Reckoning with Modi’s India

Four-fifths of all Indians who are Hindu brushed aside economic woes in 2019 and voted overwhelmingly for Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It is this emphatically Hindu India that Pakistan has to reckon with in the next half-decade.

The Indian electorate has confounded those who thought that the 2014 BJP victory was a ‘black swan’ – an event of “rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability.” Confounded similarly are those who deemed that Modi’s jingoism, xenophobic nationalism, and bigoted religiosity were edges that would be rounded off once in power. The reverse happened.

From the first summer (2014) of Modi assuming office, India started violating the 2003 ceasefire on the Line-of-Control (LoC) as well as on the working boundary. In 2015, Modi vitiated his anti-Pakistan rhetoric during visits to Bangladesh and Afghanistan, and used Indian victimhood from alleged Pakistani terrorism as a diplomatic calling-card across the world.

The arrest of Indian spy Kulbhushan Jhadev in March 2016 signalled aggressive Indian espionage from across Pakistan’s western border. Jhadev’s active status as a naval officer was a substantive indicator of a renewed, multi-pronged offensive against Pakistan.

The martyrdom of Burhan Wani in Kashmir in July 2016 stirred a fresh wave of anti-India protests in Indian-occupied Kashmir (IOK). Accusing Pakistan of atrocities, the Indian PM invoked Balochistan formally for the first time that August. A month later at the UN General Assembly, the then PM Nawaz Sharif’s countered Modi by declaring Burhan Wani a martyr and terming the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination an intifada.

The anti-climax came on September 29, 2016 when, using the pretext of Pathankot and Uri attacks, India staged a fictional “surgical strike” against Pakistan. The faux-strike announced the doctrine of ‘not war, not peace’ – that India will no longer be held back by the nuclear deterrent, and will seek to punish Pakistan kinetically as well as through non-kinetic means, while remaining below the nuclear threshold.

Following the non-strike, the Indian army chief confessed in an interview in January 2017 that the “Cold Start doctrine exists for conventional military operations.” Although some analysts have assessed that India is “claiming a capability it does not have”, the threat to Pakistan from Cold Start is no longer in the realm of theory; Modi has made it corporeal.

Modi’s anti-Muslim rhetoric also became corporeal through systematic, widespread murder and rape of Kashmiris in Indian-occupied Kashmir (IOK); a distinct echo of the genocide of Muslims in Gujarat that Modi oversaw in 2002. The repression through pellet guns, rape, murder, and disappearance of Kashmiris under Modi was blood-curdling to the extent that the UN high commissioner for human rights was forced to issue an unprecedentedly damning report on IOK human rights abuses in June 2018.

The Indian PM’s poisonous rhetoric after 2014 created an atmosphere of murderous permissiveness not only in Kashmir but across India. Since 2014, 44 Indians, mostly Muslims, have been killed in cow-related vigilante-killings.

The B JP government not only turned a blind eye to the lynching of Muslims, it also began to declare them non-citizens by instituting a controversial National Registry of Citizens (NRC), which gave an amnesty to Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis and Jains; just not to Muslims.

Modi’s anti-minority bigotry might have been enough for the West to keep him at an arm’s length, despite India’s vigorous GDP growth rate, vast middle class, and influential international diaspora. Two factors, however, brought Modi the international acceptance he craved: US and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) failure in Afghanistan, and the US-led imperative to contain the China as a rising economic and military power.

Modi’s anti-Pakistan invective resonated with the United States and Western countries facing a military as well as state-building defeat in Afghanistan. As the American military and allies lost vast Afghan territories to the Taliban, Pakistan became their scapegoat for the catastrophe. The deeper China-Pakistan economic partnership (CPEC) orchestrated by Nawaz Sharif, signed in 2015, precipitated the issue.

The 2017 US National Security Strategy spelled it clearly: “[US] will deepen our strategic partnership with India and support its leadership role in Indian Ocean security and throughout the broader region.”

Consequently, Indian pellet-gun murders and mauling in Kashmir yielded little international notice, lynching of Muslims fell on deaf ears, and rape of eight-year and three-year old girls in Kashmir met with international acquiescence.

Narendra Modi threatened regional peace through a six-fold escalation in Indian violations of ceasefire along the LoC and working boundary in 2017 and 2018, and the resultant killings and injuries to unarmed Pakistani civilians. International concern? Zero. Even the February 2019 Indian attack inside Pakistan’s international borders yielded no condemnation. Quite the opposite. In return for facilitating de-escalation in Pak-India tensions, the international community extracted its pound of flesh from Pakistan on the long-simmering Masood Azhar issue at the UN.

The US and some ISAF countries are determined to punish Pakistan; India adds to the chorus. This anti-Pakistan nexus has been evident at the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

In the run-up to the Indian election, some policy circles in Pakistan touted the ‘Nixon-in-China’ syndrome, the precept that right-wing parties have more leeway in making peace with enemies because no one questions their patriotism. PM Imran Khan betrayed this illusion when he told the New York Times this April that “Mr Modi’s government might actually be the best possible option for settling the Kashmir conflict, because right-wing Hindus would support Mr Modi in achieving it.”

It is time to shed all illusions about Modi – what you see is what you get. Pakistan no longer faces an Indian government; we face a Hindutva government.

Reckoning with Modi must begin by stopping forthwith the unilateral, spontaneous offers of talks, and avoiding the kind of blunder made by PM Khan in his post-Balakot broadcast speech, in which he offered talks on terrorism without specifying a parallel demand for talks on Kashmir.

Affirm willingness to talk if offered, and insist firmly on Kashmir as a prerequisite of talking about terrorism. The only stand-alone subject for talks that should be given serious consideration is normalization of trade, but that too on the basis of a stringently-negotiated reciprocal market access.

Our eyes should also be on the emerging alliances, such as the US-Japan-Australia-India block to contain China, as mooted in the US National Security Strategy; and on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which contains the seeds of a probable China-Russia-Pakistan-Turkey-Iran alliance.

Nawaz Sharif opened new doors for Pakistan’s diplomacy by signing the first-ever Pak-Russia defence agreement with the Russian Federation in 2014 and achieving membership of the SCO in 2017. Pakistan should walk through these doors.

The challenge for Pakistan is much greater than India, where there is scarce room for optimism. The way forward with India is of eternal vigilance, which is the price of liberty. Dream of peace we must, but with our eyes open.

The single-most dangerous metric in Pak-India relations is the difference in GDP growth rates, which is already becoming large enough to be a national-security concern. The government’s larger task is to restore the credibility of Pakistan’s diplomacy. A single monumental step can do this: to eliminate violent extremism from Pakistani soil; whatever it takes, however long it takes.

Patient, discreet diplomacy will be required globally – bilaterally as well as multilaterally. Frequent consultations with China, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia are essential in this regards. And, despite the austerity, serious resources must be committed to our diplomats.

Let us strengthen ourselves internally, particularly in Balochistan and in the former tribal areas; respect Afghanistan’s sovereignty and demand respect in return; eliminate violent extremism; implement vigorously a foreign policy of economic connectivity and shared regional prosperity; and be a democracy worthy of the name.

The writer is a MNA and has served as Pakistan’s minister for foreign Affairs, defence, and commerce.

Email: pmlnna81@gmail.com

Twitter: @kdastgirkhan