Pulwama attack — cat’s hubris

Some years ago, the cover page of The Economist had a cat looking in the mirror seeing itself as a lion. The caption read “Can India become a great power?” While India is by no means a great power — with millions sleeping in the streets; women getting raped; Dalits treated like animals; radical voices silenced, told in great detail by the brave Arundhati Roy; ruled over by a prime minister whose claim to fame is his key role in killing over 1,200 Muslims in Gujarat state when he was the chief minister there — the funny part is that it acts like one.

Superpowers have always jeopardised their security due to flawed foreign policies and aggression in distant lands. India does the same with its Whack-A-Mole strategy in occupied Kashmir. The Pulwama attack killing 40 members of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and injuring many more should be an awakening call for the Modi regime.

The suicide bomber named Aadil Ahmed Dar was “from a village about six miles from where the Indian convoy was struck, in contrast to the fighters and weapons that once streamed in from Pakistani-occupied areas to sustain the insurgency.” This is a different ball game that India must not ignore. “Many Kashmiris loathe the paramilitary unit, viewing it as an occupying force recruited from across India to suppress them. Mr Dar’s attack on Thursday was aimed at the force, whose use of pellet guns against protesters has blinded scores of people.”

The statements quoted above are not from the Pakistani media but rather from The New York Times which traditionally spins the news more in favour of American allies such as India.

Lt Gen DS Hooda, former general officer commanding-in-chief of the Indian army’s Northern Command, said, “It is not possible to bring such massive amounts of explosives by infiltrating the border,” adding that it appears to have been stolen from the stashes of explosives that are used to blast a mountainside to broaden the highway to occupied Jammu, the same road where the attack occurred. India should trust its own former general. The attack wasn’t planned and rehearsed elsewhere, but is rather the result of the actions of the Indian security forces in the Kashmir valley.

Happymon Jacob, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi who tracks the conflict, said that a handful of Kashmiris joined the insurgency in 2013, before Modi came to power. After Modi, 150 have joined just last year. Professor Jacob further stated, “They aren’t joining the militants from Islamic seminaries, but they’re fresh graduates from engineering schools, or they hold jobs. For an entire generation to be so angry with India says Delhi’s policy has been a failure.”

Rahul Bedi, a defence analyst with the London-based Jane’s Information Group, said, “Kashmir is a pressure cooker” that “doesn’t leave the people with any way to channel their anger or ambitions.”

Gowher Nazir, who lives in a village adjacent to the suicide bomber’s village, said: “These rebels were once dreamers, looking forward to living their lives. But they have been pushed to a wall.” The pre-dawn attack in the town of Uri, Kashmir, in 2016 came weeks after Indian security forces killed a revered Kashmiri commander, Burhan Wani.

Since 1947, India has ignored the United Nations resolutions to allow a referendum to let the Kashmiri people decide if they want to join Pakistan or India. Kashmir is the world’s most densely-militarised region with over 700 thousand Indian soldiers deployed.

Aggression creates terrorism, not the other way around. India is making the mistakes that superpowers have made. Does it have the same muscle to face the consequences? The biggest powers of the world couldn’t solve the problem of terror with aggression, what makes India think it will?

Published in The Express Tribune, February 21^st, 2019.

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