Anchored in an Unsustainable Plan, Modi’s Speech Presented Old Ideas as New, Bold Thinking

It was an angry drill sergeant we heard on Monday night as Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation at the cessation of recent hostilities with Pakistan.

It wasn’t a leader who had thought things through – about how to get in to attain a limited objective (dealing with terrorists), and then how to withdraw without risking a wider conflagration. Or, thought about whether such a thing was at all conceivable.

In a cocktail of unsustainable, inelegant or re-bottled ideas, he packed in an election-type speech with copious doses of the blood-soaked vermilion symbolism associated with married Hindu women, marking out his religion-coloured political ideology as the single most important catalyst in the chain of reactions that were to ensue.

Wreaking vengeance for Baisaran (Pahalgam) was the text that was repeatedly underlined as Operation Sindoor was dedicated “to our mothers and sisters”. The sight in the middle distance of the scheduled assembly poll in Bihar could hardly be obscured from view.

There are two unassailable facts, though. The hit in the heartland of Pakistan for the first time since 1971, namely its Punjab, is a reality. Muridke, Bahawalpur and the Sialkot area very close to Jammu city, as well as sundry locations in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), have long been considered nurseries, schools and universities of terrorism, the fingerprints of whose graduates are on major terrorist attacks in India and the rest of the world.

The second clear fact to emerge was that Pakistan’s most sensitive air fields and air defence locations across the country, including the one at Sargodha near which sits a Pakistani nuclear storage site (Kirana Hills), and the Nur Khan air base in Rawalpindi, the headquarters of the Pakistan army, were successfully targeted by India-fired missiles. The latter is said to house facilities of the Pakistani nuclear authority.

It’s quite possible this goaded Pakistan to reach out to the US to help arrange a ceasefire, although the technicality of a formal request would be made – on India’s suggestion – through the Pakistan director general of military operations (DGMO)’s communication with India’s DGMO, the only channel open between the two countries.

But it is not in question that US Vice President J.D. Vance had spoken with Modi before this, and the US secretary of state-cum-national security adviser Marco Rubio with external affairs minister S. Jaishankar.

Minus the rhetoric, the Indian leadership conveyed acceptance, on condition that Pakistan cease its retaliatory military activity. Notably, India did not reject the US approach out of hand, asking Washington to desist.

The later plea – that “bilateralism” in dealing with Pakistan has long been India’s “longstanding national position” – just looks like a smart thing to say in the circumstances. It stems from the Congress’s question whether Modi permitted the Americans to broker a ceasefire.

Of course it is entirely valid to say that “bilateralism” is our longstanding principle and the very crux of the Simla Agreement and the Lahore Declaration signed between India and Pakistan. Its current invocation, however, just seems inapt.

It has come out in the government’s briefings that after precision strikes on the nine “terrorist” targets early on May 7, the Indian DGMO formally informed his Pakistani counterpart about it, noting that no military targets were struck. He further said that India was ready to close the matter provided Pakistan let it rest there. Pakistan clearly dismissed the proposition.

It sent its missiles and drones not only across the Line of Control but well across the International Border – as India had done – to hit Indian military positions and civilian infrastructure, thus expanding the scope of the conflict perhaps because its army appears to be in search of legitimacy, especially upon locking up the elected prime minister.

Did the Pakistanis seek US intervention after India struck close to its nuclear storage site (Sargodha) and another one close to its nuclear command authority (Chaklala or the Nur Khan airbase near Rawalpindi), partly in order to rake up nuclear conflagration fears internationally even if India had no intention to hit nuclear locations?

Or, is it that the US contacted the Pakistanis – and the Indians in order to work on a ceasefire – off its own bat?

At any rate, no matter what the sequence, we did not resist the American advance when Vance called Modi and Rubio dialled Jaishankar to suggest stopping the military exchange. We merely urged them to ask the Pakistanis to ask us so that the fig leaf of bilateralism can be maintained, if only at the level of formality.

We did not tell the Americans to mind their own business – as former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had done in 1971. So, that’s the crucial difference, no matter how things have unfolded May 10 onward after President Donald Trump first announced the ceasefire on his social media platform Truth Social, practically boasting that he had brought it about – and in subsequent days enlarged upon the theme, even during his visit to Saudi Arabia, drawing a big applause from the VVIP audience there.

In the context of the politics of the day, the Indian side avoids using the expression “ceasefire”. This is because Modi’s core constituency would have liked our armed forces to conquer Pakistan, dismember it and integrate PoK with India. In the absence of such an attainment, there seems to be serious disappointment in these quarters, including its intellectual cohorts.

All this emanates from the ideological conditioning of the fairyland of the deranged. And this is how propaganda-fuelled dreams (rooted in the propaganda-stuffed image of the leader) are born, relaying the message that under him even the most idiotic fantasy is attainable. And this is from well before the Pahalgam horror.

Careful not to disappoint elements of the core constituency while having no wish to prolong the military confrontation, the government has homed in on the expression “understanding” that was technically reached after the call of the Pakistan DGMO to his Indian counterpart upon US prodding.

The Modi government assiduously avoids using “ceasefire”, which President Trump trumps about so extravagantly – for all one knows with an eye on the Peace Nobel.

Why was the prime minister’s speech inelegant? Quite frankly, because he said in thumping fashion that India would not succumb to nuclear blackmail, implying that Pakistan having nuclear weapons was no consideration in Modi’s calculus as India was well prepared in that respect too, and could pack a punch.

He may have been seeking to enhance his strongman image, but irresponsibly raising the ‘N-word’ in a public formulation, in the context of a military square-off with Pakistan having just ended with foreign intercession, is unknown to India’s diplomatic annals or national lexicon.

Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had given a cabinet minister from Delhi, the likeable enough Madan Lal Khurana, marching orders for boorishly announcing (while slapping his thighs) that India would take on Pakistan in a nuclear wrestling match.

If the declaration of not succumbing to “nuclear blackmail” is intended to convey that India would no more stand for Pakistan’s use of sub-conventional warfare, i.e. terrorism, as state policy and find safety in the thought that India would not hit back militarily for fear of igniting a nuclear armageddon, then forget it.

The prime minister announced that henceforth a terrorist strike will not be seen as being separate from a strike by the Pakistani state – and would invite appropriate retaliation.

Is such a policy sustainable – a missile a day if need be? And each time head to the threshold of a nuclear battlefield? If this is the ballyhooed “new normal”, the new principle of international relations or regional geopolitics that Modi ji has laid down, then, dear God, help us.

Why was the prime minister’s speech anchored in an unsustainable plan? This is for its rank failure to even conceive a backup on how to come out of the “chakravyuh”, a primary lesson from ancient India’s military science.

Logically, this carried the inevitability of Western or specifically American intervention in the form of a ceasefire plan – which was evidently gratefully accepted while making the right noises.

And what makes Modi’s speech a jumble of old ideas parading as new bold thinking?

Just look at the proposition that if any talks are to be held, they will only be about India getting back PoK. This is part of the Jammu region of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir that came to be occupied by Pakistan in 1947-48 through a combination of circumstances, while no part of the Kashmir valley could be so occupied though Pakistan has coveted it and unsuccessfully tried to take it on a regular basis.

The question here is: When was the Kashmir valley ever officially being gotten ready for barter or negotiation by India? Clearly, the prime minister belabours the obvious.

As speeches go and the conduct of leaders, ‘then and now’ becomes an issue that is hard to brush aside. In times of crisis, especially military conflict, prominent leaders have led their people from the front, even when the chips were down – as it was for Nehru in 1962, with the Indian army fighting the Chinese with .303 rifles and wearing canvas shoes in the snow – and coming a cropper.

As the Chinese invasion was on, the then-prime minister called a special session of parliament and his government produced a white paper for discussion. He respected democracy and did not get away from this obligation. He was not afraid to lay out the facts as he stood to face a barrage in parliament, not only from opposition parties but also his own.

His successor Lal Bahadur Shastri, of diminutive height but great stature gained quickly, electrified the country with his firm decision-making and the slogan “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan!” when Pakistan started the war in 1965. After the war he hesitated not a minute to negotiate peace. There was no cussedness.

Indira Gandhi mobilising international opinion as the East Pakistan crisis brewed with refugees rushing into India to escape Pakistan army terror, her ticking off the Western powers for unsolicited advice, and her keeping President Richard Nixon waiting for 45 minutes in Washington DC – the same time that he had kept her waiting on one occasion – are even now remembered as milestones on the way to protecting sovereignty.

The war-time speeches of British leader Winston Churchill, and the radio broadcasts of the French stalwart Charles de Gaulle, are of course the stuff of legend in shoring up national morale. In contrast, Modi, who can say a thing or two when he is in the mood, has been strangely below the radar. We have had just one glimpse of him – in an angry, irrational avatara.

Anand K. Sahay is a veteran journalist.

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