China Saves Masood Azhar: Fighting Terror Needs Action, Not the UN

There should be little surprise that China has blocked the designation of Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist once again. It was clear on Monday, when the Chinese official spokesman Lu Kang, read off the usual rigmarole, in response to a question on the listing, “China has all along participated in relevant discussions in a responsible manner and in strict accordance with the rules of procedure and provisions of the (UN’s) 1267 Committee.”

Blocking the move for the fourth time, China sent a note to the UNSC on Wednesday night, saying that it needed more time to examine the request. With this technical hold, the move has been frozen for the next six months.

Why China Blocked Bid to List Masood Azhar as Global Terrorist

China has played a similar role in earlier efforts – in 2009, 2016 and 2017. However, it had gone along with the listing of Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Mohammed Saeed and his deputy Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, in 2009, in the wake of the November 2008 Mumbai attack. Those designated by the Committee have their assets frozen and are prohibited from foreign travel.

Beijing claims that there are some technical and procedural issues that need to be resolved before it can support the move. Yet, other prominent permanent members of the UN’s Security Council—US, UK, and France—backed the move, along with a number of non-permanent members. It is obvious that China’s “deeper than the seas and higher than the mountains” friendship with Pakistan has guided its action.

In his Monday statement, spokesman Lu had said that “China will continue to communicate and work with relevant parties in a responsible manner so as to properly resolve this matter.” It was referring, of course, to Pakistan, where Beijing had, on 6 March, sent Vice Foreign Minister Kong Xuanyou (to Islamabad).

The Chinese were keen to have Kong visit New Delhi as well, but the latter demurred. India is not keen to allow China’s claim that it is mediating on the issue. It did, however, welcome a junior Saudi Minister Adel al-Jubeir to come to New Delhi on Monday, following his earlier visit to Islamabad. But this was ostensibly a follow-up visit to that of the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in February.

India Needn’t Fret Over China Blocking Anti-Masood Azhar Bid

The Chinese view is that not only should India “exercise restraint”, it should help create an “enabling atmosphere” so that Pakistan can cooperate with others on this issue. China simply ignores Islamabad’s mendacity, if not criminality, in supporting terrorist groups as instruments on foreign policy. But in international relations, it’s interests that matter, not aesthetics.

In line with this, New Delhi has taken the setback on its chin. Expressing disappointment over the development, it has been careful to avoid naming China in its official statement, following the Chinese hold. All it has said is that “a member” of the 1267 Committee had placed the proposal on hold.

India had hoped that this time around, Beijing would cooperate. It had, after all, made a major shift in its posture towards China through the Wuhan Summit. This shift involved an informal Indian commitment to abjure from using the “Tibet card” with China. Incidentally, in 2016, when Beijing had put a hold, New Delhi had named Beijing and excoriated it for not showing greater “understanding of the danger posed to all by terrorism.”

It would be foolish for New Delhi to get worked up about the Chinese hold. The listing by itself does little to restrain either Islamabad or the terrorists. After all it has meant little that Hafiz Saeed has been on the list since 2009, or that the Jaish as an organisation has been on the list since 2001. Terrorism and terrorists are not fought by paper listings, but through kinetic actions.

There is certain value to the listing, but only if it is taken in conjunction with other actions, which include wider diplomacy, covert action, air strikes and ground attacks on terrorist facilities.

Getting China Around to Pressurise Pakistan Isn’t Impossible

New Delhi has now learnt that it cannot work its international relations or counter-terrorist policy along with its election cycle. The project of getting China around to pressure Pakistan needs to be pursued along its own time-line, just as the goal of persuading Pakistan to abandon the instrumentality of terrorist proxies.

There are enough indications that this is not an impossible task. India was able to bring around Beijing to placing Pakistan on the FATF ‘grey list’ in this manner. And, after all, Beijing did act against Hafiz Saeed and Lakhvi.

In an interview with The Hindu the former Indian Ambassador to China, Gautam Bambawale had noted that India’s only option to a Chinese barracking was to keep trying. He suggested that India needed to be more transactional, and perhaps look for things Beijing would like in exchange for the Azhar listing.

The global community’s response to the Pulwama attack and the Indian response was generally sympathetic. There are enough indications that countries like the US, Saudi Arabia and China, all friendly to Islamabad, are nudging Pakistan in the right direction. India needs to keep working with them, just as it does need to keep sharpening its more kinetic instruments to deal with terrorists.

Quint March 14, 2019

Death of ‘War’ Journalism: Controlling Govt, Suicidal Media Groups

Field reporting of conflict is dying in India—assaulted by a government which seeks to control the narrative tightly. But there is also a suicidal impulse in media groups who no longer want to challenge the government’s version of events. The result is that in our era, “war” reporters are jokers who act out their scenes dressed in faux bullet proof vests and combat jackets—but inside “war rooms” constructed in a TV studio.

Indian journalism has not produced great war reportage of the caliber of Ernie Ple, Wilfred Burchett, Dickey Chapelle, Marie Colvin, Robert Fisk,  Ryszard Kapuscinski, John Simpson, Peter Arnett, and scores of others, mainly from the west. But there have been journalists who have done the profession proud.

War Reporting During India’s Intervention in Sri Lanka

Without doubt, the highest point in the war journalism of independent India was during our ill-fated Sri Lankan venture in 1987.  Sumir Lal, a young reporter for The Telegraph of Kolkata went from Colombo and reached the LTTE positions facing the Indian Peace Keeping Force. Equally intrepid was Anita Pratap who, with photographer Shyam Tekwani, also managed to reach LTTE lines. Her searing reportage and Tekwani’s photographs in India Today showing Indian troops lying dead after an LTTE ambush, are forgotten now, just as the India’s Sri Lanka venture is.

But their reportage would have led to a riot in today’s hyper patriotic atmosphere.

• fb
• tw

From the outset, courageous reporting of the Sri Lankan adventure was able to inform the country of the somewhat questionable assumptions behind India’s decision to commit the so-called peace force in our neighbouring country. This brand of journalism provided a forewarning to the Generals who had assumed that dealing with the LTTE would be a two-week affair.

The Defence Ministry has always insisted in maintaining total control on information relating to a conflict. As a result, in Sri Lanka, soldiers died, were cremated on the island, and forgotten. Great acts of sacrifice and bravery remained unreported, except when the government chose to provide the information.

Accidental and Independent Conflict Reporting

Even today, the Ministry has this attitude to information, guarding it tightly in an era when commercially available satellite imagery can challenge their narrative. Time and again it has been shown that accurate reporting, howsoever painful it is for the armed forces, is a bigger battle-winning and morale-raising factor than inept news management that lacks integrity.

The first Indian war correspondent, as it were, was inadvertent. Journalist G K Reddy was stranded on the wrong side of the lines when the Pakistani-led tribal raiders attacked Kashmir in October 1947. He escaped from “Azad Kashmir” and wrote a series of reports that made his name across the country.

• fb
• tw

In India in the 1980s, the commercially successful newsmagazines like India Todayand Sunday began to change things by sending journalists to conflict zones, independent of government support. This was  a major factor in encouraging a climate of professionalism and objectivity. Emulating the trend, soon TV news channels, too, began to spend considerable sums of money to send teams of journalists to cover the second Gulf War or the Afghan conflict.

Kargil Reporting Changed the Game

Many others may argue that the coming of age of Indian war reporting was during the Kargil war. It is true that there was some graphic reportage from that event, but it was from the relative safety of the National Highway 1D linking Srinagar with Leh. We say “relative” because the reporters there were in danger of being hit by Pakistani shelling and some were injured. The frontline was 4 or 5 kilometres as a crow flies from the highway.

The Kargil war changed the dynamics of the relationship between the government and the media.

• fb
• tw

Since the usual route to Kargil was via Srinagar, it was easy to prevent journalists going up. But the reporters soon took flights to Leh and motored down to Kargil and began reporting before the Army press organization got its act together.

However, the government soon realized that conflict reporting was a huge bonus. Private TV channels, who were relatively new, brought the impact of the war to the average Indian home. Emotions were heightened by the footage of funerals of the soldiers, who had died in the front. The government of the day, facing a General Election soon, decided to use the reportage to whip up nationalistic fervor and hoped to cash in on it at the ballot box. Never mind the fact that it was intelligence failure of the instruments of the same government that were responsible for the war that eventually saw the deaths of over 500 soldiers and officers.

Truth Vs Propaganda in Conflict Reporting

Reporters in the west have often covered war from the adversaries’ side as well and many have died and continue to die in the process. There has never been a question of any Indian reporter being able to report from the adversaries’ side in the wars with Pakistan and China It is unusual for combatants to allow reporters from adversary countries to report from their territory. But skillful insurgent groups use it to further their aims.

This is, however, a matter of the geographical location of the battlefield and the intensity of operations. So, even as a Peter Arnett or Rageh Omar could report from Baghdad under the American aerial attack in 1991 and 2003, those who went in with the US forces into Iraq and Afghanistan were often “embedded” with military units.

Philip Knightley’s The First Casualty is a useful work to understand the nature of war reporting. The book’s title refers to the fact that truth is often the first casualty in a war. The subtitle, The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker speaks for itself.

‘Patriotic’ Journalists

Total war like World War II saw journalists, too,  conscripted into the war effort. Patriotic reporting was the norm and reporting was of the embedded  variety. The brush wars of the 1950s and 1960s enabled journalists, especially from countries neutral in a conflict to cover both sides.

In times of open war, media almost everywhere sheds even-handedness to become “patriotic”. War is a situation when national feelings are heightened and most newspapers won’t go against the grain, if for purely commercial considerations. However, what marks out great reporting from what we see in India today is the effort made by journalists to seek and report the truth, and for great editors to publish or broadcast it without fear of consequences.

Quint March 9, 2019

Dealing with Pakistan

Through history, it has been evident that walls and forts do not really stop invaders and that the best defence is the one that prevents the destruction of your own home territory. It is for this reason that the chosen strategy of powerful countries is to fight the battles for their homeland security away from home, preferably in the adversary’s territory.  

Translated into our relationship with Pakistan, it does tell us that neither military strikes, deployments along the LoC, nor the fence along the International Border will keep out Pakistani terrorists from this country. They need to be dealt with in their own home territory through a mix of means.

Last week, India took one step in the direction by carrying out the air strike on Balakot. Whether or not the Indian bombs hit their targets is not as important as the fact that for the first time since 1971, in a no-war situation, India used air power to hit targets in Pakistan proper.

Unfortunately, the ruling party’s electoral agenda has sharply distorted  the strategic landscape, and this includes the Balakot episode. Looking at the evidence currently available, an Indian strike did take place on Balakot. It did not damage the main JeM seminary, but may have taken out a number of subsidiary structures and killed an unspecified number of militants (evidence for this is awaited). In the meantime, there was an air clash in which an Indian aircraft was shot down and a pilot captured. The Indian side says an F-16 has been shot down, again evidence is still awaited.

But if you look at the narrative playing out in India, the whole thing is being projected as an unvarnished triumph for India.  Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman did display heroism, but it was heroism in adversity, maybe greater than the one that is often required in victory. But the fact we lost a pilot, and had to face the ignominy of having him in Pakistani custody was a setback, and it is delusional to show it as some sort of a victory. You can attribute some of the over-the-top response to the ruling party’s ability to control the narrative and to the hyper-nationalist attitudes where common sense and caution are discarded.

All military action comes with the possibility of failures and casualties. If New Delhi is to adopt cross-border strikes as policy, it must be ready for such eventualities. On balance, though, the Indian strikes on Pakistan are a major shift, whose significance we will have to assess in the coming years.

The  problem with Indian policy lies at two levels. First, it has not decided what its grand strategy vis-à-vis Pakistan is. Should it seek the break-up of Pakistan, or military dominance over it, or, should it move on another track, seek to incorporate it in a larger geoeconomic and geopolitical area? All options must be weighed against the price that comes with its chosen strategy. Whatever endpoint it has in mind, it must be able to effectively meld the military, covert, economic and informational aspects of its policy in an effective manner, something it has not been able to do till now.

Our policies towards Pakistan have zig-zagged from the Lahore Declaration of 1999 to Kargil, from the January 2004 joint statement to Balakot and from Modi’s embrace of Nawaz Sharif on December 25, 2015, to the campaign to isolate Pakistan in 2016-17.

In this we also need to factor in the failed policy of the BJP government in Kashmir. The relentless hardline, minus any political outreach, has led not just to an intensification of the insurgency, but enabled Pakistani groups to recruit locals. It was such a person who, after all, carried out the Pulwama attack.

War always looks like an easy option — use your legions, defeat the enemy, impose your terms on the other side and all is well, at least for a while. But in today’s world, it is so much more difficult to defeat an ethno-religious insurgency or a nuclear-armed adversary and neither Pakistan nor the insurgent Kashmiris are a pushover.

In my previous article, I had referred to Clausewitz’s dictum that war is a continuation of policy with other means. Writing in The Diplomat, James R Holmes says that most translations have mis-stated it to say ‘by other means’. In fact, he insists, Clausewitz meant ‘with’ and this is significant since it says along with the kinetic aspects of war, the contest also includes other means — diplomatic, covert, informational and economic. This is particularly important for the current era where an all-out war between states, especially those armed with nuclear weapons, is unlikely.

An ideal, and possibly the only, strategy we have under a nuclear overhang is to have Pakistan collaborate in the process of defeating the monsters it has nurtured within. Modi has not got Islamabad on the backfoot by his military instrumentality, but by his successful West Asia policy that has got the principal powers there — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran and Israel — accept India as the preeminent power in South Asia. The battle to subdue Pakistani jihadists must be fought not only in the Kashmir Valley or Pakistan, but also in the capitals of West Asia, United States, China and Russia. As for the Valley, the most important battle is the one we are not even fighting any longer, that for the hearts and minds of its people.

Tribune March 5, 2019 

India’s OIC Moment Wasn’t a Triumph But It Wasn’t a Failure Either

How are we to judge the invitation to be the guest of honour at the recent plenary of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) summit, held in Abu Dhabi on 1-2 March?

What the OIC says and does, matters little. But in today’s information age, its positions shape perceptions, which, in turn, influence policy. So, we got an invite that we have thirsted for since we were ignominiously from the OIC’s Rabat Summit in 1969, there were no critical references to India in the Abu Dhabi Declaration, but it passed a separate resolution criticising India. And Pakistan boycotted the meet because of the Indian invite.

It’s not quite the unalloyed triumph for India as is being made out in official circles, but it is an important development with portents for the future.

OIC Invite Result of Modi-Prince Bonhomie

Our invite to the OIC CFM meet was probably courtesy the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, (the de facto ruler of UAE) who drives his country’s foreign policy. Prime Minister Modi has established a special rapport with the Crown Prince following his visit to UAE in August 2015 and then again in 2018.

In turn, there have been two visits by the Crown Prince to India in the tenure of the Modi government, the second as Chief Guest of the Republic Day parade in January 2017.

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority has put $ 1 billion into HDFC’s affordable housing scheme and another $ 1 billion in India’s National Investment and Infrastructure Fund, and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and the Saudi giant ARAMCO have agreed to take a 50 percent stake in a $ 44 billion refinery being built in Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra. All this in the last year or so.

No doubt the Sheikh would have had the issue cleared with Saudi Arabia, the headquarters country of the OIC. Here again, Modi’s diplomacy has done good work as was evidenced by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) visit to New Delhi last month.

So, it was no surprise that the Abu Dhabi Declaration adopted at the end of the meeting failed to mention Jammu & Kashmir, though, for the record, it did mention the other hot-button Islamic issue, Palestine, was critical of that Islamist outsider, Iran and was supportive of Syria and the UAE-Saudi policy in Yemen and critical of the Houthi militia.

It indirectly commented on Islamic State radicalism calling for “the necessity to stabilise the situation” stabilisation of Southeast Asia and Central Asia, and in the Middle-East and North Africa as well as other areas of the Africa continent. And for good measure it emphasised the need to restore permanent peace and stability in Afghanistan.

But while Imran Khan was praised for returning the Indian pilot “as a gesture of goodwill to de-escalate tensions in the region,” there was no condemnation of India’s actions in Kashmir in the Declaration. There were two objections to the final document of the Declaration—Iran and Pakistan.

 Subsequently, a resolution was passed expressing “unwavering support for the Kashmiri people in their just cause” and condemning the recent waves of Indian “terrorism”. The resolution criticised the human rights excesses of the Indian forces and called for the implementation of the UNSC resolutions on Kashmir.

Another resolution on regional peace and security in South Asia welcomes Imran Khan’s renewed offer of dialogue with India and his gesture in handing over the Indian pilot. It expressed concern over air strikes by India on the terror camps in Pakistan.

Acceptance of Invite a Compulsion of Statecraft

For a party that has little concern or sympathy or concern for the Indian Muslims, it is indeed somewhat ironic that the BJP-led government even accepted an invite at the CFM meet of an organisation that calls itself the “collective voice of the Muslim world.” The reason is, of course, the compulsions of statecraft.

The 57-nation strong Organisation of Islamic Cooperation are too large a bloc of countries to ignore.

• fb
• tw

Further, by refusing the invite, Islamabad would have got a free pass that it has had since the Rabat fiasco when an Indian delegation led by Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, later President of the country led an official Indian delegation to the Moroccan city, only to be kept out of the meetings at the insistence of Pakistan.

As a result, Islamabad has routinely used the summit as a platform for anti-Indian propaganda. Almost every summit has a de rigeur criticism of Indian actions in Jammu & Kashmir. There is an OIC Contact Group on Jammu & Kashmir which regularly passes resolutions criticising India.

Immediately after the Balakot strike on 26 February, for example, the OIC Contract group met in Jeddah and called for immediate de-escalation. India was roundly condemned at the meeting for “the recent wave of repression, brutal killing of innocent Kashmiri civilians by the Indian occupied forces, frequent incidents of rapes especially of minor girls.” The OIC also formally condemned “India’s violation of the Line of Control” with Pakistan, an OIC founding member state.

Like the cross-border air strike, the OIC invite has portents for the future. It marks a successful breaching of the OIC solidarity by New Delhi. Whether or not it remains a one-off affair depends as much on South Block’s diplomacy, as India’s ability to convince the world of its case in Kashmir.

Quint March 4, 2019

Neither India Nor Pakistan Is Really Prepared To Fight A Conventional War

Just how far India can escalate tensions with Pakistan without going to war is difficult to forecast. The Indian air strikes of February 26 have rejigged the spectrum of possibilities. For decades, conventional wisdom was that the use of air power was somehow an escalation.

So, India did not use its air force in the 1962 war, where it may have prevented our disastrous defeat. In 1965 too, operations went on through August in J&K minus the use of air power. Only when Pakistan attacked Chamb  and threatened to cut the Jammu-Poonch road, the IAF was hurriedly brought into the battle by then defence minister Y.B. Chavan at around 4 pm. He sought and got the cabinet sanction for his action later.

Over the years, the Indian and Pak­is­tani forces have battled it out, at times through mortar and artillery duels along the LOC. At other times, they have conducted commando strikes against each other across this line. Pakistan initially tried to pass off the Kargil incursion as one made by militants, but this did not wash, and it was soon evident that it was an Indo-Pak military clash, albeit, one of a lower intensity.

It took nearly three weeks, after Pakistani intruders were first reported in May 1999, for the air force to be sent in. The then IAF chief turned down the request of the army chief for help and waited for the Cabinet Committee on security to order action. Caught unprepared, the IAF lost two aircraft on the second day of its operations, resulting in the death of one pilot and the capture of another.

Pakistan has made it clear that it will not ­hesitate to use nukes in case of ­an Indian ­military ­attack.

The recent Indo-Pak military clash seems to be taking place largely in the air. Beginning with the Balakot strike, it has now featured aerial battles on or near the LoC. Unfortunately, we had a parallel to the Kargil experience when this time too, on February 27, a day after the Balakot strike, an IAF Mig-21 Bison was shot down by the Pakistani air force and a pilot captured.

There is a red line somewhere, notional of course, which, if crossed, could lead to the use of nuclear weapons. From the Indian perspective, that line is fairly clear—as a country that has pledged “no first use”, nuclear weapons will be used only if the other country employs them against us first. However, most people would agree that were India convinced that it was facing a ­nuclear attack, it could pre-emptively use its ­nuclear weapons to strike first.

Pakistan has made it abundantly clear that it will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons in the event of an Indian military attack with conventional weapons. They say that given their geography and smaller military, Indian penetration of their borders could pose an existential threat to the country. To this end, they have developed tactical nuclear weapons which, they say, they could use in the event of a large Indian military incursion.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies says Pakistan has a spatial threshold that will be triggered if Indians reach the Indus, or an economic threshold resulting from any Indian naval blockade or if Indian military action threatens the destruction of the Pakistani military. There's also a political threshold in the event of developments that could lead to the breakup of Pakistan, just as it happened in the case of Bangladesh.

Clearly, a conventional war by itself is not a thr­eshold, in other words, if there were skirmishes along the LoC or even the international border, it would not necessarily trigger a nuclear conflict. But the danger here is the escalation as the nations seek to gain the edge in what began as a ­l­ocalised clash. Commanders seeking advantage in a particular tacti­cal situation could lead to a competitive circumstance, resu­l­ting in a quick climb on the ­escalation ladder.  

Neither India nor Pakistan is really prepared to fight a conventional war. But, to paraphrase General V.P. Malik during the Kargil war, they will fight with whatever they have. Because they maintain large establishments, they suffer from obsolescence and thus, they are desperately seeking to modernise their forces. There is little point in ret­ailing the size, numbers and equipment of the two opposing forces. Suffice to say, Pakistan maintains enough strength to counter any Indian incursion.

NUKE FOR NUKE

Pakistan's Shaheen-III.

Through the decades, the Pakistani military has been oriented towards India. In contrast, the Indians have had to develop a serious ­conventional deterrence capability vis-à-vis both Pakistan and China alongside maintaining a substantial force deployed against domestic insurgents in the North-east and in Jammu & Kashmir. However, since 2008, the Pakistan army, too, has had to develop counter-insurgency capabilities in relation to the formidable threat it has faced from the Pakistani Taliban.

The guiding principle of the Pakistani force’s structure is to maintain an effective parity with India. We say “effective” because there is no question of real parity between a country that is continental in scale and one that is less than one-third of its size. Further, its GDP of some $279 billion can hardly compare with one which is $2.4 trillion. The Indian defence budget—at $52.5 billion in 2017—is more than five times that of Pakistan’s—at $9.72 billion. But the Pakistani military has made the most of what it has. It can indeed give the Indian army a run for its money. One major ­reason for this is India’s inability to restructure and reform its huge military and make it more capable of fighting a modern, high-tech war.

The global geopolitical situation ­favours India, whose economy is growing despite the missteps of politicians.

Over the years, Pakistan has used four techniques to maintain effective parity. First, they have spent a disproportionate amount of their government revenues on defence. Second, they have been helped enormously by external allies; in the 1950s and 1960s and again in the 1980s, it was the United States, currently, it is the Chinese. The allies have provided the Pakistani military substantial weapons systems and equipment at throwaway rates. Third, Islamabad has used what is called “sub-conventional” means, aka terrorism, to undermine India. Fourth, they have developed a nuclear weapons force to protect themselves against any Indian retaliation to their covert war.

 The current conflict is being played out in the skies above the LoC. And this can easily lead to a wider conflagration. Having carried out a so-called surgical strike across the LoC in 2016 that did not deter Pakistan, New Delhi was compelled to resort to an aerial attack. Given the level of the provocation—the biggest casualty count of security forces in the Pakistan-supported covert war in the Valley—India had to dramatically step up its level of deterrent violence, and it did.

Pakistan would like to avoid any conventional war since it has successfully used terrorism to keep India off balance. And now, it could well be that Islamabad’s only option is to retaliate through more, rather than fewer terrorist actions, just as it did after the so-called surgical strikes. If that happens, India may expand the menu of its actions along the LoC. It may undertake sustained army action across the LoC backed by air power. Given India’s military and economic strength, it will eventually prevail, without necessarily crossing Islamabad’s spatial, ­economic, military or political red lines.

The global geopolitical situation favours India, whose economy is growing despite the missteps of its political class. The experience of the Islamic State has driven home the importance of combating Islamist terrorism to countries as diverse as the US, China, Russia and the European Union. None of them wants to appear backing unsavoury characters like Masood Azhar.

However, it will not be cost free. India will have to pay a price—a direct one on account of stepping up military hostilities, and a larger one in opportunity costs relating to the fulfilment of its economic and social needs. But perhaps the biggest danger could be that in its mortal struggle with Pakistan, it could fatally weaken itself vis-à-vis a greater adversary—China.

Outlook March 1, 2019

What Narendra Modi says about ‘pilot projects’ – and what it says about his record on terrorism

Barely minutes after Pakistan announced the release of the Indian Air Force pilot Abhinandan Varthaman, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared, “Abhi abhi ek pilot project pura ho gaya. Abhi real karna hai, pehle toh practice thi.” A pilot project was just completed, he said. The real project must be taken up now. The earlier one was just for practice.

It was Modi’s usual bravado and tendency to play with words.

Given his aversion to unrestricted media encounters, no one could ask him why a lot of pilot projects get done only on the eve of elections and never quite get scaled up to the real thing subsequently.

Nearing the end of his five-year term and seeking another, Modi has decided that a tough counterterrorism posture would provide him the wind needed to win the election. But was he not always supposed to be tough on terrorism? If so, what is the balance sheet on that, taking his entire term into account?

In 2014, during the last election campaign, Modi said his government would do more and speak less when it came to dealing with the likes of Dawood Ibrahim. He wondered why the then Congress-led government had been unable to get Dawood and maintained that action was needed to combat terrorism, not mere words. And, presumably, that he would act.

It is 2019 and Dawood is still not back in India nor, for that matter, is any of the top terrorist leaders who mostly reside in Pakistan. There is no record of any of them being killed by covert action either. Presumably, their respective pilot projects are still underwayIndia’s wanted men who are reportedly in Pakistan include Abdul Subhan Qureshi, Iqbal Bhatkal, Mirza Shadab Beg, Tiger Memon, Amir Raza Khan, Mohammed Khalid aka Sagir, hijackers of IC 814, and Khalistani terroristssuch as Wadhava Singh Babbar, Paramjit Singh Panjwar, Lakhbir Singh Rode, Ranjit Singh Neeta, Gajinder Singh “Hijacker”. Here, we are not even talking about the biggies – Hafiz Saeed, Masood Azhar and Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi.

Modi’s record of dealing with terrorism and the country that backs terrorism – Pakistan – is, to put it politely, mixed. In his first year and a half in office, his relationship with Pakistan was good, and even warm. On December 25, 2015, Modi descended in the skies over Lahore and choppered to Mian Nawaz Sharif’s hometown of Raiwind. The occasion? Mian Sahib’s birthday and the pre-wedding festivities of his granddaughter who was to be married the next day.

Earlier, on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Ufa, Modi and Sharif had agreed to talks between their respective National Security Advisors. The meeting was called off because of the terror attack in Gurdaspur, but the two officials met in secret in Bangkok in December 2015.

In November 2014, Modi and Sharif had secretly met on the sidelines of the SAARC summit in Nepal, as the journalist Barkha Dutt revealed in her book The Unquiet Land.

Narendra Modi visited Nawaz Sharif in Pakistan for his birthday in December 2015. Photo credit: AFP

No action, only words

Thereafter came the three-year period, between the Pathankot attack and the Pulwama suicide bombing, when the government had all the time to execute its so-called pilot projects against Pakistan. To the best of public knowledge, however, none seem to have fructified into the real thing. We have neither dented the Jaish-e-Mohammad nor the Lashkar-e-Taiba. And a number of Khalistani and Indian Mujahideen terrorists continue to have sanctuary in Pakistan.

One reason was that the Jaish and the Pakistanis kept the terror campaign carefully contained. They did not strike civilian targets and only hit police, Army and Air Force posts, that too in Jammu and Kashmir and contiguous areas of Punjab. The Pakistani strategy was to avoid international opprobrium like they had received in the wake of the Mumbai attack of 2008 and the Indian Mujahaideen’s campaign of bombings in India’s northern and western cities around the same time. Barring the 2011 train bombings, which killed 26 people and injured 130, there have been no Islamist terror strikes in these areas since.

What Modi did do was what he is good at – giving speeches demanding the international community isolate Pakistan and bring into force the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism, which the United Nations has been debating for the past two decades.

Whether it was at the BRICS summit, the G20 gathering or the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting, or during his visits to other countries, Modi reiterated the message: nations promoting terror need to be isolated and the world should unite to pass the terrorism convention.

In the meantime, India refused all offers for talks with Pakistan. There were times when it seemed the two sides would talk but New Delhi pulled out because of this reason or that. As is well known, Pakistan was not quite isolated and has, in fact, managed to rebuild its relations with the United States and the West.

There is nothing wrong in making diplomatic efforts to get the international community to chastise Pakistan and pass the terrorism convention. The world would be a better place if this happens. But, at the end of the day, any real battle of counterterrorism demands action on the ground, not mere words and resolutions. There we have nothing on the Modi side of the ledger.

The only conclusion we can arrive at is that this “pilot project” business is just a lot of bluster aimed at the only thing Modi really cares about – getting reelected.

Scroll March 2, 2019