Indian general elections 2024 are anticipated to be marred by a false-flag operation on the lines of the Pulwama suicide attack in February 2019 that killed 40 Indian paramilitary soldiers, with many security analysts believing that it could have been prevented had there been a will. The attack that was followed by an Indian Air Force strike on Balakot, Pakistan — allegedly to target the miscreants that the BJP had conjured to blame the Pulwama attack — was successfully intercepted and foiled by Pakistan.
From the charade of Pulwama, Modi emerged on the Indian electoral stage as the unassailable national saviour. Political gurus believe that the Modi government has been using anti-Muslim, anti-Pakistan and anti-Kashmir rhetoric to unite the extremist Hindu voters. The formula helped Modi get back into the saddle with a heavy mandate in the 2019 general elections.
India has been using the narrative of “Pakistan-staged terrorism” as its foreign policy tool to gain domestic and international political gains.
In an interview, the Modi government’s former governor in Indian-held Kashmir, Satya Pal Malik, warned about the probability of seeing a Pulwama-like false-flag operation again as the campaign for the 2024 elections kicks off. “I fear [these people] could do any untoward incident. They can orchestrate an attack on the Ram Temple. They can plot to kill a BJP leader. If they can do a Pulwama attack, they can do anything. They don’t care about parliament.” According to Pal, the purpose of putting the onus of the attack on Pakistan was to gain electoral benefit from the tragedy. Indeed, the Pulwama attack was used umpteen times in the 2019 general election to mobilise voters.
Ever since coming into power, the BJP has left no stone unturned to transform India into a Hindu-only nation under the Hindutva ideology that refers to the Hindu supremacist agenda of converting a constitutionally secular India into an ethnic Hindu state. The aim is to reduce the 200 million Muslim minority into second-class citizens and to demonise other monitories.
Kashmir has been a hotbed of violence since 1989, turning the state into a military garrison with 700,000 military forces deployed to quell an insurgency that Delhi repeatedly fuelled through manipulated electoral results and draconian law.
A UN report on the violence in the region from June 2016 to April 2018 found excessive use of force by the Indian security personnel, including the firing of pellet guns that blinded hundreds of Kashmiris. From the interviews surfacing after Pulwama, a Kashmiri named Abdul Ahad Bhat, talking to BBC, said, “Those who were born after the 1990s have never seen peace. They were born amid curfew and died before they ended.”
A fresh wave of insurgency erupted in the valley in 2016 after the martyrdom of Burhan Wani at the hands of Indian forces. It was the beginning of the realisation that the struggle for the emancipation of Kashmir had become an indigenous battle that could no longer be blamed on external forces such as Pakistan.
Since the annexation of Kashmir by India on August 5, 2019, India has been attempting to change the demographics of the valley to undo the Muslim majority narrative underlining the Kashmir struggle. Under the Indian constitution that had given Kashmir the status of a quasi-independent state, no one outside Kashmir could settle in the region as a native. However, after the division of Kashmir into two federal territories, Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh, people outside Kashmir were encouraged to settle in Kashmir, buy property there and do business.
In the aftermath of the Pulwama attack, questions were raised about how a van carrying 300kg explosives could go unnoticed amid a high-profile security contingent deployed in Kashmir. However, whoever raised this question was quickly branded anti-national by the Modi government, which helped quell the matter until Pal mainstreamed it again.
The pertinent question is: will India use the same tactic in the upcoming elections in mid-2024?
After Pal, renowned Indian lawyer Prashant Bhushan has also warned of a Pulwama or Balakot-like incident by the Modi government to consolidate further the Hindu vote for a victory in the Lok Sabha elections 2024. He further noted that the manifestation of a malicious communal agenda in the charade of nationalism cannot be ruled out. He even mentioned the probability of a surgical strike in Azad Jammu and Kashmir under the guise of vengeance from Pakistan.
It is interesting to note that for sometimes, newspapers, magazines and journals tilted towards BJP have warned of an attack on Ram Mandir — strengthening the apprehension that something nasty is being cooked to stir nationalist-laden sentiments to sensationalise the electoral campaign.
The international community should take notice of BJP’s foreign policy of accusation and blame on Pakistan for domestic political mileage. Pakistan has been doing everything under its capacity to fight the war on terrorism that has intensified in its erstwhile tribal areas after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Pakistan has provided evidence of India’s involvement in the terror incidents targeting Pakistan’s security agencies.
This vicious Indian design to keep Pakistan’s security on the precipice is an international concern, especially when the matter is between two nuclear powers.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 31st, 2023.
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