been killed.
Details of the Indian counter-strike on the night between Sept 28 and 29 is common knowledge now. After deceptive movements for four days, as if preparing to launch a larger offensive, commandos using relatively light weapons crossed the LoC and destroyed the militants’ “launch pads”, killing eight.
Militants’ incursions across LoC begin at this time of the year. To prevent them, more such strikes could occur.
Modi declares that his country has never coveted territory. India seems to pursue the same logic that Pakistan has adopted for long: Needling an enemy is better than to fight that enemy unconstrained.
As the K-word incites passions on both sides, the world gets worried about the N-word, escalating war between two nuclear-armed adversaries.
Indians have said they targeted only the militants and not Pakistani soldiers or its people. Indeed, the Indian director-general of military operations informed his Pakistani counterpart on hotline that the brief operation had ended. If the idea was to avoid any escalation, nobody can tell if that would happen.
If India, as Modi said, would respond “at an opportune moment”, and did, Pakistan too could choose “an opportune moment”. Islamabad’s denial of Indian strikes seems part of its wait-watch-prepare-strike.
The Indians reason that Pakistan’s immensely popular and powerful army chief, General Raheel Sharif, would want to redeem himself before retiring in November. That is, if he is able to — or allowed to — retire at this juncture.
In striking back and going public, India has ended “strategic restraint” that successive governments had exercised, to the chagrin of the public, under tremendous pressures from major powers. The 2001 attack on its Parliament and the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks came close to an act of war. This year saw attacks on two military establishments in Gurdaspur and Pathankot in Punjab. Uri, with the highest 18 Indian casualties, has proved the breaking point.
The Indian counter-strikes signal that terror attacks are no longer a low-cost option for Pakistan (as enunciated by some of its experts), thriving under a nuclear threshold. Modi, who always advocated a muscular response to terrorism, has broken a psychological barrier. The new approach is “offensive defence”.
But, there are no illusions. Terrorism did not come to South Asia with al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, and it is not about to end. Two weeks after Uri and five days after India’s counter-strikes, militants again attacked an Indian military camp in Baramula in the Kashmir Valley.
Security experts foresee sleeper cells being activated to launch terror attacks in other parts of India, as well as attacks on its interests in Afghanistan. All of these would qualify as terrorism and play into the Indian narrative.
That narrative must include not just meeting threats from across the border, but also talking to the Kashmiri stakeholders for a political solution.
As one blames the other, war hysteria is raising tempers and crashing stock exchanges. Sadly, it isn’t about war-preparedness; it’s about wanting a war.
Pakistan’s human rights activist I.A. Rehman blames the “agencies” and the media on both sides.
“Today, an Indian is prosecuted for cheering a Pakistani team, and a Pakistani boy is sent to prison for applauding (India’s cricket captain) Virat Kohli. Today, Pakistani poets, actors and sportsmen are being hounded by Indian gangs.”
Bollywood star Salman Khan asks if Pakistani actors working in India are “terrorists” and whether expelling them would end the ogre.
After the Uri attack, India scuttled the summit of Saarc, the regional body of eight South Asian nations. For a change, besides Bhutan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, having their own problems with Islamabad, also joined the boycott.
India is working to isolate Pakistan. But Pakistan has China’s support. As India announced a review (not renege or quit) of the Indus Water Treaty with Pakistan, even before Pakistan could approach the World Court, China swiftly blocked a tributary of the Brahmaputra river that feeds lower riparian India and Bangladesh.
India is making a minus-Pakistan regional move in Bimstek. Afghanistan and the Maldives may be roped in. The Asian Development Bank is funding a billion-dollar highway building plan in the Himalayan foothills.
Amid the hectic American presidential election campaign, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton fears that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons could “fall into the hands of jihadists”.
Fighting the nuclear-armed North, South Korean President Park Geun-hye says Indian action has “a lesson for other nations facing terror threats”.
Amid talking at each other over terror, bilateral trade is a big casualty. India is complaining to the World Trade Organisation about Pakistan’s refusal to reciprocate the most favoured nation (MFN) status it had granted two decades back. Ironically, a unilateral, conciliatory gesture to promote better ties has become a cause of complaint.
Pakistani media earlier dared India to wage a war and “risk the (latter’s) US$2.3 trillion (RM9.5 trillion) economy”. It is now exhilarated that India will be the bigger loser if it withdraws the MFN.
This may perplex any outsider, but in South Asia, to use an “Indianism” in English language — we are like that only!
The writer is NST's New Delhi correspondent. He is president of the Commonwealth Journalists Association (2016-2018) and a Consultant with Power Politics monthly magazine