Pakistan Is Trying To Exhaust the Indian Political Will To Fight On To Total Victory

Every war has two visible and direct costs – lives lost and money spent. There are several indirect and collateral costs some of which are to be incurred and amortised over long periods of time.

Lives could be of civilians or soldiers. Lives could be lost at the boarders or inside the country. Money spent could be in terms of running costs of operations, depletion and loss of military and civilian assets and infrastructures, replacement costs, disbursal of immediate and long-term compensation and so on. Indirect and collateral costs are immediate or deferred over short, medium or long-term and may include loss of opportunity, productivity, rehabilitation, renewal and reinforcements, diplomatic costs paid by the country, political costs paid by ruling parties, social and psychological costs paid by citizens and so on.

Relations between India and Pakistan have been defined by the violent partition of British India in 1947, the Kashmir conflict and the numerous military conflicts fought between the two nations. Consequently, their relationship has been plagued by hostility and suspicion. According to a 2017 BBC World Service poll, only 5% of Indians view Pakistan's influence positively, with 85% expressing a negative view, while 11% of Pakistanis view India's influence positively, with 62% expressing a negative view.

Pakistan is at War with India since 1947 whose scale and scope has been swinging like a pendulum between extremes of hostility and bonhomie. Pakistan recognises the odds against them. They don’t expect to defeat India in a full scale war. The Pak doctrine of a thousand cuts must be seen in the light of the available alternatives before it since its defeat and dismemberment in 1971 which was the biggest national economic suffocation and humiliation suffered by Pakistan at the hands of India.

The doctrine of a thousand cuts emerged out of Pakistan’s drive for national glory and economic security via the conquest of the support of the Islamic world, China, the US and the belief of Pakistan’s rulers that they could check India’s bid for a regional dominance via foreign aid and military deployments. As Pakistanis sought to free themselves from their diplomatic dependence on the United States, the Americans sought to use that dependence to contain imperial ambitions of Russia, China and the Islamic countries in the region.

Given the size of economy, India is able to afford the monetary costs of the ongoing war with Pakistan but it is unaffordable for Pakistan. The cost of lives is where the actual Paki-game is being played. Loss of lives away from the civilian areas does not result into as much of collateral costs of political opinion, public opinion, social and psychological costs as against the costs which the loss of lives amidst civilian milieu result into. Thus, simply put, Pak tries to generate a spectre of loss of lives in non-military zones which cannot be created by Pakistani men in uniform. Pakistan has therefore created specialised regular combat troops to execute such battles and similes who do not wear a regular uniform. Some of these operations are at best projected to have been out-sourced or franchised. India mistakenly calls them terrorists.

A dispassionate look at the events of the last few days would establish the point. India attacked the so called terrorist-training establishment but Pak Military retaliated. If terrorists were free agents, there was no reason for Pak to retaliate using regular military assets.

The retaliatory action of Pakistan is actually an act of unprovoked aggression on Indian military establishment and a war on India. This was immediate. In such immediate reaction, the assumption was that time was working against Pakistan - i.e., the longer Pakistan waited to retaliate against India, the dimmer its prospects for success. This assumption was grimly realistic.

Pakistan had little chance of preventing further strikes from India and India’s great military superiority would eventually bury Pakistan. The global diplomatic opinion developing in favour of India drove the Pakistanis into the logic of preventive attack: given inevitability of more strikes by India and Pakistan’s feeble military power relative to India’s, Pakistani leaders reasoned, better attack now than later. If Pakistan had any chance of fighting a military battle with India to some kind of successful conclusion, it had to bring military operations to a head as soon as possible. Short-war Pakistan was going to pick a fight with a long-war India.

India has not yet reacted to the Pakistani military aggression and invasion. Wing Commander Abhinandan has been returned as a POW.  By swiftly seizing the opportunity to retaliate to Indian air-strikes, Pakistan has forced India into a murderous, location-by-location slog that could eventually exhaust India’s political will to fight on to total victory.

Pakistan has tried to raise the blood and treasure costs of the war beyond India’s willingness to pay. The Pak theory of victory amounts to the hope that India would judge the cost of defeating Pakistan to be too heavy, too disproportionate to the worth of the interests at stake.

How India deals with these developments will shape the future of Indo-Pak war for a long time. India needs to craft her strategy very quickly, circumspectly and brilliantly.

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This follows an earlier posting on 15 February 2019, titled “Pakistan is at war with India: Pulwama, Uri or Mumbai are tactical offensives” which can be found at https://www.facebook.com/ProfMukulGupta/posts/704635659930365.

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On Refusing To Be a Hindu Apologist in Hindustan

I am suffering from “double consciousness” these days – a trouble of always looking at myself through the eyes of a pseudo-secular society and measuring myself by the means of an activists’ led nation that looks back at me with contempt.

My life was marked by a strict dichotomy between the religious, spiritual, conventional and ritualistic vibe of my home that was full of pictures and statues of Hindu Gods and Goddesses and would be reverberating with the chants of sacred hymns and Sanskrit Mantras from my parents every morning, and the, irreligious, secular, activist and non-conformist vibe at my work place which had people of different faiths, orientations and dispositions, sometimes aware of, at other times not even aware of but never mindful of such individual differences, working and enjoying together in harmony and tranquillity.

When I went to work, the markers of my Hindu background were stripped away and I faced no favouritism or prejudice from my peers and colleagues.

I faced or feared no social consequences of my being a Hindu and for me assimilation in the work-milieu was solely driven by my interpersonal and professional skills. I observed that there were many other Hindus besides Muslims, Sikhs, Jains and Christians amongst the co-workers and we looked forward to sharing of sweets and food often because there would always be some religious festival coming up one after the other. I looked forward to “sevaiyaan” and “kadaah-parshad” coming from homes of Muslim and Sikh colleagues as they in turn waited for “Modak” and “Charan-amrit” from my home.

Until the aftermath of the incidents of 06 December 1992 and 12 March 1993, I never had to be watchful of my being a Hindu in my social circle at work or amongst friends. Something changed and I found it difficult to openly talk about my religion due to a perceived risk of alienating my Muslim colleagues and friends. I was scared that they would perceive me differently if they would know my belief in my shrines and my sense of loss at the hands of foreign invaders many centuries ago. As a result, I was left to deal with an ethnic and religious difference which always existed but never mattered before, and had suddenly surfaced as important without a reliable social support system. Suddenly, micro-aggressions in individual spaces became more difficult to ignore. Slick comments from some of my Hindu friends, who would abuse and accuse Hinduism, more than the non-Hindus, were far more confusing and harder to get over.

In the wake of such developments, I no longer thought about Hinduism as an irrelevant concept that I never paid attention to because of the pluralistic workplace and diversity amongst friends I had made. Over the years, my relationship with my Hindu friends deteriorated because they made flippant racial comments and insisted that my new interest in Hinduism was offensive. When some suggested a “protest” in support of secularism but used it as a smoke screen behind which to propagate their pseudo-secular, pseudo-liberal and pseudo-intellectual credentials, I was forced to acknowledge the ways in which my identity is diametrically at odds with such of my friends.

Later, when I confronted some of them, they could only argue without any convictions, information, awareness, understanding or wisdom. For me, their posing to be secular through taking up an anti-Hindu posture was an acknowledgment of the baggage that comes with their being a Hindu in a space populated by politically opportunistic anti-Hindu discourse which they are incapable of meeting through reasonable arguments. Because most Hindus are unable to defend against such malicious propagandists, they have meekly joined them. For them, my arguing with them became a sign that I was becoming one of “those Hindus” who “makes everything about Hinduism,” a transgression against their supposed religious neutrality of their majority society. This tension came to a head when my closest friends of years of mutual understanding started insisting that despite “Same Spirit towards all religions” as ethos of Hinduism, Hindus like them are seculars and Hindus like me are non-seculars; but such binary classifications do not apply to Muslims and Christians, whose basic ideology considers all other religions as inferior. In spite of my indoctrination into “equal reverence towards all religions” and my informed support to the doctrine, I am branded as a fundamentalist. In contrast, just to propagate their own pseudo-equanimity, my friends who were similarly indoctrinated, are willingly stooping as low as to vilify Hinduism and eulogise the religions of the invaders of Hindustan. This has pushed me to my breaking point because my friends’ pseudo-liberalism is no longer masked or diminishable.

No matter how I speak or what congregations I attend, I will never be safe from the assumptions my peers will make about me, my environs, or my affiliates. After all my meticulous efforts to avoid anything that would code my being a Hindu as “non-liberal” or “non-secular,” I seem to have committed the biggest sin of all: distinguishing myself through my beliefs and my arguments. Even well-intentioned insistence of a lot of my friends that they “don’t see any -ism” in me is slightly infuriating because “if you don’t see my being a Hindu then you don’t see me.”

Throughout the last 25 years, many of my choices were rooted in my desire to maintain my dual identities. I stifled righteous rage inside me and ignored threats to my self-worth in order to remain assimilated into my educated secular peer group, but I could not erase my Hindu-ness and I cannot swallow bile in order to please my friends.

Speaking up for Hindus means “outing” myself as “non-secular” and living in the truth of being a Hindu from Hindustan, the only homeland for Hindus, riddled with poverty and subservience, but also community and love. By now I have internalized this message and I am happy to be “just a Hindu.”

Things have changed. The markers of Muslim faith are specially being flaunted in public in the form of Burqa, Hizab, Niqab, skull-cap, short pyjama, beards, and so on, have increased visibility in classrooms, markets, streets and office campuses. There is a clear aggregation amongst Muslims and their separation from the rest of the people leading to favouritism and tolerance within the groups but discrimination and prejudice across the groups. Higher population growth amongst Muslims and clustering of Muslims in ghettos identified as “mini-Pakistans” within each city are a new undeniable reality of Hindustan.

While things have changed, I finally have given to myself the freedom to deal with them with the entirety of my person, without having to hide the particular stresses of being a Hindu in the Hindu land.

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Without Malice towards Pakistanis

Instead of marching Pakistan towards democracy, the Pakistan army and the ISI have chosen the model of totalitarianism camouflaged as parliamentary democracy as a way of governing their people. Armed forces are an apparatus in the hand of a national government; unfortunately however, Pak National Government has become an instrument in the hand of Pak army Generals and Pak Parliament is nothing more serious than a debating club.

Policy subjugated to adversarial-obsession-with-India, anti-India rhetoric or demonstrations will not solve any of the crises facing the Pakistanis. These protests and speechifying are ISI's way of distracting attention from the government’s failure to improve the living conditions of the people living under its repressive regime.

The only way for the Pakistanis to move forward is by protesting against their failed political parties and military establishment. Many Pakistanis, however, are afraid to speak out against their rulers in Pakistan. Why would any Pakistani speak out against the national government when the ISI or the Pak army arrests and harasses those who even dare to post critical remarks on Facebook? Why would any Pakistani criticise their Prime Minister when he or she knows that this would endanger their lives?

Pakistanis must remember that their grand-fathers and great Grand fathers were all Indians. They can choose to hate India if they are willing to hate their heritage and their legacy. Pakistan cannot achieve peace with India until Pakistanis are at peace with their lineage and history which they share with Indians.

In April-May, India will again celebrate democracy by voting in a free and democratic election. The Pakistanis, meanwhile, will mark another year of weak regime and failed democracy, and will continue to dream about heading to any real ballot box at all.

Is this the future for which Jinnah created Pakistan separating from India? Pakistanis and Pakistan deserve better.

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