Uri attack: How India can punish Pakistan without declaring war
Eighteen brave soldiers martyred. Of them more than a dozen were sleeping in their barracks when four Jaish-e-Mohammad fidayeens attacked an Indian Army camp.
Thirty others injured. Of them, at least ten are critically wounded. From Pathankot, the scene of terror has shifted to Uri.
So, what would the Modi government do? Will it once again send a dossier to Islamabad, seeking "justice" for the crimes perpetrated on Indian soil?
Or, will it invite Pakistani officials at Uri to have a firsthand look at the scene of terror, as was done at Pathankot? (Ironically, when the NIA wanted to visit Pakistan for investigations, it was roundly rebuffed!)
Thankfully, the initial government response has been satisfying. Never in the recent past has one seen a more resolute and purposeful reaction from the government.
While the party in power, the BJP, wants "jaw for tooth", Union minister Jitendra Singh says not responding to the terror would be "cowardice".
And rightly so as the government must realise that it was chosen by people to act resolutely against Pakistan, and not just send dossiers after every act of terror.
In fact, the "biryani diplomacy" of the previous dispensation should not be replaced with the "dossier diplomacy" of this government. For, every act of not responding adequately to Pakistan further encourages the elements inimical to India.
Pathankot got us to Uri. Not acting on Uri will surely take us to something even bigger - and worse.
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| A PTI video grab of the Uri attack. |
India behaves the way it does for two reasons: one, we as a nation have failed to comprehend the true nature of Pakistani state despite 68 years of incessant hostilities from the neighbourhood.
Last week when India raised, for the first time, the Balochistan issue before the United Nations, some of our celebrated peaceniks, global citizens and woolly-headed liberals found their voices again, saying how a prosperous Pakistan is good for India.
A few so-called experts, on the basis of few weeks of fam trip experiences in Pakistan, fondly recalled how people there were just like us! "They didn't even charge us a penny for the kebab in Lahore after knowing that we are Indians," one Pakistan "expert" has told this writer.
It is this kind of discourse that creates a make-believe divide of the army versus the civilian, the masses versus the government.
The question is: does it help India whether there's a military regime or the civilian?
A look at Pakistan's short history suggests the two work in tandem. Gen Zia-ul-Haq, for instance, is blamed for the Islamisation of Pakistan, but the fact is it was Zulfikar Bhutto, a Leftist by orientation, who made Pakistan the Islamic Republic.
It was the government of his daughter, Benazir Bhutto, which not only helped create the Taliban, but also was the first to recognise their rule in Afghanistan.
As for Nawaz Sharif, he instituted death penalty for blasphemy, besides introducing the infamous Sharia Bill!
Pakistan is an abnormal state and its unifying factors are Islam and anti-India sentiments.
The anti-India feeling flourishes in Pakistan not just because there's the army but because there's a thriving civilian ecosystem which detests its eastern neighbour.
An anti-India mindset at the top can't exist for long without a support base from the bottom. Former Pakistan ambassador Rajiv Dogra recalls in his book, Where Borders Bleed, how an unnamed Pakistani foreign minister confided that his greatest wish was that God should "place a nuclear bomb each on my palms... One I would drop on Bombay, the other on Delhi".
Sadly, this is not an exceptional opinion in Pakistan. Khaled Ahmed explains this phenomenon in his latest book, Sleepwalking to Surrender: Dealing with Terrorism in Pakistan.
"Muslims produce their best men when they are not ruling the state they live in… When Muslims acquire a state they go into a kind recidivist trance: 'give us utopia or nothing'," writes Khaled as he recalls how Pakistan accepts the discipline of economics while ideologically rejecting the concepts of banking and savings, and how one prominent nuclear scientist promises to produce electricity for all of Pakistan from one "tamed jinn"!
The second problem which India faces vis-à-vis its western neighbour is we always deal with it from a defensive point of view. "Oh, we can't be too aggressive with them, they have nuclear bombs!"
One would hear such discourses many a times. What our so-called experts fail to understand that there are over a dozen steps a government can take before going for a full-fledged war.
India, for instance, can throw the 1960 Indus Water Treaty, which unduly favours Pakistan, into the dustbin. Without shelling a single mortar, India can make Pakistan crawl.
Then, of course, we should leverage our economic might. It's time India sends a clear message to the world that Pakistan is a pariah state, a "criminal enterprise" as Sir Vidia Naipaul would famously call it. Do business with it and the Indian market is beyond you.
Last but not least, why should Delhi buy weapons from any country which funds Islamabad?
Uncle Sam, which in the last few years has become India's largest supplier of weapons, would definitely listen to this point.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)