PRAFUL SHANKAR
One of the after-effects of the surgical strikes carried out by the Indian Armed Forces and its subsequent announcement to the general public has been the focus around India’s emergence as an assertive international player.
There can be debates around whether or not operations of similar nature had been carried out in the past, but what remains unquestionable is that this time around, the military action was given sound political backing and was supported by a well-orchestrated diplomatic effort spearheaded by the Government. Additionally, this has also been the first time – except during times of all-out war – that India displayed its confidence in handling the global fallout of any retaliatory action it may choose pursue on the face of Pakistani aggression.
And while the sight of a more forceful Indian approach to counter-terrorism has certainly had its effects on Pakistan and its political class, there have been significant repercussions within India as well.
In fact, it would seem that it is the unequivocal support the surgical strikes received from the common public which seems to have riled the opposition the most. While their frustration with the popularity of a political opponent would seem to be an obvious reason for this discomfort, there could be other subliminal ones as well.
Although local politics may have been farthest from his mind, in effect, by choosing to walk the talk on Pakistan, the Prime Minister put in motion a sequence of events which revealed plenty about its chief participants – the political class and the larger Indian public. Posts the announcement of the strikes, the initial reactions from the politicians, especially the opponents of the BJP, were refreshingly statesman-like and unanimous in support of both the Army and the Government.
Yet, as the dust began to settle and the opposition began to sniff the groundswell of support for the Prime Minister’s decisiveness, things quickly turned ugly; with Comrade Yechury being the first to break rank. He was quickly followed by likes of the Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, former Congress MPSanjay Nirupam and many others of the ‘secular’ vein.
Even so, none of the aforementioned came close to matching the inane bluster of Rahul Gandhi who, along with allowing his party’s notables to question the veracity of the strikes itself, felt that the actions of the Prime Minister post the strikes was similar to ‘khoonkidalali’.
What is most perplexing about such a reaction from some parts of the political class is its total disconnect from the man on the street. Other than a section of celebrities and the Aman-ki-asha brigade, it has been hard to find voices which have not wholeheartedly supported the Indian action. For a nation which has had to grudgingly bear an infinite number of lectures on defaulting to the moral high ground on Pakistan, the news of the Indian state retorting ruthlessly and in more-than-equal measure against Pakistani indiscretions would have been a more than welcome change in narrative.
In fact, it would seem that it is the unequivocal support the surgical strikes received from the common public which seems to have riled the opposition the most. While their frustration with the popularity of a political opponent would seem to be an obvious reason for this discomfort, there could be other subliminal ones as well.
Whether it has been the initial blunders committed with regard to Pakistan and China, the centralised ‘socialist’ model of economic planning which left citizens at the mercy of bureaucrats or the decades long poisoning of the Indian educational system by littering national history with an inferiority complex, independent India’s first ‘intellectual’ overlords orchestrated a sustained degeneration of India’s history, culture and potential in the minds of its citizens. The electoral domination of the Congress party – and by extension, its Leftist brethren – over the first 50 odd years of India’s independence ensured that this project remained unchallenged for decades.
Even so, what we now know and can see, is that despite the ideological and strategic maneuvers of powers-that-were, the larger Indian public continued to nurse some level of pride in their collective national heritage. It may have dormant for long but it was there all the same.
Post the Uri attacks, the opposition would have derived much glee from the perceived discomfiture of the Government, perhaps calculating thata continuance of India’s safety-first approach would allow themto puncture any claims of the BJP’s nationalistic credentials forever.
By ordering and then, announcing the surgical strikes, the Government not only brought the dreams of their rivals crashing down with a rude thud but it also succeeded in tapping into the larger public sentiment in a way that its opponents had feared for long.
Clearly, the Indian public breaking from mould and eschewing support for a daring move by its Government signaled another step forward in the deconstruction of the Leftist narrative from the psyche of the modern Indian. For those who built their political empires on shoulders of this very narrative, it is this sight of the confident contemporary Indian and a complementary political leadership which is the scariest of all.