India has just been through a near war situation when on February 26 it sent its aircraft to hit at selected targets inside Balakot, a town in the Pakistani province of Khyber Pakhtunkwa where training camps of the Laishkar-e-tayaba are located. Pakistan retaliated the next day sending in its F16 jets one of which was chased out by a MiG-21 Bison of the 1970’s vintage. In that unequal fight of an aged fighter jet taking on a supersonic machine, IAF, Wing Commander Abhinandan Vartaman’s aircraft was shot down and he had to eject. Later he was arrested and two days later released under the Geneva Convention although the two nuclear-powered nations were not in a conventional warfare. The Indian Air Force strike was a response to the Valentine’s Day Pulwama attack that killed over 40 CRPF personnel. The nation was angry and grieving. Retaliation for that horrific act which the LeT led by Masood Azhar, India’s long time enemy, claimed was its successful subversive attack on India’s security personnel was justified.
The LeT has indoctrinated many youth in Kashmir who are fuelled by a sense of anger against the Indian military which they say have treated the state as a war zone and the Kashmiris as enemies of the nation. The indoctrination of young minds by LeT that India is the aggressor in Kashmir and that a jihad (holy war) is the only way to win back this territory, makes young people not only join the jihad but willingly give their lives to the cause. Suicide bombers are difficult to tackle for any country. The United States is still fighting the war on terror in Afghanistan, 18 years after 9/11.
India’s response to Pulwama was legitimate. The country cannot be bled to death and pretend it is unhurt. The Balakot air strike was a well thought out plan. What is objectionable is the propensity of the BJP to take credit for a military action. National security is the brief of the government. That the BJP and allies are today in power is incidental. That the Narendra Modi government gave the armed forces a free hand to hit back at Pakistan so as not to demoralise the forces was a welcome decision. Holding the military back at this juncture would have demotivated them to the point of defeat. But after the air strikes the claims and counter claims about what was actually hit and the number of those dead was unwarranted. The Prime Minister should have addressed the nation in sobriety and called for unity. He did not. On the contrary he continued to ride on the glory of the air strikes. As a result the opposition parties are at daggers drawn with the BJP. The security of the nation is paramount and should be used as political capital by any party.