War, Power, and the Price of Nationalism: India’s Cycle of Conflict

The past can hold clues to an uncertain future. Indira Gandhi was hailed for India’s decisive victory in the 1971 war with Pakistan, leading to the birth of Bangladesh. She had seemed invincible then, but in that victory also lay the seeds of her destruction. The Congress became a party built around a “Supreme Leader”, which eventually turned out to be bad for its health, and the cost of war jolted the economy as inflation went through the roof. In a few years, there were mass movements against Indira Gandhi, and by June-end in 1975, she had imposed the Emergency. In 1987, her son Rajiv Gandhi would send Indian forces to help the Sri Lankan state in its war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). That decision was widely considered a historical blunder, and Rajiv died in a suicide bombing attack by the LTTE in 1991.

During the tenure of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India’s first Prime Minister from the BJP, there were genuine efforts to forge a legacy of peace. Instead, he faced the brief Kargil War of 1999, triggered by Pakistani incursions into Indian territory. It was India’s first televised war, and the courage of the soldiers who reclaimed Kargil’s peaks became the stuff of lore. Vajpayee’s own image shone, and the National Democratic Alliance led by him secured a majority in the election that followed, eventually becoming the first coalition to complete a full term.

The Vajpayee years also saw the largest military mobilisation on the India-Pakistan border since 1971. This came after the attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001. Operation Parakram lasted 10 months and claimed the lives of nearly 800 soldiers in accidents and mine-clearing operations, without actual combat (527 soldiers had died in combat at Kargil).

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It was at this time that Narendra Modi became Chief Minister of Gujarat. Operation Parakram began two months into his first term, and it was against this backdrop that the Gujarat riots of 2002 took place. During the communally charged election campaign that Modi led, he repeatedly invoked “Mian Musharraf” (the Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf), often while pointing toward Muslim villages and neighbourhoods—dog-whistling to equate Muslims with Pakistan, and thereby with enemies of the nation. It was, therefore, significant that Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif attended Modi’s first swearing-in as Prime Minister on May 26, 2014. At Rashtrapati Bhavan that hot summer evening, I knew I was witnessing history in the making with Modi’s ascent. The presence of Sharif was a significant side story that day. Although different from Vajpayee, Modi may have briefly explored walking in the BJP veteran’s path; so much so that, in 2015, he made an unexpected, unscheduled visit to Pakistan to greet Sharif on his birthday, December 25, which, coincidentally, was also Vajpayee’s birthday.

First Uri, then Pulwama

But all goodwill was gone the following year when militants attacked an Air Force base in Pathankot in Punjab in January. Later that year, 19 Indian soldiers were killed, mostly while sleeping in their tents, by encroachers at Uri, at the Indian Army brigade headquarters near the Line of Control in Baramulla, Kashmir. Indian commandos hit back by crossing the LoC, later claiming to have destroyed several terrorist launch pads. This was the first of what the BJP began to refer to as “surgical strikes”.

The next one came in 2019, after the Pulwama terror attack that killed 40 Central Reserve Police Force personnel. A surgical strike followed in Balakot across the border, and the nation rallied around the leader. It was also an election year, and Modi won his second term as Prime Minister, with his party’s vote share increasing to 37.36 per cent, its highest ever.

The question now is, what will follow the merciless killing of 25 Hindu tourists in Kashmir Valley? First, there is the legacy concern as two big policy decisions of the Modi regime—demonetisation and the removal of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir—have failed to control terrorism despite loud claims to the contrary. What is more, the security sweeps in the Kashmir Valley after the Pahalgam attack suggested the involvement of local facilitators even though the plot was hatched in Pakistan. Voices have been raised over the intelligence failure, which falls under the Centre’s purview.

The India-Pakistan-Kashmir triangle

For all the tall claims of normalcy, the Pahalgam incident is a reminder that nothing is resolved in the India-Pakistan-Kashmir triangle. It is just another bloody chapter. Ideologically, the RSS-BJP Hindutva fantasy includes Akhand Bharat, or a reunified subcontinent, and unfurling the saffron flag in Islamabad. The two-nation theory, that Hindus and Muslims are separate nations, underpins the existence of Pakistan and was recently restated by that country’s army chief, General Asim Munir, in a widely circulated and controversial speech. But the argument that Hindus and Muslims were distinct national identities was also made by V.D. Savarkar, the ideologue of the Hindu Right, in 1937, three years before Muhammad Ali Jinnah articulated it in the Lahore session of the Muslim League where the resolution calling for the creation of Pakistan was moved.

Savarkar, however, sought Hindu domination in an undivided land, while Jinnah sought a separate nation. The BJP and RSS may pay lip service to the idea of India’s secular Constitution, but they seek to bend society, law, street power, and electoral campaigns for a majoritarian state, a de facto Hindu Rashtra against Muslim Pakistan. The bloodbath in Pahalgam does indeed increase anti-Muslim feelings across India, and in the week after the incident, around 20 incidents of hate crimes were reported. As the ruling party, the BJP seeks polarisation but not complete anarchy or civil war, but that is hard to calibrate.

At this time when emotions are fraught and TV anchors are thumping the table demanding a final solution, what can realistically happen? It is hard to predict: the first surgical strike took place 11 days after the attack on the military base at Uri, while the Balakot operation came 12 days after the Pulwama attack. As I was writing this piece, military exchanges on the LoC were escalating, and India had cancelled all visas and suspended the Indus Water Treaty.

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Meanwhile, as part of the televised ritual on Indian news channels, some anchors and security analysts are demanding that India behave like Israel and demolish Pakistan, ignoring the fact that Palestine is not a nuclear-armed state as Pakistan is and, indeed, not a state at all but a territory monitored by Israel. Besides, the war in Gaza has taken a heavy toll on Israel, with a contraction in its GDP, a notable increase in emigration, and the psychological trauma of living in a state of constant war. A Pakistani Minister has, meanwhile, said that his country has 130 nuclear warheads aimed at India.

India these days looks relatively stable though the world is in turmoil following the re-election of US President Donald Trump and his upending of the rules-based order. An outright war with Pakistan, which is actually in a mess, would only indirectly pit us against China, one of the world’s largest economies. China has strategic investments in the Belt and Road corridor that runs through Pakistan and is also committed to defending the latter.

The day after the Pahalgam strike, the Prime Minister addressed a public meeting in Bihar where he suddenly switched from Hindi to English to say that India would “identify, track, and punish every terrorist”: “We will pursue them to the ends of the earth.” War rhetoric is different from real war. Yet, given the BJP leadership’s commitment to optics, some sort of controlled military action is certainly on the table.

Saba Naqvi is a Delhi-based journalist and author of four books who writes on politics and identity issues.