India’s standoff with Pakistan in February 2019 and the one earlier with its ‘all-weather friend China’ in July-August 2017 messaged Islamabad and Beijing that there were red lines that it was advisable for both powers to respect.The Rubicon was crossed and there could be no going back..
During the Doklam confrontation on the Bhutan-Chinese-occupied Tibetan border, China’s frothing military threats against India in India itself and those emanating from the Chinese capital were reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s well practised rages against Czechoslovakia and later with Poland. The difference on this occasion was that India did not blink in the faces of these menaces and her military strength and determination gave China pause. India did not look to foreign powers, as had the Czechs in 1938-39, when they looked to Britain and France and were betrayed by both at Munich.
In 1971, India fought off Pakistan on the battlefield, withstood the malevolence of the diplomatic machinations of the Nixon administration and Maoist China,, with Moscow holding the ring as India’s guarantor.
History is the surest guide to wisdom. To ignore its lessons is to invite peril. President Trump’s claim, following the fiasco of his touted Hanoi Summit with his North Korean counterpart Kim Jong-un called Chinese President Xi Jinping and asked for his help to keep the ball rolling. Mr Trump had declared earlier that Washington and Beijing were close to an agreement on their trade dispute with a deal of far-reaching consequences to be sealed at a possible summit in the the US capital. Against this backdrop the President cavalierly informed reporters in Vietnam of a US-brokered India-Pakistan peace deal, which did didn’t chime well in New Delhi, but such third party intervention was effusively endorsed by Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.
The US, Britain and France will seek UN condemnation of the Pakistan-based jihadi Jaish-e-Mohammad and its infamous leader Massod Azhar, but the resolution has been a long time coming, has it not? Without the Indian air strike at the Jaish base at Balacot and likely escalation, persuaded Pakistan to take pause and reflect on the fraught past. Pakistan-sponsored jihadi assaults on India’s financial capital Mumbai in March 1993 and again in November 2008. With hundreds of deaths and swathes of property destroyed. Enough was enough.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan has demanded ‘actionable evidence’ of Jaish-e- Mohammad activities. India has submitted a dossier for his perusal.
The Pakistan authorities have flipped flopped defiantly with talk of retaliation, then on the futility of war. Its propaganda machine was hopelessly askew. First, that the intruding Indian aircraft had been driven off without damage to property or lives; this was sequenced by contradictory threats of retaliation. Then came official reports two Indian MiGs shot down and their pilots killed. However, a real life vintage MiG 21 fighter did crash land on Pakistan territory and its pilot Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman captured after he had pursued and brought down a high-tech American-supplied F-16 (denied initially by Pakistan). The wreckage including missile parts were displayed at a media conference by India’s three service chiefs. Pakistan’s subsequent aerial attacks on Indian military installations were thwarted, but had they succeeded the resulting escalation would have reached a new level.
Premier Khan wisely backed off with a ‘peace gesture’ by releasing Wing Commander Varthaman who arrived at nightfall at the Wagha border post to an enthusiastic welcome.
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, led by Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Bangladesh, invited External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to address the convention, Her eloquent speech had the desired effect. Islamic Pakistan – snubbed, sulking and shaken - boycotted the event.
She had briefed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, on the reasons for India’s strike. The three ministers issued a firm declaration exorcizing terrorism in all its forms. Russia and China called for a peace process, as did the broad spectrum of world opinion.
Finally, Russian President Vladimir Putin telephoned Prime Minister Narendra Modi, condoled the deaths of the 41 Indian soldiers at Pulwama, Kashmir, assuring Mr Modi of his country’s full cooperation against international terrorism The Indian Premier thanked him for Russia’s time-tested support.
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, during a visit to India in December 2018, noted that no state cooperates so closely with India in technology transfer of weapons and military equipment like Russia’ - the beating heart of the Eurasian landmass, with India its fulcrum. Their understanding on a rule-based multi-polar world as the best guarantee of peace, security and development is ommendable.
(See Media Watch p12 for former ISI director Asif Durrani’s take on Pakistan)
Getting the India-Pakistan equation right
Britain’s Foreign Office Minister Mark Field in a statement to MPs in the House of Commons presses the point of his dispassionate equidistance in the India-Pakistan imbroglio.
He might care to remember that Britain is the foremost investor in India, and India among the top three investors in Britain; that the UK’s Indian Diaspora is a burgeoning, largely prosperous middle class spread across every facet of the ciountry’s political and cultural heritage. The Pakistani Diaspora has been largely responsible for the five terrorist attacks across Britain including the particularly heinous one at a children’s pop concert in Manchester killing and maiming numerous attendees.
Kashmir may be the flashpoint in the India-Pakistan relationship but the true source of the jihadi violence is the conviction of Pakistan’s rulers – military and civilian – that their country has been divinely ordained to establish an Islamic Caliphate in the Subcontinent by force of arms. British concern for human rights in Kashmir would have greater traction had similar concerns been voiced on the expulsion of its large Hindu Pandit population from the valley by armed jihadi groups bent on ethnic cleansing and a sharia dispensation.
The larger subcontinent canvas should be the proper focus. During the lead-up to the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war – the flashpoint then the massacre and repression of East Pakistani Bengalis – Islamabad’s planned the dismemberment of India. Pakistan’s Zulfikar Ali Bhutto proclaimed his country’s crusade worth recalling. ‘In the remotest of our villages the humblest of our people possess self-confidence, a ready willingness to march forward into India....’
His confidante in President Yahya Khan’s office, penned the following note to Bhutto, soon to become Prime Minister, advising that ‘once the back of the Indian forces is broken, Pakistan should occupy the whole of Eastern India and make it a permanent part of Pakistan ....This will provide a physical link with China. Kashmir should be taken at any price, and Sikh Punjab turned into Khalistan.’
The American historian and academic Stanley Wolpert discovered this letter in the Bhutto archive, with the writer’s injunction that it should be destroyed (See Stanley Wolpert, Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan: His Life and Times, p162)
Apropos of 1947, V.P. Menon, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s principal aide, was to write: ‘[India] had no territorial ambitions in Kashmir. If the invasion by the raiders [Pakistan-sponsored Pathans] had not taken place, I can say in the face of any contradiction that the Government of India would have left Kashmir alone.’
Menon again: ‘When I recommended to the Government of India the acceptance of the accession of the Maharaja of Kashmir, I had in mind one consideration and one consideration alone, viz, that the invasion of Kashmir by the raiders was a grave threat to the integrity of India. Ever since the time of Mahmud Ghazni, that is to say, for nearly eight centuries, with but a brief interval during the Moghul epoch, India has been subjected to periodic invasions from the north-west. Mahmud Ghazni had led seventeen of these incursions in person. And within less than ten weeks of the State of Pakistan, its very first act was to let loose a tribal invasion through the north-west....Srinagar today, Delhi tomorrow. A nation that forgets its own history or its geography does so at its peril’. [V.P. Menon Integration of the Indian States, p 413]
Visas for skilled Indians
Skilled Indian professionals and students constituted the bulk of UK visas in 2018, according to statistics released by the Home Office in London. The professionals include doctors, software engineers, who have dominated Britain’s Tier 2 skilled visa category for some time, accounting for 54 per cent of all such visas issued in 2018. The Home Office stated that successful Indians visa applications had increased by 6 per cent last year to 3,023 more visas over the 2017 figure, with student applications rising by 35 per cent to 19,500.
China headed the tourist visa list with 56,085 visas, with India next with 43,771 visitors. ‘Chinese and Indian nationals together accounted for just under half, 48 per cent of all visitor visas granted,’ said the Home Office.
