India’s Pakistan policy has lost all sense of direction

New Delhi: Indian PM Manmohan Singh’s recent state visit to Washington generated a lot of media coverage, not in the US (where the media literally took no note of it) but in India, thanks to the planeload of journalists that Singh took with him. Rarely before had an Indian PM’s state visit to the US been so invisible to Americans. If the American media did notice Singh, it was only at the fag end of his trip when he met with his Pakistani counterpart in New York. That put the spotlight, however briefly, on the India-Pakistan equation rather than on the Indo-US relationship. New Delhi doesn’t like the India-Pakistan hyphenation, yet its own actions can be counterproductive. Singh defiantly met Nawaz Sharif, disregarding both public opinion at home and the Pakistani military’s increased hostility.But before meeting Sharif, Singh complained to US President Barack Obama about Pakistan’s continuing export of terrorism — a complaint that prompted Sharif to purportedly compare Singh with a whining “dehati aurat”. By grumbling to Obama, Singh implicitly expressed his government’s helplessness in countering Pakistani terrorism, besides signaling that his meeting with Sharif was at the US request. In fact, the state department welcomed his discussion with Sharif, saying “dialogue is a positive step forward and we’ll continue to encourage that. If Singh believed that holding political dialogue with Pakistan’s new civilian government was important, a New York meeting at the foreign minister level would have sufficed at this stage, especially since no one expected a meeting between the two PMs to break new ground.

Yet the extent to which Singh went to save his September 29 meeting with Sharif can be gauged from one troubling fact: news about the September 24 Pakistani cross-border raid into the Keran sector — which triggered a two-week gun battle between the Indian Army and the intruders — was not released by the government until after the Singh-Sharif meeting. It is unfortunate the government allowed the political exigencies of a meeting in New York to take precedence over the imperative to inform the nation about a major intrusion involving Pakistani Special Forces. It is crystal clear that India’s Pakistan policy has lost all sense of direction. It is so adrift that it has emboldened the Pakistan Army to carry out multiple acts of aggression across the line of control this year without fear of Indian retribution — from the decapitation of two Indian soldiers and the separate killing of five troops to the Samba raid and the Keran incursion. Sadly, the government has also sowed factionalism in the Army’s senior hierarchy by playing favorites and targeting the ex-chief, Gen VK Singh, through media plants. Worse still, the government has restrained the Army both from responding appropriately and effectively to cross-border aggression or from giving out any information to the media on Pakistani (or Chinese) border violations. The restraint order has crimped the Army’s traditional leeway to act preemptively against an impending aggression and to inflict a just retribution for any cross-border attack. Can any force be turned into a veritable sitting duck struggling to fend off repeated aggression? By allowing the Army’s operational imperatives to be trumped by the government’s meandering and clueless foreign policy, Army chief General Bikram Singh faces an unflattering reality on his record: His stint as chief has coincided with a pattern of rising cross-border aggression by Pakistan (and China).

Bureau Report