The mutilation of bodies of Indian soldiers has less to do with India and more to do with the intensifying civil-military conflict in Islamabad. India needs to be calm and execute a considered response
This is second time in a row that this column is discussing about Kashmir, where large-scale combing operations by security forces are in progress. The immediate provocation seems to be looting of banks, ruthless killing of police personnel and mutilation of the bodies of Indian soldiers by Pakistan troops — terror network combined.
It may not strike as rational if a clinical analysis of the factors that led to Pakistan’s Army mutilating and beheading the bodies of two Indian soldiers it abducted within the line of Control area is directly traced to the intensifying civilian-military conflict within Pakistan itself.
We on this part of the border may tend to disbelieve any such conclusion. But it must be read in context of Pakistan’s power realities. In Islamabad, military is not just the Army, it is a wing under civilian command. It is as much a power dealer as the civilian constitutional set up of the Government, unlike in India and in most other democracies.
The basic concept of the Army under Islamic tradition is of a force meant to guard Islam, not just as a protection to the state, which is a modern concept. In Pakistan, the Army has fashioned itself as the sole arm of Islam’s thrust into ‘Hindu’ India.
It is, therefore, a decisive force in politics. The Army’s takeover of the civilian authority has also been justified on the basis that the civilian authority is unable to carry out its mission of invading and subjugating the ‘Hindu’ people.
Pakistan, for a bulk of Muslim masses, is a starting point to re-establish Islamic rule in the entire subcontinent. It was propagated in the pre-partition politics of the All-India Muslim league, that the British took India from Muslim mughals, so they must return it to Muslims. Of course this is contrary to facts, for most of India had managed to free itself from Islamic rule before the arrival of the British.
This false narrative has continued since the creation of Pakistan and received impetus after the central figure liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated in 1951. The civilian and military rules in that state have been alternating ever since.
Academic research from Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, a book by diplomat and academic Husain Haqqani, to more current books like Christine Fair’s book, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War, have confirmed this basic history of Pakistan.
Meanwhile, as Ayesha Siddiqa has established in her research work, Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy, the Army in Pakistan has grown to be a huge enterprise that sits on an annual bounty of two billion dollars to itself. It also blackmails the Americans into believing that if Washington does not pay off, there is every danger of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists.
The intelligence apparatus of Pakistan’s Army, the Inter-Services Intelligence, (ISI) was envisaged as a fifth arm to infiltrate India and facilitate its take over. After the end of Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1989, a large number ofjihadi participants in anti-Soviet action there, were ‘unemployed’. Part of them were used by the ISI to spread Islamic extremism into India and carry on the sabotage plan. That was the time when Kashmir’s own separatists got more funds and terrorist help in their politics.
The state came under enormous stress as madarassas proliferated and tightened the grip of the clerics over the youthful generation. To enforce the power of the mosque organisations like the lashkar-e-Tayyeba (leT), Jaish-e-Mohammed and others came up. Their reach into Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia, further enhanced their resources and power as independent authority within Pakistan. When diplomat Haqqani wrote his much admired book, Pakistan in fact was a plaything between the military and the mosque.
It was as clear as the day, that in such an arrangement with each group trying to project itself as more anti-India than the other, there would be intense rivalry and extremist action by each party. While Islamabad, representing the civilian authority of the Government, has one set of priorities, the military has another, because it must be constantly provoking India and exposing itself as true to Pakistan’s basic existence as meant to destroy or damage kafir India’s standing.
The mosque or the mullah has to train and send terror modules into India and elsewhere to justify its claim as the real, anti-India (read kafir) entity and keep the donations tap flowing.
The Dawn leak was the result of this rivalry. In October last, a high level civilian-military-mullah meeting with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif present, ended up in mutual accusations. The Government was criticised for the fact that Pakistan was getting increasingly isolated diplomatically due to its handling of anti-India operations; the Government accused the Army of selective opposition to terrorist organisations and the mullahs took on both for their failures in damaging India and in the process getting isolated from international community.
Dawn correspondent Cyril Almeida got wind of these internal rivalries and reported the proceedings of the top secret meeting in his paper. This report angered both the Army bosses and the clerics. They blamed someone, especially Prime Minister’s adviser Tariq Fatemi for the leak. Prime Minister Sharif instituted a committee, headed by a retired judge to investigate the Dawn leak.
When on the recommendation of the committee, Advisor Fatemi was shown the door and the Prime Minister’s office announced it the military publicly, saying, this was not adequate and more action was needed. This led to mutual accusations on the social media. The Army had to intensify its anti-India actions ever since.
The mutilation event is said to form part of the Army’s plans to prove its credentials as anti-India. It also puts Prime Minister Sharif in an embarrassing position as the international standing of Pakistan gets more damaged. The brutality also enables the military to come back to prominence as anti-India and expose the limits of what India could do in retaliation.
For Sharif, this may also be an event to raise the fear of a nuclear attack and get the international community to enter the Kashmir scenario once again, which he desperately needs, to retrieve his position in the Pakistani see-saw for power between himself, the military and the mosque. So Indian response cannot be a wild strike from Delhi that would enable Sharif to seek international intervention in Kashmir.
So as New Delhi mulls its options, those who ask for 10 heads for each head that Pakistan mutilated, should be careful that we do not play into the hands of the three musketeers of Pakistan and let the Government calmly think and execute its considered response.
(The writer is former Rajya Sabha MP from BJP and Delhi-based socio-political commentator)