Wage war on
26/11 has signalled in no uncertain terms that India needs to strike. The first emotional response is to bomb terror camps in Pakistan. But war on an external agent can be won only if there is a strong, unified, honest and earnest effort on our part to fight and cleanse the nation from terror. Meenakshi Rao tells you that we need a war — definitely — but first on our inept selves and only then against Pakistan
There is much talk of what our present Government must do in response to the recent jihadi attack on Mumbai. Public opinion suggests, and it is quite a tempting thought, the least one can do is attack terror camps in Pakistan and tell our rogue neighbour that we have the ability to strike back at so-called “stateless actors” on foreign territory.
But before we show our might to the world, should we not attend to a much more urgent chore – to acknowledge our own weaknesses and gather the will to eradicate them from our corrupt, vulnerable and bumbling system?
This, we all know, is a much tougher task than merely going to war with Pakistan. Corruption, negligence, lack of political will, the cheap life of the Indian citizen and inadequate public response to recurring atrocities on self and the nation are embedded so deep in our collective psyche that it would need more than just candlelights at the Gateway to get into real action.
Carnegie Endowment's anti-terror opinionist Robert Kagan, commenting on Zardari's ridiculous "non-State actors" comment, says, in the modern world, a State (like Pakistan) can't take sovereignty for granted. It has to earn the right to be sovereign. Similarly, we need to earn the right to be citizens of a peaceful democracy. As Pakistan needs to earn its sovereignty by being a responsible nation (sounds laughable at this juncture) and not allowing non-State actors to use its territory for mounting attacks on other nations, we need to see to it that we do not allow our territory to be encroached upon by evil design, both from within and without.
How do we do that? By cleansing our own system, by plugging our own loopholes and only then mounting a war on Pakistan. Think about it. How weak are our insides to have actually allowed 10, just 10 individuals, to breach our maritime and territorial borders to hold our entire country to ransom for more than 60 hours? This, despite a full-fledged Coast Guard, the Indian Navy, scores of Intelligence units, the Army, the Air Force, the Government at large and, of course, a much touted democracy whose insides we have eaten hollow but still make it a national ritual to cover the dying edifice with a velvet veneer of wholesomeness.
Much as one would loathe to admit, Lashkar chief Hafeez Mohammad Saeed said it all in his recent interview to an Indian magazine – that India fell on 26/11 not to a terror attack so much as it did to its own security and Intelligence failure.
Granted, our politicians are exploitative, power-greedy rogues. But who has allowed them to sit pretty on such salient features? We vote on caste lines, we allow minority appeasement, we are unmoved by political scandals, we brave inflation, we ignore corruption as regularly as we indulge in it and we are part and parcel of the very system we have created, a system that has gobbled up our right to be safe. So let's not crib about Pakistan, let's set ourselves in order first.
On the political front, India is in need of leaders who walk the talk of patriotism. To show that they do, the first thing would be to cleanse our nation of the Bangladeshi illegals. We have sat through the years silently, as these illegals have changed the demographics of our north-east and run through the nation from Bengal to Gujarat and Rajasthan in the west to most of the Deccan in the South. You may be horrified to know but the remotest of villages in Kutch, not to mention loads of them in the border district of Barmer, sport strange Bangladeshi brides!
Delhi has a strong force of illegals who work as sleeper cells for terror, as maids, as helps, as labourers but, most scarily, as votebanks. The biggest security these elements have comes from India's protectors – its elected politicians. Allowing Bangladeshis to set shop here is nothing less than giving terror a licence to take root, flourish and kill.
Now about Intelligence, ostensibly, our present and biggest failure. Sorry, but even this horror is self-propagated. You may hate the Indian Intelligence network for playing the dangerous game of passing the buck but when sleuths tell you it is impossible to give sound Intelligence on a billion plus people, it sounds understandable. A restrospective on Intelligence makes for engaging reading and Intelligence failure bashing has become a mandatory post-terror ritual.
However, this time round, we read that there was specific Intelligence which our political masters did not take cognizance of. Do they routinely also ignore the political Intelligence they get from these very agencies? Have they put any mechanism in place to process the loads of specific and general Intelligence that emanates from its ground operatives? Do our politicians get time out of 24X7 self-propulsion to actually think about a clean system armed against slip-ups of the kind that led to 26/11?
What kind of a political breed have we inserted in our genes? I mean, we have one political outfit whose Foreign Minister escorts terror kings like Masood Azhar to the safety of Pakistan and another dispensation mulls over how not to hang the perpetrator of an attack on the Indian Parliament! We did not attack Pakistan when our highest seat of power – our Parliament – was struck by men from their territory. What makes us think that a Government which was having problems even removing an ineffective Chief Minister would actually have the muscle to bombard Pakistan post 26/11?
Perhaps, the dithering at the highest level is a boon in disguise after all. With a compromised Intelligence network, with an overworked armed force, with weak-kneed politicians and with a public that can take any and everything in its stride, there is little hope for a quick victory.
As for the basics, one must also remember that since the last time we officially went to war with Pakistan in 1971, much has changed in that banana republic of terror. May be, we can defeat its civilian Government but can we really hope to down its real rulers — the jihadis, Taliban, tribal warlords, the ISI and the Army — all of whom are in cahoots in a grand evil design which is truly global? It is official knowledge that 40 per cent of the Pakistani territory is beyond its civilian Government's control.
The much better equipped Americans are battling against the Afghan ulcer for years now, without any positive result. Can India indulge in a similar misadventure, especially when it knows that it has allowed the tentacles of these jihadis to spread over its own territory too, that there is tacit support from many quarters to inborn jihadis like the SIMI or Indian Mujahideen or whatever else you know them as; that Muslim appeasement keeps real investigation on a permanent auto retard; that in the name of secularism, we actually extend official protection to purveyors of terrorism?
The need to instill fear in Pakistan against letting anybody from its terrain strike us is necessary. But how do we do that? Certainly not by first threatening action if the listed 20 fugitives are not handed back and then twiddling our thumbs in the face of a blatant refusal to do so by a chameleon like Zardari; certainly not by seeking action from an equally chameleon like Condoleezza Rice who blows hot this side and cold across the border before flying back to the US and its eternal policy of selfishness.
Pakistan has learnt long back that India has too many voices to actually zero in on unified action and, along the line, it has also learnt the art of exploiting this cacophony of opinions.
India, long serenaded as the big brother, now needs to act like one. A big brother's role in the Indian familial system is to intelligently and with minimal casualty protect the family and its pride.
Meaning to say, the Big Brother needs to deploy more effective ways to wage a war on Pakistan than to bomb it. For starters, the 40 per cent that is not in control of Zardari and Co needs to be told that Indian territory is unreachable for them, that the tentacles it has in India are well and truly cut, that pan Islamism will no longer drive the Indian Muslim of any segment to become harbinger, and that India, like Russia, is on a policy of zero tolerance and zero negotiation with terrorists.
Tall order this, but big jobs need a big effort and our time starts now. Let's compel our political dispensations of all hues to embark on this cleansing drive and let's hang them if they deign to dither.
The coffins from Tiger Hill are still fresh in our memory. We have been shaken by 26/11 – shaken yes, but stirred? Well, only marginally.
So here is what might work – before waging a war on Pakistan, let's wage it against ourself, against our gargantuan ineptness – a task that needs many more heroes than our Armed Forces can sport – both in and out of those dreaded dressed-up coffins. Let's get our Tricolour to flutter high over India rather than be used as drape for those 84-inch boxes which descended from Tiger Hill in 1999 and continue to return from Jammu and Kashmir as regularly as day and night.
Yes, we should. But can we?
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