Indians Remain Same Indians; But Is PM Modi A Different Leader?

 

1. Indians of 950-995 CE

Today’s Indians are just like Indians of 950-995 CE. That India was the richest land in the world with an estimated 38% of global GDP. But they were soft complacent Indians who had given up the aggressive expansive attitude that had made them rich & dominant for the prior 3,000 years. The various Indian kings that ruled India’s plains did not bother to see the coming storm, the ominous storm that was gathering northwest of the mountain gateways to the Indian plains.

Then boom! They were hit in 998 CE by the whirlwind that came down from the northwest & swept through the Indo-Gangetic plains. The name of that whirlwind was Mohammad of Ghazni. No soft complacent Indian king could stand up to the onslaught. Ghazni went back with enormous treasure. He didn’t just come once; he attacked India 17 times and each time Indians bought him off with massive amounts of money & treasure. 

This continued for the next 400-500 years. Every victorious warrior ruler of the Afghanistan-Uzbeskistan area would look down to the Indian plains and see the riches that were available for taking. So every one of these warriors swept down from the mountain passes to plunder & kill. The Indian kings were brave warriors too and their armies were invariably bigger. But they always lost. How pathetic were they? 

Extremely so. Like sheep, the Indian kings & their large armies were always surprised & caught unawares by the attacks of the Afghan-Uzbek wolves. The wolves had studied Indian tactics and developed superior tactics to use their surprise & mobility to focus their attacks on Indian vulnerabilities. In contrast, the Indian kings never changed their tactics, never changed their behavior over these 4-5 centuries.  

Most strange of all, the Indian kings NEVER went on the offensive in these 400-500 years. They never used the intervening quiet period to mount a surprise attack inside Afghanistan before the Afghan-Uzbeks could organize an attack on them. Yes, their large ponderous armies were not capable of preemptive surprise attacks inside Afghanistan. But they never developed a strong mobile force that was capable of whirlwind strikes on unsuspecting Afghan-Uzbeks areas. NEVER. 

2. Same old, same old

Look at this week’s bold attack at night by a few terrorists from NaPakistan on an Indian army base in Uri near the line of control. The toll was horrific with 17 Indian soldiers dying in fire inside their tents with another 29 soldiers injured. How is this possible? How do a handful terrorists penetrate the outer perimeter of an army base anywhere and especially an army base that was specifically located in Uri to stop infiltration from across the line of control? Whey were the 4-5 terrorists not stopped & killed well before they got close enough to set fire to tents of sleeping soldiers? 

Because just like the post 950 CE Indians, today’s Indian army leadership seems totally complacent, lax & interested only in massaging the egos of their bosses, the arrogant uncaring bureaucrats in Delhi. Has anyone in Delhi really woken up after the huge failure in 1999 when large numbers of NaPak soldiers & quasi-military terrorists climbed up in winter to take control of mountain peaks that had been vacated by the Indian army at the onset of winter? We all remember how hard it was to retake those mountain peaks; how many soldier lives had to be sacrificed in those bloody assaults against entrenched defenders? The eventual victory was sweet but it was unnecessary.

The NaPak leadership changed their tactics after their humiliating defeat in the Kargil conflict. Instead of one large visible assault, they began targeting India via small focused terrorist strikes. While they changed their tactics, the Indian leadership did not change theirs. Even after 18 years of such attacks post-1999, there is no evidence that the Indian Army or Indian Government has developed innovative new tactics to attack the terrorists across the line of control before they can attack India’s vulnerabilities. 

And so, the terrorists keep succeeding in their war of attrition as they have over the past 18 years. And India remains utterly helpless, soft, complacent and frankly, uncaring. But these attacks do not an existential danger and so, as we wrote on March 28, 2009 in our article Do Wolves Attack Sheep?,:

• “The masters of Indian “educated” sheep, the Indian Government, have decided that the costs of going out and killing the wolf packs before they attack are too high; that it is cheaper as well as safer to let a few hundred people die in every attack by Pakistani commandos. As the Indian Government rationalizes, India, unlike Israel, has over one billion people. So, they think, what does it matter if about 3,000 Indians have died in Pakistani attacks during the past few years?” 

3. A New Imperative for & from a new leader

India is now the world’s fastest growing economy. India has tall goals and the world is looking to India to become a more important factor in global stability. The recent “partnership” between America & India is a testament to this expectation. But no global role is ever given as an act of charity. Global role is to be demanded and that requires power projection. A country that is continuously humbled, continuously shown to the rest of the world as a paper tiger, is never accepted into the global leadership tier. 

So, in our opinion, the success of PM Modi’s geo-economic drive depends on respect for India’s power & the ability of India to project a “don’t tread on me” reality. So it is & was incumbent on PM Modi to demonstrate to world leaders that his India retaliates & retaliates hard.

And he did so on the night of September 20, according to BloombergQuint.  

• BloombergQuintVerified account ‏@BloombergQuint  Sep 21 – .@TheQuint‘s exclusive report on India’s retaliation for the Uri attack

[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2tPsV3qSnY[/embedyt]

• The QuintVerified account ‏@TheQuint  Sep 21 – .@TheQuint reconfirms information about a cross-LoC operation by the #IndianArmy. We stand by our story. https://www.thequint.com/uri-attack/2016/09/21/uri-avenged-2-india-paras-special-forces-cross-loc-uri-sector-jammu-and-kashmir-pakistan-neutralise-20-terrorists …

The print article provided a few more details:

Indians have been pathetically complacent for over 1,000 years and they get most complacent after a successful defense or a small retaliation. They have not demonstrated a capability to launch a long term debilitating campaign of attrition against an enemy, an offensive campaign to slowly enlarge their operations & destroy the will of their enemy. 

We hope the Uri attack has opened the eyes of PM Modi, Defense Minister Parrikar and the leadership of the Indian Army. This war, this quiet but deadly war, will not stop until the Indian Army has expanded its control to deeper areas of illegally occupied Kashmir. So the Indian Army now has play an offensive game instead of waiting for the next attack to foil.

Every lull now has to be taken as an opportunity to quietly attack & destroy NaPak army posts labelled if necessary as terrorist camps. With every such attack, a small portion of illegally occupied Kashmir has to be seized. If a major opportunity presents itself, a critical infiltration point should be seized and controlled. These operations should be small and kept under the radar as much as possible. No terrorist camp, no NaPak post in illegally occupied areas near the LOC should again sleep in peace. The decision to escalate should be left & actually forced on NaPak military-political leadership. And if they do escalate, the Indian Air Force, Army & Navy must have standing orders to counter-escalate in force.

We don’t know what the recently signed base-sharing agreement between America & India contains. But what if that agreement enables the Indian military to use American air bases? We don’t speak of some remote bases in the Indian Ocean or the Pacific. We are talking about using the Jalalabad & Bagram airbases in Afghanistan. Could Indian special forces use the Jalalabad airbase to attack the terrorist camps in the Quetta-Balochistan area? Or the Bagram air base to hit terrorist camps in illegally occupied Kashmir near the Afghan border? The NaPak army defenses against India all face towards India. So why not attack these defenses from the rear from Bagram air base in Afghanistan? And these operations would also serve American interests in minimizing terrorist attacks into Afghanistan.

We are not sure if President Obama would agree to letting Indian forces use the Jalalabad & Bagram airbases. But President Trump would in our opinion. And President Hillary Clinton could be persuaded too, we believe. After all, what is the use of a joint base sharing arrangement to India if Indian forces cannot use American airbases in Afghanistan? 

The point is that the traditional optimistic and naive hope-based approach to NaPak has to end & be replaced by a smart offensive strategy to keep inflicting massive damage on the NaPak military-terrorist infrastructure in illegally occupied Kashmir. That is not just India’s own imperative but also an imperative of America, Russia, Central Asia, Europe and Israel. In fact, Israel has offered publicly technology towards this goal. 

5. Indian Society – do Indians have what it takes?

This offensive cannot merely be limited to military means. India must develop an offensive orientation against NaPak in every sphere. But Indian society seems incapable of even thinking about such an orientation. Because Indians love to think of themselves as good tolerant peace-loving people. That is utter BS because India is & remains one of the most violent societies in the world. Every segment of Indian society engages in persistent & often violent conflict against some other segment of Indian society. But this violence is always directed at other Indians & never against outsiders, not even NaPak. 

For example, no one in Indian media to our knowledge ever proposed something as simple as below, something so simple that it comes naturally to Americans:

• Jeff M. Smith ‏@Cold_Peace_  Sep 21 – Has India ever attempted unilateral econ sanctions on Pakistan? I know bilat trade negligible;talking”us-or-them”ultimatums to global firms?

Let global multinationals choose between India & NaPak. They can’t be in both any longer. Let Coke, Pepsi decide; let  Honeywell, GE, Siemens, Cummins decide, let IBM, Oracle, Cisco, Google, Facebook decide. Let Comcast, Disney, Viacom, CBS, Bloomberg decide. Indian society has to declare NaPak as a terrorist regime and ban any body that maintains any relationship with that entity. 

This sounds great but is beyond the mindset of Indian society. Indians are utterly selfish & self-centered. They always want someone else, even their neighbor, to suffer for their country but never them. Look at Indian women. They are going gaga over a NaPak actor named Fawad Khan. Bollywood fans would revolt if Indian Government decides to revoke the visa of Fawad Khan or of other NaPak imports working in Bollywood. Indian “intellectuals” would arise in anger if Economist, New York Times et al were made to leave India if they refuse to get out of NaPak. 

Indians all over India get angry for a few days when attacks like the one in Uri kill Indian soldiers. But then they forget. And they absolutely refuse to allow any slight discomfort in their own lives even as trivial as losing a Bollywood import like Fawad Khan.

This is nothing new. India has been like that for over 1,000 years. States in Central India or South India remained soft & complacent when northern areas were being attacked & conquered by Afghan-Uzbeks. In fact, they remained complacent until their own state was attacked & then they panicked, were defeated & surrendered. This was repeated several centuries later as a private British company began annexing one portion of India after another and eventually annexed all of India. Yes, a private British company using Indian soldiers & Indian capital ended up annexing & plundering all of India.    

Nothing has changed materially in Indian society since those days in 13-14th centuries or 18-19th centuries. They remain sheep and care only about what matters personally to them. This is why terrorist wolves from NaPak & Afghanistan keep attacking them & they keep bleating like sheep. 

6. A New Leader?

Way back on March 28, 2009 we had written in conclusion of our article Do Wolves Attack Sheep?:

• “The only way to break this cycle is for India to go on the offensive and begin cross border limited attacks against terrorists in Pakistan. … Wolves are very smart animals; they never attack when they face a dangerous enemy and they always run away when they feel they are weaker. But, this is only possible when Indian society wakes up or a leader emerges in India that wakes up Indian Society from its sheep-like passive state“.

Is Narendra Modi this new leader? We think so. He will prove to be that leader if he now launches a long term campaign of defined covert attrition against the NaPak’s military-terrorist infrastructure in illegally occupied Kashmir.

 

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