Another "MUMBAI" waits

India is likely to face another Mumbai 26/11 type of attack in the near future. That is the assessment of Startfor, a US intelligence think-tank. Really, do we need anyone to tell us that this is something that is inevitable? Or do we naively believe/hope that the US is going to protect us against such attacks with the power of the dole that it is giving to a sinking Pakistan? Or that the Pakistanis have been sufficiently sacred by the shrill "all options are open" war cry and empty threats of surgical strikes that Indian leaders unleashed after Mumbai was attacked?

Nearly five months after India faced its deadliest terror attack, everything is back to normal. Everyone has forgotten about the horror that the country faced for three days. Everyone, almost, is relieved that the 'foolish hawks' who were irresponsibly talking of war with a nuclear Pakistan have become quiet. Also everyone, well not quite, has also heaped praise on the government for the very mature manner in which it has handled the crises and defused tensions.

All that is fine. But, no one is asking the two critical question that need to be asked: What has India done since then to deter state/non-state actors - call them what you like - from Pakistan from launching more such attacks? What is India going to do when, not if, another such attack does take place?

Narendra Modi has been ridiculing the government for running to Obama after the Mumbai attacks rather than doing something tangible to sort Pakistan out. Stratfor is also of the view that the UPA government was too soft and that India is likely to deliver a more forceful response should the BJP come to power after these elections. Is that really so? Yes, the general view is that the UPA has been ignoring the increasing threat of terror that India faces from Pakistan. But, would a BJP government have really responded very differently to Mumbai 26/11, and will it do so if it comes to power?

The response of the government of any sovereign state to an act of war depends mainly on two related and somewhat interdependent factors: its tolerance threshold and the relative combat power of the states involved. While there is certainly a difference between the tolerance threshold of the Congress and the BJP, they both have the same military at their disposal. The weakness of latter is what has made repeated terror attacks on India an almost zero-risk option for Pakistan for decades. As Pakistan knows better than all armchair analysts, that is going to make it virtually impossible for India to exercise a limited military option even in the future. Why? Because should the war escalate into a full blown conventional affair, India's defence forces are not in a position to give an iron-clad guarantee of success. And, failure - even a stalemate - is simply unacceptable for a country that has seven times the population of its adversary and wants to believe that it is about to become a super power.

There is a lot of uninformed talk that the era of wars is over and that it is economics and not military strength that matters in the 21st century. Those who talk on these lines are obviously blind to what the Americans and the Chinese are doing. China is not much larger than India. It has a border dispute only with this country and faces no threat from any of its other neighbours. If the Chinese leaders were Indian, they would probably have taken the Nehruvian route and almost mothballed their defence forces. But, being realists who know history and the role that power will continue to play in shaping it, they have done exactly the opposite. As a result, their military might has grown to a level that even the Americans are beginning to see a real threat to their uni-polar dominance of the world.

India, on the other hand, despite having been invaded and humiliated by the Chinese in 1962, have simply done nothing to match China's military might. And now the asymmetry is so great that whenever the Chinse decide to use force to annex Indian territories claimed by them, as indeed they will at a time of their choosing, it will be an almost no-contest.

Worse is what we have done vis-à-vis a much weaker and smaller Pakistan. We have allowed that country to militarily match up to us to a point where it can deter us from using the military option. India has the economic strength to simply make it a no-race for Pakistan that cannot spend beyond a point on defence. This would have happened on its own had India's sights been fixed on a maintaining a similar balance with China. But our leaders, devoid of any strategic vision, chose to ignore the role and relevance of the military as a key instrument of state policy. As a result, this is the only nation in the world that is happy maintaining an edge over a far smaller neighbour while pretending that a slightly bigger one, who has consciously chosen to become very powerful, does not exist!

It is because of this thinking that rather than India deterring Pakistan from launching and sustaining a proxy war, it is Pakistan which has successfully deterred India from reacting militarily in a manner that puts the cost-benefit ratio indisputably in India's favour. And Mumbai 26/11 was not the first time that India was provoked, almost taunted. Kargil and the attack on Parliament should have woken up a drowsy security establishment to the realisation that Pakistan was going to keep at it as long as it was sure it was going to get away. And how was it going to come to that conclusion? The cowardice of India's leadership, as former ISI chief Hamid Gul called it, coupled with the continuing absence of an unbridgeable military gap. Since India is even now simply not interested in doing anything about it, its tolerance threshold is per force very high. And Pakistan is going to test it to the limit. It knows only too well that the "zero tolerance" to terror that its politicians loosely talk about is just gas.

When there was serious talk of war after 26/11, the realisation hit that India's military was not ready for it. There were critical shortages of combat equipment due to which the military was perhaps weaker than it was at the time of Kargil. No wonder military commanders refused to go to war; you can't fight a real war with words.

Has anything changed nearly five months later? Major shortages of combat aircraft, air defence systems and artillery guns still exist. May be changes and preparations have been made, where they can be within limitations, to give a swift riposte to Pakistan should another attack be launched. But my sense is that the moment Pakistan gets to know through its intelligence network that India has both the political will and the military wherewithal to defeat Pakistan in a limited conventional war below the nuclear threshold, it will change tactics and opt for less spectacular attacks or go in for attacks carried out by Indian citizens only. If Startfor is to be believed, that has clearly not happened.

Narendra Modi might ridicule the Congress; the BJP may arguably display greater political will to retaliate. But the hard fact is that even if there are 10 more Mumbai 26/11s, no government will be able to make Pakistan pay in the only manner that will compel it to abandon its present course. This is the price this nation has paid and will keep paying for the failure of all governments to build and use the military as the cutting tool of coercive diplomacy and deterrence.

So, when the next 26/11 takes place, India will still be found running helplessly to the US, crying "Obama, O ba, O ma", as Modi has been saying to ridicule the Congress. Even if Modi himself is the Defence Minister then.

Political Bankruptcy In India

Its Election Time...who will the common man in India vote for? Congress? BJP? Third Front? Wait and See...Whether the secularits will win or the religious bigot?
The secularist Indian intelligentsia almost unfailingly boasts a Western pedigree and that branding alone assures them greater credibility and gives better access to the media. The political secularists like Laloo Prasad Yadav or a Karunanidhi are of course complete country bumpkins and can be safely consigned to the margins of the intellectual discourse on secularism. Vote bank politics is not a new phenomenon in India. The politics of caste and religion have always existed within the enormous diversity of India, a trait the British exploited ruthlessly to subjugate Indians. In the aftermath of Partition, the Congress Party was able to use its fortuitous credentials as the agent of Indian independence to ensure that disparate vote banks across the country remained largely loyal to it. Until the accession of Indira Gandhi, the Congress Party also contained within it a genuine regional leadership that represented divergent political views. Jawaharlal Nehru was able to reconcile India’s diverse interests by force of personality and his symbolic primacy as Mahatma Gandhi’s chosen successor. As a result, political differences and conflicting aspirations did not lead to a breakdown of the uneasy balance of power between the coalition of interests that comprised the Congress Party. But the subsequent political awakening of India and a much sharper articulation of conflicting regional, caste and religious sentiment was undoubtedly taking shape below the surface of apparent national purpose. The post-Independence ebullience only lasted a couple of decades. The socio-economic and political fissures beneath the surface came out into the open after Indira Gandhi’s bid for political power and the split that it instigated within the Congress party. In the aftermath of her triumph over the powerful old guard Indira Gandhi peremptorily installed loyalists as office bearers and Congress Party leaders across India. She transformed the Congress party from a public corporation, so to speak, into a private family firm, appending her own initial alongside the name of the party as its insignia. Once regional political leaders were turned into family retainers they ceased to articulate effectively the complex mosaic of aspirations of the regions they presided over. The quality of this leadership deteriorated eventually because personal elevation depended on loyalty to Indira Gandhi, without due regard for political consequences. Regional leaders were also hesitant to impress upon her the ground realities in the states they ruled. Her self-serving politics galvanised regional and sectional discontent, strengthening vote banks and on a truly pan-Indian scale. It was a certainty that cynical political entrepreneurs would enter the fray and the fragile sense of national identity potentially in the making after Independence retreated. Every kind of political, caste, social, linguistic and religious division was ensnared as a basis for political mobilisation. A no-holds barred contest for political power came to dominate Indian political life and wider national interests could no longer be apprehended by the political system as a preponderant imperative, except in transient moments of crisis like the Bangladesh war of 1971. But the harsh reality of the neo-Hobbesian struggle for power always resumed when the momentary sense of national purpose passed. Such a situation was guaranteed to result in egregious intellectual dishonesty and personal venality for the sake of political advantage and no political party was unaffected by it. The principle that came to rule was exploitation of every sentiment, however mendacious and to accentuate it to the maximum possible extent to arouse the most potent vote bank loyalty towards those articulating grievances. What worsened India’s descent into the miasma of irrational rivalry, pitting all-against-all (as witness caste politics in Rajasthan today) was the stupid constitutional arrangement Indian leaders, in their vaulting ignorance, had inflicted on the country after Independence and crackpot Nehruvian socialist economics. The consequences of the failure to institute a presidential system of government were disastrous. It could have ensured that one paramount decision-maker was the product of a national vote instead of being the creature of the lowest common denominator of a concatenation of fractured interests. Such a presidential system is imperative in even relatively small countries to create a sense of nationhood by enabling all voters to identify with the major political office of the country. In addition, the espousal of Nehruvian socialist economics created vicious strife to corner a share of the spoils by winning political office and intensifying it further by slowing down the growth that would have otherwise enlarged the economic pie. This remains the essential status quo of contemporary India: every fault line institutionalised, generating embittered competition of brother against brother for power and money with India’s foreign enemies funding many conflicts gleefully, as witness the imported advanced armaments wielded by India’s Naxalites. Significantly, Indian Leftists of all hues have always opposed national unity since that would marginalise them. What kind of future for India’s does its dominant interests desire within this tragic gloom of vote bank politics? The desire to perpetuate the Nehru clan’s ascendancy in Indian political life is apparently their foremost goal. The inviolability of Sonia Gandhi’s influence and the eventual inauguration of Rahul Gandhi as India’s Prime Minister are its inevitable corollaries. Keeping the Hindu communalists out of power and an end to Narendra Modi, howsoever achieved, also seem high on the wish list today. But the first set of goals have primacy and it is perfectly conceivable that the support of supposedly Hindu communal politicians will be sought, if necessary, to preserve the Gandhi clan’s freehold on Indian political life. Indeed a certain political forbearance in favour of it from the relevant quarters is already in evidence, so the alleged communal presence in Indian political life is not a serious issue at all since it already offers succour to the Gandhi family. In the context of vote banks and dynastic politics, increasingly exhibited by every political movement, ideological conviction is a function of competition for office and its intrinsic merits are irrelevant. Secularism, the principal ideological emblem, is merely a term of abuse that obscures a multitude of transgressions being committed by the accusers themselves. As for the rarefied Indian intellectual discourse over secularism, there are serious differences of opinion. Much of it is vacuous if not downright duplicitous because knotty questions fatally injure the secular catechisms put about as sacred. But there is an arrogant mainstream belief that the devout are too stupid to notice the nuances perplexing secular sophisticates. The secularist Indian intelligentsia almost unfailingly boasts a Western pedigree and that branding alone assures them greater credibility and gives better access to the media. The political secularists like Laloo Prasad Yadav or a Karunanidhi are of course complete country bumpkins and can be safely consigned to the margins of the intellectual discourse on secularism. In the end, vote bank politics and the relentless competition for political power dominate all other considerations. The reality that it is reaching a point of no return for the preservation of national integrity is of little concern to the protagonists. And in the dirty waters of Indian politics only those who have immunity despite imbibing it thrive. High moral purpose succumbs to the all-pervasive environment of degradation that has spread its ugly tentacles. No political party is able to resist its grim embrace for long, vindicating the deep initial distaste of the RSS leadership towards the idea of sponsoring participation in conventional politics. The one fragile ray of hope is the urbanisation of India and the painful advance of a resulting national consciousness among those who have left behind their parochial moorings. They seek good governance and are, crucially, less susceptible to the ubiquitous bribery practised by the Indian electoral system. It is these political refugees from vote banks that re-elected Narendra Modi in the recent Gujarat assembly elections.