The surgical strike across the Line of Control (LoC) on seven
terrorist launch pads in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in the early hours of
last Thursday by the Indian Army has established India in the league of
the US and Israel, and also exploded the myth that nuke-armed rogue
Pakistan cannot be dealt with through conventional arms and devices.
So
far, America and Israel alone have a reputation to chase and punish
their enemies, whichever part of the world they may hide in. Starting
with the hot pursuit of Naga rebels across Myanmar border recently,
India has now crossed the LoC in Kashmir to avenge the Uri attack which
had left 18 Indian soldiers dead and several others injured.
Pakistan
has continued with its policy of bleeding India to death through a
thousand cuts till date. Obviously, the strife-torn Islamic nation was
under the illusion that India would not dare to retaliate against its
nuclear neighbour. But that’s now history.
One need not take
Pakistan’s denial of surgical strikes by India seriously. The Islamic
nation has lived in denial right from the start. Just two months after
its birth, the Pakistani army, along with fanatic tribals, attacked
Kashmir valley but did not own it for years. Nor was the 1971 Bangladesh
massacre accepted. Kargil is just a recent example of denial and
deceit.
With this surgical strike, Prime Minister Narendra Modi
has at last openly given up attempting to resume negotiations with his
counterpart in Pakistan at any level, after noticing that every
resumption is followed by disruption from the military-mullah combine in
that country.
The conclusion was quite evident long time back:
power in Pakistan is no longer held by the elected political
establishment. Actual power is held by the military-mullah combination
as former Pakistani diplomat and academic Husain Haqqani has traced in
some detail in his widely acclaimed book Between the Mosque and the
Military. The place of a Prime Minister in the Islamabad environment is
as passive as can be imagined. It is the military-mullah combine that is
calling the shots there.
By the logic of events in Indo-Pak
relationship between 1999 (when Kargil happened) and now, there should
have been no hope whatever of peaceful relationship with Pakistan as
long as mullah-military combine called the shots there against an
unstable civilian government.
Haqqani’s book was followed by
several academic studies of Westerners on the power structure there. All
of them without exception came to the same conclusion—the whole
foundational existence of Pakistan as the various leaders there see it,
is based on targeting India, a prospering democracy increasingly winning
the respect and regard of the global community and seen as a huge
destination for investment and innovation.
Some of our own
peaceniks who hold candlelight friendship demonstrations at the Wagah
border on and off expecting similar responses from the other side but
never getting it, tend to overlook the basic factors that run though the
new, radicalised majority of Pakistani Muslims.
The
peacenik leaders here tend to dwell on the past cultural links when the
entire subcontinent was one India. From that stand they begin to
believe that the anti-India sentiment is a virus that could be
eliminated if the civil society in Pakistan asserts itself and the
cultural links are encouraged.
This is the great illusion to which
a section of civil society, especially the cultural elite, are holding
on. The allurements of the old links in language, culture, literature
and architecture are waning. The new generation in Pakistan is fed on
the return of a global Islamic conquest. This idea has been inculcated
more forcefully in the last 30 years not only in Pakistan in the Wahabi
style, Saudi-financed madrasas but across the world.
Jihadi
violence in the Valley is sought to be explained as yearning for azaadi.
But why do some educated American Muslims shoot and kill
indiscriminately in elite clubs, plant bombs in Time Square in New York
or in subway trains?—all mostly individual initiatives, especially by
those who have converted to Islam recently. And why are Muslims killing
fellow Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan?
The masses in these
countries are fed on radical religious rhetoric that welcomes
poverty—remember Bhutto’s famous call to Pakistan masses to welcome
deprivation (eat grass) to become a nuclear power. As an editorial in
the business daily Mint pointed out the other day: Radicalisation and
violence has left Pakistan civil society in tatters and has pushed its
economy far behind India’s.
The data given in the edit shows that
the deaths of civilians and security personnel in Pakistan is almost 80
times that in India (adjusted to population size difference). Economic
and military aid from US has tapered from 3.5 billion dollars in 2011
to 1.5 billion dollars in 2015 and is set to be less than a billion
dollars in 2016.
While India exports software to earn over 60
billion dollars to world’s applause, Pakistan exports terrorism and
earns the world’s condemnation, as Prime Minister Modi pointed out.
The
surgical strike will have a cascading effect. The border districts in
Kashmir are likely to be less volatile now onwards, for two reasons.
One, they will not get material (in terms of trained manpower, arms and
money) support from across the border to the extent they were so far.
The morale of Indians in the Valley will surely now go up, and that of
pro-Pak terror elements nosedive.
Balair Punj, a former BJP MP and a Delhi-based commentator on social and political issues Email:punjbalbir@gmail.com
Coutesy: The New Indian Express
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