How Modi hit Pakistan with words and put war-mongers in their place
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on a hot summer day on Saturday delivered a knockout punch. Not to the foe Pakistan as much as to Ram Madhav, the BJP’s hotshot general secretary. Madhav and the entire war machine of the BJP were made to bite the dust by Modi.
As a key party figure and part of the inner coterie of BJP president Amit Shah, Madhav would have known what was coming at Kozhikode.
He had told ANI a day before the speech, Modi’s first public statement since the Uri attack: “Do you people only want statements, or want to see some action. Action will be taken, wait and see.”
To Madhav and his war-mongering followers’ disappointment, Modi didn’t go for “whole jaw for a tooth.”
He launched a war cry from Kozhikode; he challenged Pakistan to fight a war. But it was not a war that the BJP has been crying for since the Uri attack. Modi challenged Pakistan to fight a war against poverty and illiteracy.
Sounding statesman-like, Modi declared: "I want to tell the people of Pakistan, India is ready to fight you. If you have the strength, come forward to fight against poverty. Let's see who wins. Let's see who is able to defeat poverty and illiteracy first, Pakistan or India."
Modi, perhaps, had read Winston Churchill before addressing the public meeting in Kerala. Churchill’s wise counsel told him, “jaw-jaw is better than war-war.”
Modi’s speech was lapped up by many of his bitter critics in the media, though opposition parties found the speech lacking in clarity and purpose. Prominent journalist Rajdeep Sardesai said in a tweet:
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Going many steps further, journalist Shekhar Gupta joined chorus with BJP’s supporters. He said Modi was firm and statesman-like in his speech.
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BJP supporters were firing off the Twitter handle. They felt Modi had put Pakistan in place with his blistering speech. #PMreturnsUriFire was trending on social media.
It would be correct to state that Modi didn’t pull punches. He went out of the way dropping all niceties to hit out at Pakistan.
In a first-of-its-kind, perhaps, in the bitter and checkered history of India-Pakistan relations, Modi made an appeal to the people of Pakistan going above the heads of its leaders.
He called on the people of Pakistan to virtually throw out the Nawaz Sharif government and its political establishment that has been supporting terrorism. The call to create this sort of people-power dichotomy in Pakistan by an Indian Prime Minister is unprecedented.
Senior journalist Sagarika Ghose felt Modi was keen to bring back the narrative of people-to-people relations in the India-Pakistan discourse.
At this point in time it could also mean to stop the hotheads’ clamour for the boycott of Pakistani actors by Bollywood.
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The question one needs to ask is why did the government and BJP allow the hotheads in the ranks to create a situation for war if the strategy was to isolate and hit Pakistan with aggressive diplomacy?
Why did the party take the people on a belligerent jingoistic warpath if the strategy was to expose and fuel the internal fissures in Balochistan and PoK in a tit-for-tat for Kashmir?
Are the people who have been baying for blood since the Uri attack going to be satisfied with mere words and no military action?
Wasn’t Modi expected to add extra punch to his vow that the attackers wouldn’t go unpunished? Nobody expected him to enumerate what actions the government proposed to take but surely one of the actions on the table since Uri has been military action. Of that there was no hint in the speech.
Congress’s Randeep S Surjewala tweeted to expose the chinks in Modi’s armour but failed to explain why his party had joined the war chorus along with the BJP?
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Modi’s speech was meant to calm down the rising temperature that had caught the country in a war fever for the past one week. With his war rhetoric toned down, he shrewdly and wisely sought to bring about sanity, to bring back the country from the hysteria of war to equanimity of peace. On this score, Modi’s speech was laudable in purpose despite all its shrill elements.
But if the call for war had reached a crescendo after the Uri attack, Modi, his ministers and senior party leaders are to be blamed.
People were angry, they are justifiably angry over Pakistan’s unrestrained policy of cross-border terrorism. But it’s the government’s responsibility to channelise the anger in the right direction.
Unfortunately, the government, the party and the media were leading the people to build war hysteria, not calm them down for effective but pragmatic punitive measures to be taken against Pakistan to avenge Uri.
The blow hot, blow cold rhetoric induced by the government after every terrorist attack coming from Pakistan has done more damage than good.
The heightened expectation of the people to avenge the Uri attack through an eye-for-an-eye response is a result of the government’s failure to assuage the people’s feelings through concrete and well-planned strategy against Pakistan in the wake of the Pathankot attack.
For the whole of last week, since the Uri mayhem was reported, the country has discussed nothing but the possibility of war. There was hardly any voice that could dare to suggest that war could be the last option after various other pressure tactics brought to the fore by the Modi government had been exhausted.
Unfortunately, Madhav’s “whole jaw for a tooth” call and the hysteria following that led people to believe that war on the cards.
As the BJP’s chief point person for Kashmir, as the party’s strategist who worked and helped sew the BJP-PDP alliance, Madhav should have been the first to know that the Kashmir situation at the moment is not conducive to war.