27 July 2020
The Military Calculus: Yesterday was Kargil Vijay Diwas. A day that should have been solemn with the remembrance of ‘martyrs’ as this nation’s press continues to refer to the Fallen who made the ultimate sacrifice because a job had to be done. Yesterday a major politician chose to air the series of radio talks, as the Prime Minister of this country, which is called Mann Ki Baat. Yesterday another major politician who happened to be the CM now of a large heartland state of MP chose to be in a hospital facility which is private and project a video of him seated in his ‘hospital bed’ in rapt attention to the talk being aired on television. He was detected Covid19 positive the previous day, but apparently he was not having any difficulty in breathing, nor in need of any infusions, and was perhaps admitted more out of ‘administrative convenience’ and while people took umbrage to his occupying a prime hospital bed and engaging four medical staff to his care, my limited perturbation was that here was a known Covid19 patient not sporting the basic requirement of such a patient- the Face Mask! Of course, Indian spin doctors including Ms Nidhi Razdan of NDTV were tweeting about his presence as a Covid19 patient and how he was trying to destigmatise the disease! Really?
There was Defence Minister Mr Rajnath Singh laying wreaths for the Fallen at the National War Memorial and he made comments to the press that was typical national rhetoric- “ If Enemy Attacks, India will Give ‘Befitting Response’ ” ran Breaking News! Many veterans bemoaned the words, because it apparently played to the narrative that the Chinese are visiting not attacking in Eastern Ladakh and some of the Fallen who are commemorated in the War memorial, would include the nearly two dozen Indian soldiers including Col Santhosh Babu who fell to Chinese aggressive postures and tactics and the rhetoric was cheapening their sacrifice coming close on the heels of it as it were.
There were many heroes who were high lighted, both living and the Fallen. The present Northern Army Commander General Joshi is himself a Kargil veteran having commanded his battalion in active operations during those hostilities. Kargil was the first border skirmish of dramatic proportions where India deployed almost all of her medium artillery and brought to bear the IAF in direct ‘bunker’ busting role, to try and hammer the Himalayan ridges and outcrops which offered shelter and staging for the Pakistani infiltrators. There are many strategists who feel that India failed strategically even though she achieved a tactical victory, because she chose to limit the operations to only those areas that violated her Line of Control. May be India could have made a bid to militarily expand her holdings, into Neelam Valley or the Northern Areas adjoining Kargil heights including this Sub Sector North, which Pakistan had illegally ceded to China, when the world opinion was in her favour and the Chinese PLA was still not as modernised or quipped for High Altitude Mountain Warfare. There are others who feel that knowing own capabilities we restricted ourselves to a set of targets that we could win. Ultimately Pakistan vacated many areas after mining them, following US pressure to withdraw from their transgressions, thus vindicating the actual ‘moral stance’ taken by India’s then political executive led by Shri Atal Behari Vajpayee. However, while people today reflect on the conflict with a sense of ‘Vijay’ or Victory, the most thread bare assessment of it comes not from an Army veteran but from an Air Force veteran, and it has a context of assessing Kargil as a series of ‘Lost Opportunities’ https://twitter.com/arunp2810/status/1287359505089482752?s=20that would have today seen us in much better situation in confronting the Chinese PLA over Galwan Valley flashpoint. Actually AVM R Isser (Retd) does not spell out the exact comparison directly but the inference is readily available how the May 1999 situation in the Kargil Sector abutting the Karakoram ranges has revisited us in Eastern Ladakh Sector situated on another radial of these very mountain ranges! Then the Leh Kargil High Way was being actively interdicted by Pakistani positions on Tololing, Tiger Hill, Trig Height, and other ridge lines astride the highway, today the Chinese are commanding the strategic areas abutting the DBO-DS Highway which is another arterial road on the other axis leading to Sub Sector North in proximity to the LAC and nearly parallel to the LAC and the Chinese claim lines of 1960. What India does now, or how China reacts now, will determine how this strategic situation in a tactical area is resolved, but the article sears with honesty about the opportunity costs India faces due to its inability to imagine the helicopter as a crucial vehicle of war in mountains, and not learning the appropriate lessons from the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan!https://www.vifindia.org/paper/2020/july/12/exploring-indian-airpower-doctrine-and-debacles-in-the-himalayas
Strategic National Calculus: No one quite knows if India’s much greater satellite prowess now, two whole decades later, after successful Moon and Mars missions, her access to American Intelligence inputs are in place following agreements like COMCASA which is Indian version of CISMOA, did not offer her the clear picture of PLA incursions as they happened in real time, and if the Indians were unable due to Covid19 nation wide lockdown or if the military was told to hold back and allow Sumit level diplomacy to retrieve the situation. No one knows for sure but we can all understand if right now at the highest level of the Political Executive there is actually a series of talks to settle the borders of India and China which involve India offering a buffer guarantee in writing of creating a band of 10 or 20 kilometers along the LAC with the LAC being redrawn to accommodate the latest Chinese positions in return for concessions along the remainder of the border, in the central and eastern sectors, including the Chumbi valley, Tawang and those adjoining Bhutan. Such an agreement would at a strategic level actually translate into a win for India freeing up her resources considerable to focus on development and kickstarting her economy after the recent half a decadal slump.
The Judicial Calculus: If India’s Supreme Court is now engaged in examining a defamation of its Lord Justices including the Chief Justice of India by holding Mr Prashant Bhushan and Twitter India in an adjudication over contempt. Again, we see the judicial exercise as coloured because there is no legal provision by which Twitter has ‘withheld’ from view the two tweets which are part of the case by Mr Bhushan, undertaken unilaterally by Twitterhttps://www.firstpost.com/india/scs-actions-in-prashant-bhushan-twitter-case-show-court-as-vehicle-for-administration-not-dispenser-of-justice-8640781.html. Likewise the current impasse in Rajasthan where the Speaker has been held to freeze his action by a clever series of back and forth between the HC and the SC, when there is a catena of judgements on the powers of the Speaker over the Anti Defection Law and judicial review can be done only after the Speakers have completed their actions, is an inflection point.
The Executive Calculus: The cases of deciding which drugs and equipment are essential, which are not, the manner in which online retailers have been curtailed to sell only essential wares which are simple low end grocery staples and commodities, and particularly not being permitted to sell Masks, Digital thermal Scanners and computer and mobile wares and their accessories in zones deemed to be Red, which incidentally have the maximum restrictions that allow only for Work From Home or School From Home also reflect a design of the executive which is at variance to the ground situation. Now there is a penchant for ‘weekend curfews’ and lockdowns of cities for spells that are less than 14 days, which do not make any Public Health sense, but are again a coloured exercise of power.
Just think of the death of Bollywood actor Mr Sushant Singh Rajput, and how the Mumbai Police is questioning individuals of select hierarchy and sectors in the overall film industry, like Mr Rajeev Masand who is a film critic and TV show host. Or like the unabashed opportunism being shown by Ms Kangana Ranaut in this episode.
Health Calculus: We have a Minister of State of the Union Cabinet offering a Papad that cures Corona, a politician claiming cow urine as a cure, an MP asking followers to Chant Hanuman Challsa over prescribed time and number, a God Man leading his followers in a global chanting chain of a Tamil devotional composition called Skanda Shasti Kavacham. We have attempts to enrol a drug into the Corona regime by Biocon a reputed company in Pharma sector in India Itolizumab which is for psoriasis and repurposed but tested on too few patientshttps://www.thehindu.com/news/national/biocons-covid-19-drug-tested-on-too-few-patients-to-reliably-conclude-on-benefits-say-experts/article32060019.ece. We have a textile firm brandishing a fabric as ‘Corona protective’ when actual claim is that it is germ resistant, we have branded hand sanitisers that now label themselves as Corona killing, and so you get a sense that a whole environment had been created that allowed indiscriminate and unscientific attempts to join the bandwagon of Corona virus and our attempts to counter the Pandemic and make money in the process. This is outside the question of how several repurposed drugs and masks of various categories have become pricier after their connection to Corona was established!
Privilege of socioreligious lines: You can see people staking claims through brahminical descent by right of birth, to intelligence, to leadership of society, and others countering it on social media exchanges. You can see how each word that seeks to put dalits, scheduled castes, tribals and other lower castes in their place, women in their place, Muslims and Christians in their place and counters to all of these exchanges are simple strokes of privilege, not of logic or pristine reasoning. There was a thread which tried to equate the south brahmin community to Jews, to which the counter was a simple count of Nobels with the Jews and the patents filed by and held by them. No one tried to clarify how the Jews themselves today practise xenophobia which is what the Isreali state has reduced itself to, or how those brahmins are actually in person very liberal, while as a community claiming to be orthodox and revisionist! Because it is easier to bandy privilege. So when Mr Tharoor is trolled for claiming that those whose flesh and bones are interred in India more than those whose ashes are scattered, firstly out of ignorance, people think straight jacket that this is Hindu verses Abrahamic, when many lower caste and tribal ‘Sanatana Dharma’ adherents actually bury their dead. The proportion of Hindus who would cremate are far less in compared to those who would rather bury their dead, and in what can be called an inroad into Dharma, mainstreaming it, in a particular Shamshaan versus Kabristan political narrative, the nuances of Dharma and its grandeur is the first casualty. Second is that Tharoor’s tweet was an infra dig, but one that was in context, where the RSS claims that only those are true sons of the soil whose living fulfilled three conditions, including the religious centres and figures belonging to geographic India. ( Imagine what would have happened if J&K had gone to Pakistan at partition then, or what about Sikhs whose first Guru Nanak Dev is now technically a Pakistani, or Kailash Mansarovar which is technically now Chinese, or Pashupatinath Temple is technically Nepalese?)
There are many more sectors and forays, including education, where for some time now, the national leadership is quiet about how schools are surging ahead with online classes and school work without reflecting on how this will create a further gap in education between the haves and have-nots. The EWS who got enrolled through the UPA stellar legislation on RTE are now left high and dry, not to mention the children enrolled in State run schools. In the midst of this crises, a policy to change the APMC role in agricultural procurement and a series of measures that have affected MSP and procurement have left farmers reeling under further adversities without any scope for reliefhttps://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/withdraw-mandi-trade-ordinance-changes-in-power-act-farmers-in-punjab/article31780394.ece. There is an equally charming view that in the long run deregulation of the Agricultural sector and removal of middle men will transform the status of the agriculturist. Why charming? Because it drips with innocence and sells a pipe dream far removed from the cruel reality of Indian farmers!
So the sleight of hand in India is bandying a wand of privilege across sectors in India, privilege that had remained hidden for long, constrained by the need for propriety and political correctness has been unleashed in no holds barred fashion. In an essence it opens up a fresh understanding of Indian character, revealing a state of national pillars from press to politician through judiciary and government servant, who appear comfortable in their cocoons, unmindful if not outright disregarding the Jawan, the Kisan, the students, the mazdoors and others who are struggle to get a break in India. True professionals and labourers are disenfranchised in today’s India like never before. And it is happening despite the representative presence of all these professionals and labourers at the highest echelons of Decision Making Matrix in our country! Forewarned is forearmed!
Think of this as a wakeup call. This pandemic seems to be gathering momentum and our systems seem to be waiting for the proverbial straw on the camel’s back to break! Unless enlightened citizens voice their call for rectitude and reason, their call for professionalism and ethics, their call for solemness and rejection of prejudice and privilege, India seems to be entering a quagmire predicted by Winston Churchill, that she appeared to have largely avoided in the first seven decades of her existence as an Independent Nation! This 15 August assumes a remarkable significance, it calls for a National Pledge of Covenants for Soldiers, Farmers, Students, Professionals, Artists and many more. Clear covenants that would bind the nation in her actions and interactions with these crucial aspects of our national sinews! It calls for a denial of entrenched and extant privilege! In all its forms! The time is now!
indiarubberman.com 