The fog of war is dense, so one must wait for the dust to settle after Operation Sindoor to know how it plays out. Operation Sindoor followed the April 22 terrorist attack at Pahalgam; the attack had the “objective of provoking communal discord, both in Jammu and Kashmir and the rest of the nation”, as Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri stated. India’s response was to bomb nine places, four inside Pakistan’s Punjab, that were part of the terrorist infrastructure.
Pakistan claimed it hit three Indian Air Force planes without clarifying how the planes crash-landed on Indian soil. The Indian Air Force is too skilled to have as many as three crashes in one go. Perhaps Pakistan had hit one or more Air Force aircraft as soon as take-off. Whatever the eventual fact, it could give Pakistan a way to save face and say it had retaliated, defusing the situation before it could spiral out of control.
One can never tell with Pakistan, however. Israel’s war against Gaza, since October 7, 2023, has provided a new rhetoric that unfortunately exploits the genocide conducted against Palestinians. Pakistan immediately claimed that India’s strikes had killed children. Unlike Israel, India did not deliberately target schools, hospitals, and entire neighbourhoods. India’s targets included known Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Toiba establishments, which include madrassas—seminaries that include child and teenaged students. If there was collateral damage, it was not by sinister design.
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We may think the episode is over, but we cannot be sure. Pakistan is in a mess. Its economy is in the doldrums, taking loans merely to repay interest on previous loans. There are no jobs for its youth. It has multiple crises on its western border, battling both the Pakistan Taliban (backed by Afghanistan) and the Baloch insurgency. It now faces a serious water crisis in the dry season, and things will get worse after India builds storage infrastructure to divert the rivers. It has a festering political crisis as the imprisonment of Imran Khan deprives both the army and Shehbaz Sharif’s government of legitimacy.
Retaliatory measures
An Orwellian distraction, such as military action that unites the population, is possibly an easy option for an army brass that is clueless about dealing with non-military problems. No wonder, then, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) spokesman said: “Pakistan will respond to Indian missile attacks at the time and place of its choosing.”
Two wild cards are at Pakistan’s disposal. China’s top diplomat Wang Yi last week stated: “As an ironclad friend and an all-weather strategic cooperative partner, China fully understands Pakistan’s legitimate security concerns and supports Pakistan in safeguarding its sovereignty and security interests.”
Bangladesh is the wilder card. Its internal governance, one learns, has been completely infiltrated by the Pakistan army’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI), since Sheikh Hasina was deposed. This is the context for the suggestion, less than a week back, by a former Bangladesh Rifles head, Major General (retd) A.L.M. Fazlur Rahman, that Bangladesh should occupy India’s northeastern States in the event of Indian military action against Pakistan.
This is not surprising, given that in the 1990s, academics in Bangladesh spoke of Lebensraum, the idea popularised by Nazi Germany for expanding the “living space” for one’s people. One saw little of this idea during the India-friendly regime of Sheikh Hasina, which had a long stint in power. However, it will probably forever be embedded in a sizeable section of Bangladesh’s society.
It is unlikely that things will get that far. The world seems to take India-Pakistan tension in its stride. It has seen these things before, and no doubt it expects to see it again.
US President Donald Trump had previously said that “they’ve had that fight for over a thousand years”, a deliberate echoing of the Indian right-wing narrative (that India suffered a thousand years of invasion), pinning the blame on Muslims.
This time, he called it “a shame” and hoped “it ends quickly”, though he stuck to his long-war narrative. He had obviously been briefed by India before the strikes took place. The UN called for “maximum military restraint”. China has called Operation Sindoor “regrettable”.
Perhaps once the two countries have let off some steam, the world will coax and cajole a compromise end to the current imbroglio.
India is aware of the problems if war breaks out. Even if it was victorious (though war is unpredictable and uncontrollable), it would mean an economic setback. Although some may say Pakistan is already an economically failed state, a setback is something India will want to avoid. India has been posting relatively good GDP growth rates; it hopes to capitalise on the US’ trade war with China, and, like the rest of the world, it is anxious about a looming world recession. An economic setback will mar the India growth story.
Interestingly, the day before the attack, former Jammu and Kashmir Governor Satya Pal Malik was interviewed. He was in Raj Bhawan at the time of the 2019 Pulwama attack that claimed the lives of 40 jawans; he accused Union Home Minister Amit Shah of incompetence and claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had asked him to maintain silence about the episode afterwards.
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This week, he felt New Delhi ought to apologise for the security lapses that allowed the Pahalgam tragedy to happen; he said that the only reason Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha has not resigned is because New Delhi will then have to accept responsibility for the lapse.
Yet the most damaging was his accusation that the Prime Minister deliberately did not praise the Kashmiri response to Pahalgam—Kashmiris condemned it and shut down the Valley in solidarity with the victims—because the Prime Minister benefits politically from a communal divide to fester in the country. Communal hatred is what Misri had accused the terrorists of trying to spread.
You can bet that terrorism, targeting communal harmony, will continue as before, even if sporadically. One must worry that next time, it will not be confined to Kashmir.
Aditya Sinha is a writer living on the outskirts of Delhi.
Source:https://frontline.thehindu.com/columns/operation-sindoor-india-pakistan-escalation-pahalgam-attack-analysis/article69549358.ece