India must prepare for Pak endgame

PAKISTAN Army Chief Gen Asim Munir’s dog whistle while addressing the Overseas Pakistanis Convention in Islamabad and the murder of 26 innocent tourists — overwhelmingly based on their religious denomination — in Pahalgam, Jammu & Kashmir, have a clear connection.

While addressing the conclave in the presence of Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, the General said: “Our religion is different, our customs are different, our traditions are different, our thoughts are different, our ambitions are different, that’s where the foundation of the two-nation theory was laid. We are two nations, we are not one nation.” Gen Munir also referred to the founding Islamic principles of Pakistan, saying that the country’s “basis was laid on the Kalima” and that Kashmir was their jugular vein.

A week later, there is a massacre of people who are the “others” in the above rant. This is not a mere coincidence.

Gen Munir essentially echoed what Muhammad Ali Jinnah, ironically a non-practising Muslim, had articulated on March 23, 1940, to the Muslim League: “It is extremely difficult to appreciate why our Hindu friends fail to understand the real nature of Islam and Hinduism. The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, and literature[s]. They neither intermarry nor inter-dine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions…”

Pakistan’s history vis-à-vis India’s can be divided into two distinct phases. The first from June 1947 to November 1971 is essentially the story of the Partition and two wars over J&K in 1947 and 1965. The second is from December 1971 till now. The dismemberment of Pakistan, with the eastern part seceding due to the active intervention of India, has left a permanent scar on the collective psyche of the Pakistani military establishment.

A nation born on the basis of faith could not hold together a linguistic group subscribing to the same religion for even two-and-a-half decades. This effectively blew the two-nation theory out of water.

Why did Gen Munir then drag out the apparition of the fallacious two-nation theory that was essentially repudiated by the creation of Bangladesh in 1971? For that, unfortunately, still remains the only ragged ideological, if not philosophical, justification for the existence of the remaining rump called Pakistan even today.

‘The Bangladesh scar’ indelibly imprinted on the institutional psyche of the Pakistani military establishment has never healed and nor will it ever be allowed to because that has become the rationale for the military’s increasingly disproportionate role in the national life of Pakistan, especially since 1977, and its extravagant claims on the fiscal resources of the state.

The creation of Bangladesh led to the Multan Conference convened by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto on January 20, 1972, where two decisions were taken. The first was that Pakistan would acquire a nuclear bomb by any means, even if it meant eating grass, and the second to bleed “India with a thousand cuts”.

By 1980, Punjab became the first frontier of the strategy to bleed India. It was upscaled by Pakistan to J&K in 1989. The end of the Afghan jihad in 1989 freed up militant capacity for redeployment in J&K by the Pakistani deep state.

In the 2000s, the proxy war was exacerbated to the pan-India level with an assault on the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001, the Kaluchak massacre in May 2002, the Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore) attack in December 2005, the Mumbai train bombings in July 2006, the Mumbai outrage in November 2008, the Pathankot airbase attack in January 2016, the Uri terror strike in September 2016, the Pulwama suicide bombing in February 2019 and now the Pahalgam massacre.

The reason for recounting these major attacks over the past 25 years across three NDA/BJP and two UPA dispensations is that Pakistan has been relentless in persecuting its proxy war against India, irrespective of which party was in power in New Delhi.

Different political dispensations have tried different ways of dealing with the problem called Pakistan that is complicated by the nuclear dynamics among India, Pakistan and China.

Then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee initiated Operation Parakram after the 2001 Parliament attack. It was the largest-ever mobilisation of the Indian armed forces after December 1971, only to wind it down in October 2002.

The UPA tried to initialise diplomatic means, including and not limited to the anti-terror dialogue of 2006 with Pakistan, continuing the backchannel talks initiated by PM Vajpayee, and the global campaign after the 2008 Mumbai outrage to get Pakistan denounced, sanctioned and proscribed as a state sponsor of terror.

Over the past decade, the NDA/BJP government has tried coercive means — the post-Uri surgical strikes and the post-Pulwama Balakot airstrikes.

Unfortunately, all these approaches have not moderated the fundamental mindset of Pakistan and its deep state that still thirsts for revenge and retribution for the dismemberment in 1971 of a moth-eaten nation conceived in the womb of ‘othering the other’ by Choudhary Rehmat Ali, an Oxford dilettante, and perennially stamped into infamy by Jinnah in March 1940. That is the core of the disease. The state sponsorship of terror is only its symptom or manifestation.

Where does the Indian state go from here after the Pahalgam massacre? Essentially, there has to be broad national and political consensus in India that we are in it for the long haul. Tactical responses, including surgical strikes or airstrikes and putting the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance are at best legitimate assertions of India’s national anger and revulsion at the repeated murders of our innocent citizens, but they do not succeed in changing the fundamentally criminal disposition of the Pakistani deep state.

As long as Pakistan exists as a nation where the military has a country and not a country that has a military, state-sponsored terrorism will not go away. That is the hard reality.

What India has to plan for is the permanent extinction of this artificial state of play in existence since 1947, irrespective of the cost in terms of blood and treasure.

There has to be an Indian state whose natural boundaries are till the eastern bank of Indus and then the larger Pakhtunistan from its western bank, which is and was the natural political, strategic and geographical order of things through millennia.

This is the endgame that India must seriously prepare for to protect itself from this intrinsically hostile entity on our western borders. It will not happen tomorrow but definitely someday if India gets serious about dealing with this scourge once and for all.

Manish Tewari is Lok Sabha MP and former Union Minister.

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