Anand K. Sahay 
Drums of war – or intimations of politics of small men? From the drawing rooms of New Delhi and its smoky back chambers of fixers to the ‘chai-khanas’ of old Delhi, the likelihood of a military incursion into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir is all the talk these days. And the guesswork comes in the context of preparations for the assembly polls in five states in December and quite possibly an early Lok Sabha election as well. Have mind games begun, and are they only against Pakistan?
Another question: In Modi Raj, have polls and pugilism with Pakistan – and no other neighbouring country – become the natural order of things? In early 2019, mixing warfare with elections had extracted patriotic fervour from an unsuspecting public and yielded Prime Minister Narendra Modi handsome results.
The prime minister had gone out on a limb to canvass votes, especially from first-time voters, to “avenge” the Pulwama tragedy. But recently, former J&K governor Satyapal Malik has opened our eyes. He has revealed that Pulwama was a government-manufactured tragedy and the tears it produced were crocodile tears of the high-ups, that Pulwama was an elaborate, regime-rigged cleverness at the cost of the lives of 40 CRPF jawans to find a false justification to send attack aircraft across the Line of Control to bomb Balakot, which was billed as a terrorist redoubt.
What about now? Will the same trick work again? Or will such Goebbelsian patriotism be seen through as fake – as another name for low-grade politics soaked in the brine of communalism to polarise voters on the lines of religion?
Whether the trick works a second time is in the womb of the future, but its executors may just be tempted to try because it has been seen to work once. The government certainly looks desperate. It is likely to clutch at any straws since its performance on the domestic front is bleak and hard to list with any degree of coherence without playing ducks and drakes with the data whose managers have been shown the stick for doing their work professionally and not taking steps to boost the government’s propaganda drive. The prospect of election-hour hostilities is, therefore, hard to brush aside outright.
And this brings up a thought: If our forces are ordered to move, where will the boundary lie – somewhere on the geographical map, or on the electoral landscape of India? Will it be mission accomplished when the soldiers have made their sacrifice and planted the flag across the battle-lines, or when the elections are in the bag?
At any rate, the July 26 statement of defence minister Rajnath Singh from Drass near Kargil in the Union Territory of Ladakh – where the fighting in the snowy heights had been fierce – went way beyond the commemoration of India’s famous win over Pakistani intruders in a short but brutal conflict in 1999. The raksha mantri, in fact, added fuel to the whispered conversations around the speculation of a military jab and thrust.
And this wasn’t the only time. Just about a month ago, speaking from Jammu, Singh had picked on the same theme – the sending of our forces into PoK. Taken together, the defence minister’s statements have been nothing less than startling. He has even said that the venture of striking across the Line of Control could be accomplished with relative ease, and that our forces were determined, ready and brave, that it was only a matter of saying when.
In a nuclear-armed neighbourhood, where minor miscalculations can cause serious damage, ministers at the top serve their country better by being judicious rather than resorting to colourful speech even when lauding their troops. In the time of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a good-natured, prominent and well-regarded leader of the Delhi BJP, Madan Lal Khurana, had lost his cabinet berth after he slapped his thighs (“taal thokna”) and challenged Pakistan to a village-style “dangal” or wrestling bout.
Is the defence minister echoing his own thoughts or is he delivering a command performance in the run-up to the election? If the latter, then there are no surprises. The former national president of the BJP and chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, the country’s largest state, is now a pale shadow of his earlier avatar in public life. It may have been hard but he has had to learn to stoop to make himself heard. On the other hand, if Singh is acting on his own, in effect being his own master for this particular performance, then he is proving to the world that he is a simpleton, a babe in the woods of geopolitics who can hardly be counted on to be in full command of his brief as defence minister – unless the signalling is carefully deliberated at high levels and has a higher purpose than we think.
It wasn’t so long ago that Prime Minister Modi elicited praise from world leaders, especially his best friends the Americans, when, in the Ukraine context, he advised Russia’s president Vladimir Putin that this was not the era of war. Evidently, the episode has made no impression on Singh. He seems to point to a new maxim – that while it may be good and healthy for his boss to caution the Russians against the dangers of making war, it is for him indeed brave and patriotic to do a spot of pre-election sabre-rattling against Pakistan.
Pakistan has its own loose cannons but it is a country where, for long, stupidity has prevailed over good sense in all spheres of society and governance. The trouble is these days we seem intent on following in their footsteps.
While our altogether too bold defence minister has made a pastime of thumping his chest, wearing a cockily-slanted military-style hat every now and again, and copying military bearing in every way he can and declaring that no enemy dare look India in the eye, he and his colleagues in the cabinet make fervent, barely-concealed pleas to the Chinese to get back to their side of the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh. These are pleas, not threats of showing “red eyes”. That is reserved for another neighbour.
It is a comic situation, if you pardon the irony. But it won’t remain comical if one day the Chinese defence minister, or even a minor flunkey from the other side of the Great Wall of China, were to choose a chauvinist moment – and these are a dime a dozen in our Chinese comrades’ playbook – to declare that at a time of Beijing’s choosing, PLA soldiers would once again cross the ribbon of water in Galwan and plant their flag on India’s side of the LAC. The Chinese threat-mongers may, if they so choose, say the same sorts of things from the Bhutanese side in Doklam where they are busy creating new villages whose sole residents are soldiers and intelligence agents, not farmers irrigating the rice paddy.
Only days ago, a recently retired chief of the Indian Army informed a gathering that was largely made up of journalists that the threat perception on our western front (Pakistan) had reduced and this had enabled us to move forces in substantial numbers to be to deployed to meet the Northern (Chinese) threat. This is a realistic assessment supported by the infiltration data for J&K.
And yet the eminent soldier thought it was kosher for his former boss to make belligerent statements as regards the LoC, as this may help to keep the enemy “off-balance”. Can he be serious? One may only marvel at such schematised thinking. India’s top military ranks seem to be unmindful that Pakistan has two close friends, the US and China, both permanent members of the UN Security Council. Neither is likely to be amused by the provocative remarks of the defence minister of India, regardless of whether this is in the service of a domestic communal agenda.
Their thoughts are likely to be on the regional security dynamics, considering that in the widest perception the Modi regime is skating on thin ice and needs the pill of communalism wrapped in a poultice of communal hatred to tide over election time.
Anand K. Sahay is a journalist and political commentator based in New Delhi.