Author: Swapan Dasgupta
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: October 2, 2016
URL:   http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/usual-suspects/end-of-indias-strategic-restraint-miles-to-go.html

Yet, it must be noted that while Thursday’s military operation marks the end of an old approach, there are many more miles to travel before a new doctrine can take shape. India has to build its economic capacity and become a far more important player regionally before the international community can unhesitatingly repose faith in its ability to act firmly and responsibly

 The debate over possible Indian responses to identifiable terrorist attacks appears to have now reached inflection point with the Indian Army’s ‘surgical strike’ across the LoC in the early hours of September 29. Regardless of whether or not such Special Forces’ operations were carried out in the past, the open admission of last Thursday’s raid on terrorists staging posts inside enemy territory symbolises India’s reversal of the doctrine of ‘strategic restraint’ and the formal inauguration of an ‘offense-defence’ approach.

 The shift had been dictated by circumstances. Over the years, the covert war launched by Pakistan on targets — both civilian and military — in India had been crying out for a response that went beyond diplomatic huffing and puffing. Having exploited its strategic geography to the tilt during the West-sponsored war against the Soviet Union’s misadventure in Afghanistan, Pakistan has, over the years, become quite adept in getting the best of all possible worlds. It had become a safe haven for the Taliban while, at the same, being a strategic ally of the US in its war on terror; it had projected itself as a modern Islamic state while, at the same time, nurturing the most regressive forces of Islamism; and it has feigned friendship with India while simultaneously sponsoring terror outfits that focussed not merely on Jammu & Kashmir but even the rest of India. Pakistan has played its nuclear card very effectively, blackmailing the world into thinking that its ambivalent Islamism was preferable to a formally Islamist nuclear state. This may explain why it has got away with high-level truancy — the harbouring of Osama bin Laden in Abbotabad, the nuclear bazar run by the rogue AQ Khan with backing from the state, et al — relatively unscathed.

 It is entirely possible that the West’s hesitation over pushing Pakistan too hard was a factor behind India’s own ‘strategic restraint’, a doctrine interpreted with varying degrees of appeasement by different practitioners. However, behind the desire to play the role of an elder brother and overlook the loutish conduct of a younger brother who felt no familial ties, was a misplaced sense of magnanimity. It was this self-image of loftiness that prevented Indira Gandhi from driving home India’s colossal advantage and securing a permanent settlement of the Kashmir problem in 1972. It was a similarly misplaced faith in Pakistan’s innate goodness that led to the then Prime Minister IK Gujral winding down India’s Intelligence networks inside Pakistan. And it was the fig leaf of even-handedness that, despite the terrorist carnage in Mumbai a few months before, led to Manmohan Singh retreating an extra mile to accommodate Pakistan’s concerns at the meeting in Sharm-el-Sheik in July 2009. Nor for that matter did Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dramatic visit to Lahore on Christmas Day 2015 produce the requisite goodwill that could overwhelm the accumulated mass of hatred for India.

 It would seem that even before the Indian Prime Minister invoked the issue of Baluchistan in his Independence Day speech this year, strategic restraint as the principle of bilateral relations with Pakistan was ready for shelving in the archives. The curious thing is that it survived for so long.

 Apart from a lobby in the US State Department whose influence has been diminishing over the years, there is little apparent mood of generosity towards Pakistan in the West. Even if Donald Trump emerges second-best in November’s US presidential election, the issue of zero tolerance of all countries breeding terror will influence US foreign policy quite markedly in the future. I have little doubt that the US was somewhere in the loop in Thursday night’s action across the LoC.

 Is there a domestic lobby in India that favours strategic restraint against such a consistently difficult neighbour as Pakistan? Chief Minister of Jammu & Kashmir Mehbooba Mufti is the only person of consequence who favours such a policy. But she has her local compulsions. As for the rest, the only people advocating such an approach are those whose intellectual ancestry can be traced to either opposition to the Pokhran-II tests in 1998 or a romantic Aman ki Asha approach. Maybe there are also a few who feel that enduring a little pain is worth the sacrifice, for the sake of preventing a nuclear escalation that Pakistan has unendingly threatened. But apart from their over-exposure in the English-language media, they count for little in the arena of public opinion from which foreign policy and strategic approaches cannot be disengaged.

 Yet, it must be noted that while Thursday’s military operation marks the end of an old approach, there are many more miles to travel before a new doctrine can take shape. India has to build its economic capacity and become a far more important player regionally before the international community can unhesitatingly repose faith in its ability to act firmly and responsibly. Militarily too, India has to iron out inefficiencies in the entire defence establishment — from procurement and deployment to recruitment — before we can be certain of managing the blowback from Pakistan.

 These are tasks that await completion. However, what was in evidence after the Uri attack was a political will to ensure that Pakistani-sponsored depredations don’t go unpunished. Even at the diplomatic level, the Modi Government appears to have done much more than earlier regimes — the action on the SAARC summit and re-opening the Indus Waters Treaty being prime examples. The question is: has Pakistan realised it is dealing with a very different dispensation in Delhi?