https://aliahd66.substack.com/p/india-a-strategic-audit-does-not?sd=pf

India: A strategic audit does not really matter

India, long a power in its own right, has been reckoned as an emerging great power. In Barack Obama’s words of the mid 2010s, "India is not simply an emerging power, but a world power." Perhaps that was a bit of over-the-top diplomacy on Obama’s part, trying to pull India into his ‘pivot to Asia’ reconstruct of United States (US) strategic policy. The pieces of that policy, that involved a shift of focus on a central strategic balance in Europe to the Indo-Pacific, are only now falling into place. Even though the Russian invasion of Ukraine could have potentially put the clock back, that it has floundered, has fortified China as the principal and implacable challenger to the US’ interests and hegemony.

India, playing along to the extent its multi/pluri-lateral foreign policy provides it leeway, has a foot in both camps. Its locational advantage gives it some eminence as a potential frontline state in the new Cold War. Wooed by both sides, India also has a sense of self-importance. However, its pronounced bias towards the US-led one makes of it a subordinate partner. Condoleeza Rice’s public promise once to make India a great power, prematurely let the cat out of the bag.

India: Not quite a great power

What’s certain is that India is not a great power. While this could once be qualified by the caveat ‘as yet’, today it is a far shot. Its development indices are not up to it. Absent checks, India’s A2 policy, aping zaibatsu and chaebol, is crony capitalism run rampant.  The threat to democracy is evident from the bid of the ‘deeply overleveraged’ Adani group, on behalf of political mentors, reaching out last week to stifle the lone outpost in India today for free media. Also, from the government’s fudging of the statistical score-card, it is unclear that India can get back as an economic race horse any time soon.

Significantly, it is regressing on state formation – with institutions hollowed out - and nation building – with its social cohesion in question. A critical viewing of the latest Aamir Khan hit, Laal Singh Chaddha, tells as much. The fact that Khan takes care to circumnavigate the ‘malaria’ being spread by Hindutva and uses the usual Muslim-denigrating tropes – such as Muslim mafia’s control of Bollywood - to advance the film’s narrative is a giveaway. The very intelligent artist that he is, Khan tacitly messages that the times are unsuitable for the movie to refer to, for instance, the most significant incident of this century (as it has turned out): the Gujarat pogrom.

Clearly, soft power based on democratic values has been traded for an authoritative profile for its leader, appropriately viewed elsewhere as authoritarian. The national security implications of the democratic deficit have elided strategic commentary. The silence itself indicates this as a area of concern. An instance is the absence of discussion on the national security fallout of a pet project of Hindutva: the National Population Register and its implications for Muslim India.

India persists with a single-point foreign policy fixated on terrorism – at a time when terrorism has been roundly defeated – makes its contribution to forums - as most recently by the defence minister at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation - two-bit (do kauri) worth. India’s foreign policy resources that are notably slim in relation to its size are inordinately invested in placing notables onto the terror list in order to embarrass terror sponsor Pakistan and Pakistan sponsor China.

This tells something of the regime’s national security system in which the fixations and expertise of its national security adviser pervade both defence and diplomacy, making it an intelligence-predominant one with the attendant pathologies that can be expected to go with such an arrangement. Since information access and institutional billets are now controlled by this cabal, there is little incentive for the media to expose or veteran fraternities to feed policy.

Consequently, India’s contribution in the Security Council during its ongoing non-permanent membership has been pedestrian. In keeping silent on egregious Russian violation of international law, it has traded its vote on normative issues for oil. At the fag-end of its two year tenure, for the first time it voted against Russia in a procedural vote allowing the Ukrainian president to address the Council virtually. The war dragging on into its sixth month, the Permanent Five cannot alone be blamed.

India: A regional power?

Even as a regional power, India’s credentials are in doubt. India has been an insignificant player in the most prominent regional conflict through the two-decades of the conflict’s duration, Afghanistan. At one time it had only biscuit distribution to Afghan school children to boast of. It has been a non-entity in the end-game there. Though it had two years to reach out to the resurgent Taliban, it scooted past a closing door. Retracing its steps now has lost India’s voice some four years.

It continues to be absent in addressing the crisis in Myanmar, though its resolution is central to India’s Act East policy, that is part of its Indo-Pacific policy package. It is checkmated by China in its own backyard, the latest episode being the docking of a Chinese surveillance ship in Sri Lanka over India’s objections. Bangladesh has risen economically with little Indian buoy. Bhutan is on its own trip in engaging China, though India claimed to have staked out Doklam on its behalf.

Militarily, its military actions – ‘surgical strikes’ on one side and defence of territory on the other - have been less than enthusing. Though faced with a Chinese intrusion - at the most remote part of its land frontier - India chose to use its military for talks across a table, rather than on the battlefield. An occasional ‘tu-tu-main-main’ does little to embellish India’s power credentials, even if China deigns to reply or open a round on its own. The latest is India’s lite take on the Taiwan crisis – after over a week of dithering - being followed by Chinese decrying Indian military exercises with the US in vicinity of the contested boundary in the central sector.

On the Pakistan front, with a putative two-front challenge manifesting in the Ladakh intrusion by China, India speedily calibrated its west-oriented military power. This buries the unwritten strategic posture dating to the seventies that in case of two-front war, India would first prevail quickly in the west and then stall China in the east. Now, India appears to be settling for defensive deterrence on the Pakistan front and the traditional deterrence by denial against China.

Though the home minster only this week said that troubles in Kashmir owe to Pakistani proxy war, infiltration figures show the notion up as an effort at passing the buck. Instead, that Pakistan has not upped the ante in Kashmir. Pakistan’s internal focus and stabilizing Afghanistan, keeps it from exploiting the diluted deterrence. Secret talks have kept it placated, indicating that they have expectations from the evolving situation. If unmet, with conventional parity now the order, the future could see a shift in Pakistan’s posture depending on how India plays its Kashmir hand.

Pointers are that Indian hawks will aggravate matters in Kashmir by trying to manipulate the vote, but not in the gauche 1987 mode. Their latest sleight-of-hand was in trying to get voters onto electoral rolls through the back door, by including security forces’ members and outsider labour as voters. An fertile ground prepared by misconceived policies cannot but see Kashmir keep India tied down to South Asia indefinitely.

At the cusp of great power

It is apparent that over the last eight years the reasonably-credible legacy of the much-disparaged previous government has been squandered. In wake of the 26/11 decision by India not to respond militarily had been assiduously used through the subsequent years to do down the then government’s strategic posture. That spurred the government on to revisit its strategic posture, agreeing – if reluctantly – to countenance a ‘two front’ threat. By when it departed it had agreed to a mountain strike corps and beefed up the eastern theatre with two divisions. Patrols on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) visited points that have been placed off limits since 2020. It had sufficient political capital with Beijing to have it revert to status quo ante in Ladakh after the Depsang incident in 2013. In contrast, India has suffered repeated intrusions in the tenure of the current regime – one when the Chinese president was sitting on a swing at the prime minister’s home state.

On the Pakistan front, it shifted to an offensive posture, from the traditional one of offensive deterrence. A national security adviser of the period informs of contemplating a first strike. The circumstance of this would only have been one created by a successful conventional offensive, instigating Pakistani to ready nuclear weapon in a first use mode. This indicates India’s as an offensive strategic doctrine. The Line of Control was occasionally active, with an army chief extolling aggressive tactical level commanders. From the highpoint of unrest in 2010, Kashmir reverted to quietude – without the suppression that now goes with the term.

National security institutions received a structural boost after 26/11. National security debate was at its zenith, with the government at the receiving end. Two episodes of civil-military tension arose, only one of which was militarily relevant (the resignation of a naval chief over non-delivery from the civilian side of the support necessary to keep the submarine fleet seaworthy), though the second one (of the army chief wanting to keep 4, Rajaji Marg, within the family) is the more famous. Today we see what a commentator avers to as ‘politico-military collusion’.  

On foreign policy, that government too had its ‘Howdy Trump’ moment in Manmohan Singh expressing India’s ‘love’ for Bush Jr. Even so, its performance in the Security Council was more credible, as the book by a minister in the current government - who was India’s permanent representative at the horse shoe table - testifies. Though it abstained on the resolutions that tarnished the UN’s flagship role back then -Responsibility to Protect – subsequent events proved it apt in its critique. Today its voting behavior contradicts its rhetoric on critical concerns that constitute the normative center of gravity of the UN: non-aggression against political independence and territorial integrity of a state.

There was one blemish to internal security. The government, mindful of the Hindu vote bank being manufactured by supporters of its right wing challenger by using terror perpetrated under false flag operations, was unable to find the gumption to turn the tables on it. It allowed the provincial government under Modi to wiggle out of culpability for the Gujarat pogrom under cover of a judicially appointed Special Investigation Team. It did not follow up on the killing in a black operation of Hemant Karkare, compensating by awarding him an Ashoka Chakra. How this subterfuge led to his widow’s death from brain haemorrhage is easy to see. 

This was perhaps out of sensibility for the grandeur of the State. It did not want the State to be besmirched if the truth on both counts spilt out - that elements of the State were participant in the pogrom and partially constituted the ‘deep state’ lending a shoulder for the black operations perpetrated terror. It gullibly hoped for a trade-off in the right wing playing by the rules in exchange for being let off. In the event, it turned out misplaced solicitousness, besides being a historic misreading of Modi’s character.

The slide ever since

Modi’s vaulting ambition was better read by the fierce capitalist forces it had unleashed in a previous avatar in the turn to neo-liberalism. These were now both funding and riding the ‘Modi wave’ to power. The marriage of capital with obscurantism has proved hardy ever since, and isn’t done as yet. Current-day Enforcement Directorate raids and toppling of state governments by moneybags has portents of worse to come. The combine can do without democratic urges, the thirst for freedom quenched by Azadi ka Mahautsav jamborees and visions for the future satisfied by the mirage of Amrit Kaal. 

The internally-directed information warfare agenda does not allow a decent measure to be taken of India’s strategic deficits accumulated since. Strategic analysts deployed to turn out hagiographies of Modi and his national security adviser, Ajit Doval, should be named and shamed for letting their clients, the attentive public, down. Critical analysts, such as redoubtable Gautam Navlakha, have been jailed on trumped-up charges based on insertions of ‘evidence’ into personal laptops by information warriors from the intelligence fraternity. Movies are being churned out - funded from an unaudited intelligence budget - fudging contemporary history, even as some others purvey a politically charged version of more remote history.

It befuddles how nationalism can be inspired by lies, which suggests that the effort is more for enabling a cult status for Modi transferable into votes. A like status for the adviser too is the price for misdirecting tax-payer monies. The tradition of relying on self-regulating intelligence czars set by Indira Gandhi in her reliance on Kao – subject of hagiographies as part of the same perception management exercise - has been self-interestedly maintained.

The initial years found Prime Minister Modi globetrotting. His bear hugs were packaged as India’s moment of arrival. However, from a profile of ‘reformer-in-chief’, it went on to be ‘divider-in-chief’. Modi counts among the world’s authoritarians. India is only notionally a democracy, forcing an opposition leader to observe that with institutions in the bag, votes are easy pickings. Hyping yoga cannot compensate for such loss in soft power and advocating Hindi as a UN language cannot win any friends, especially when there is no consensus on Hindi back home.

Strategically speaking, running with hares and hunting with hounds is now the able handiwork of the ever-dapper minister, Dr. Jaishankar. The information war cover provided by keyboard armies ensures that every twist is justified as prompted by national interest, be it Modi being feted by Nawaz Sharif at Raiwind or ‘katti’ with Pakistan after the entirely predictable Pathankot attack. Diplomacy absent, intelligence-led secret talks with Pakistan and the military in the lead with China, begs the question how the Ministry of External Affairs justifies its budget.

Doublespeak persists with the foreign minister insisting that the LAC is not normal, while the defence minister persists with the ‘no intrusion’ line from his prime minister’s ill-timed all-party meeting at the snow-balling in the Galwan incident of the underreported-till-then Ladakh crisis. Information denial and manipulation with an intelligence hand at the rudder is now a fine art. Directed at ensuring political consolidation of the reigning ideology, Hindutva, and its presiding deity, Modi, it is abuse of the professional ethic and tax payer money. 

An instance is hyping of the China threat as one needing warding off by soldiers in the tens of thousands. Though India has the power - husbanded over the past 12 years since India’s own pivot to the China front in a genuflection to its patron US’ shift then - it is unable and unwilling to use it. This reveals a political-strategic infelicity - unfamiliarity with the use of force short of war and limiting war in case of escalation. Making a virtue of a necessity, social engineering through the Agnipath scheme is part of the cost borne by the army, besides the reputational hit.

Equally importantly, the policy choice is myopic in its jettisoning of environmental laws in the cutting strategic roads on the fragile Himalayas. Future generations inhabiting the Ganga-Brahmaputra basin will bear extreme weather events, plus water scarcity from receding glaciers. There is absolutely no attention to environmental aspects of strategy, a field that must be added to the traditional strategic factors: operational, social, economic, political, technological, legal and logistical. Innovation cannot come from a national security establishment which has ideological conformism as leitmotif, judging from the two successive military advisers appointed (the earlier one is now quasi-Chief of Defence Staff). Upping of its budget – a thrice-over hike in 2017 – is only retrospectively understood to have been for the Pegasus that - as events turned out - was for waging war on democracy. Its success is apparent in the Supreme Court - a tangential victim – passing over the matter under the ‘doctrine of sealed covers’.

India not a power in a theoretically sustainable sense

Detoxification appears a surmountable problem in relation to the set back to democracy that the strategic establishment has wrought by its complicity in and silence over Hindutva. It is not the primary national security threat as the princeling rightly, though confidentially, had it once. Instead, Hindutva is the national interest. Re-crafting national interest entails retrieving political culture. Since the other political parties are sent scurrying by gimmicks as revdi and scattered by ‘lotus operations’, there is little hope of rescue of the Constitutional scheme. The upshot is that power is not of consequence externally as much as internally. Internally, the field is conquered. Hindutva consolidated, awaits another electoral sweep for culmination in a revamped Constitution, helpfully already written up in Kanpur by a set of saffronite seers.

In conclusion, a strategic audit of India traditionally envisaged is inapplicable. The problem is similar to that of appraising Hitler’s war-time strategy: Should he have attacked Russia even as the west held out? Should he have gone for investing Leningrad and Moscow or raced for the oil in the Caucasus? Should he have exhausted his military power on untenable frontlines on the Russian front when he could have pulled back to defensible lines?

What this rumination prompts is that though there is a precipitous drop within a mere decade in India’s credentials as a power – from cusp of great power to a questionable regional power – it is inconsequential. In the Hindutva scheme, external appearances only matter to the extent as to how they are received in the domestic space. Domestic perceptions can be managed adroitly; therefore, ratings on power – especially when negative as with other indices as freedom of speech, human rights, economy etc - are passé. The regime’s paradigm dominance compels even a strategic audit as this to bow to its diktat: What matters is Hindutva firming-in; all else, piffle.

 

 https://aliahd66.substack.com/p/amrit-kaal-scenarios-out-to-2047

The Modi era has found a name: Amrit kaal. Conjured up last year in wake of the dreadful Covid Wave II, it is now official, finding mention – according to statisticians with nothing better to do – in the prime minister’s Red Fort ramparts speech, all of 14 times. Narendra Modi’s contradicting of Himanta Biswa Sarma the other day on the next prime minister (PM) has put at rest the question that plagued Nehru starting about a similar juncture in his tenure: ‘After Nehru, who?”

It’s going to be Modi for some time. He needs outdo Indira’s 13 years, plain-sailing after an inevitable hat-trick (pun intended) in 2024. His photos from the Garden of Five Senses at his Lok Kalyan Marg residence testifying to his pracharak-edifying physical fitness, he will saunter past Nehru’s, 17. His sanskars - judging from those of the Brahmins let-off for rapes and murders in the Gujarat pogrom - are celestial. Besides, lessons learnt from the security breach on the flyover in the vicinity of Bhagat Singh’s shrine at Hussainiwala and from the chip-laden man gate-crashing National Security Adviser (NSA), Ajit Doval’s residence (that saw the first instance of accountability of any kind in the Modi tenure in the sacking of three of the NSA’s personal security minders), should see him through to Mugabian longevity.

The very plausible excuse will be that his party needs him. After all, its twice-won parliamentary majority owes to the ‘Modi wave’ in each case. In the first instance, it was manufactured on the back of the black operations comprising an India-wide terror bombing campaign that created a Muslim ‘Other’ to carve out a Hindu vote-bank. It then appropriated the national sentiment against corruption by subverting the movement from within by sending in stooges as General VK Singh, ‘Crane’ Bedi and ‘Baba’ Ramdev, all of who were rewarded subsequently. The second time round, the promise of acche din having being dashed on the rocks of demonetization and a botched ‘Gabbar Singh Tax’ rollout, required another resort to black operations: this time at Pulwama.

At Pulwama, a militant in and out of custody some six times reduced a bus in which 40 security men were travelling to ashes. Apparently, there is a book out that tells of where the 80 kgs of explosives came from, but, to cognoscenti, that the explosive found its way – as did the 26/11 attackers into Mumbai and the terrorists targeting the Pathankot airfield – tells its own story. Reportedly, another book tells of the accuracy with which Balakot was targeted. Balakot was the military-feat-that-wasn’t but provided enough space on its back for Narendra Modi to ride into power a second time round. (This author suffering from ‘confirmation bias’ - as trolls inform him on his twitter handle - has no intention of reading either book.)  

As Modi ages, the excuse to continue milking his persona will be that there are alternatives, but fratricide might result if he were to depart the scene or settle into Rashtrapati Bhawan for life. A prime minister-in-waiting might not make it past Covid Wave VI. One who could make a credible alternative has been sidelined from the party’s parliamentary board. Pretenders to the throne are aplenty and all in the age bracket and ambitious enough to see them respectively bid for the new prime ministerial residence at Central Vista. There is an ascetic being mentored for the role, testified to in photos of the prime minister - who changes his shawl at every turn of their stroll together during the tutoring session; a minister with a foreign degree and whose daughter does not own a bar; a chief minister leading a civilisational war between the rest and the Muslim one-third of his state; and, not to forget the South, a brash young man last seen in Srinagar stirring up passions over the tricolor on Lal Chowk, though taking care to stand right behind a gun-toting Sikh cop. The ‘After Modi, who?’ conundrum will be flogged to keep the patriarch going even as he chugs past Biden’s current and Trump’s by then-second term landmarks.

Under continuing Modi leadership, Amrit kaal is at hand. By the centenary of Independent India, New India is to be a ‘developed nation’, two aspirations advisedly twinned. Both journeys began with the end finally of the British Raj in 2014 - as the Bollywood ‘Queen’ reminded us. The nation building part of it has been on for about a century, with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) at it since its inception. Over the past eight years, the Republic is no longer Mahatma Gandhi’s and Nehru’s, but ‘Veer’ Savarkar’s. The nation includes only those subscribing to the latter’s punya bhoomi thesis, though the thesis shuts out spiritual winds – that can only but be universal - from elsewhere. Strangely, while ancient India can be vishwa guru in the spiritual sense (and all other senses including technological), other lands and their peoples cannot.

The development promise is held out yet again to keep the corporate and commercial elite alongside. They fund the project in exchange for second generation neoliberal economic reforms that Modi promised to unleash untying the animal instincts, energies and appetites of capitalism. The middle classes who seek to profit from this marriage of convenience - signified by Hum Do Hamare Do - are doubly advantaged: not only getting an identity-kick from the ‘nation’ but also corral the benefits of development, its underside be paid for by other sucker communities on India’s social and geographic periphery. Luckily for Modi, Covid intervened timely to provide him with an alibi of mahamari to show for a derailed economy – his election a second time round obscuring that his actions had brought this on well prior to Covid onset.

Modi, ably assisted by NSA Doval, fostered ‘politico-military collusion’ – in the words of a leading military watcher - whereby he set the external security coordinates in a manner as to not interfere with or trip up the internal political project, Hindutva. It is two birds with one stone. The two neighbours – Pakistan and China – have been kept mollified, even as the appeasement that has brought this quietude on the borders is projected internally as a work of deterrence. Internally directed information war has it that the two neighbours have been suitably impressed by the bared fangs of the Modi-inaugurated Simha atop the new parliament building. This suffices for voters, willfully and self-interestedly beguiled by the lapdog media with the lies earlier on Balakot and later, on Ladakh.

While on the borders, both sides have been kept engaged by the typically-Indian approach to talks: interminable and meaningless. These have been secret with Pakistan and been between the two militaries with China. Since there is no known expertise in negotiations with the intelligence hands undertaking the secret talks (other than hostage taking negotiations) or with the military, these can get nowhere. Arriving at resolution through talks was never macho enough, even with Manmohan Singh’s (MMS) India, even though the receptive Yin was not absent in MMS, which Anupam Kher purposely over-acted out in his rendering of the Singh character in The Accidental Prime Minister.

The quietude on both lines of control – ceasefire on one and status quo (though not status quo ante) on the other – allow for the political space for consolidation of Hindutva. All institutions – including the judiciary having been brought over and bought out – once there was only the military left. This is being hollowed out by the Agnipath scheme. It is kept without the jointness that a Chief of Defence Staff might have instilled. Thus, the dominance of Hindutva over the political paradigm and political culture going official in an impending make-over of the Constitution by a switch to Hindu Rashtra, there would be no institutional rearguard for the First Republic.

This setting provides for three possible trajectories of the future: the officially-conceived Amrit kaal; a contested Amrit kaal; and, last, an alternative Amrit kaal.

The official Amrit kaal

New India, duly impressed by the success of Har Ghar Tiranga, puts aside its diversity. From a salad bowl it gets to being a melting pot. Hindi-Hindu-Hindusthan resonates, including in the South, where Hindutva made inroads beginning with the Telangana elections. Hyderabad’s Owaisi fled to Dubai, taking his millions, while his pocket borough lined up for ghar wapsi. The Pasmandas, serenaded by Modi, pleaded for the reservation dividend, but there were no sarkari jobs as the government bailed out from its enterprises, including the corporatized and then sold-off Railways. New India swept past the $5 trillion mark and lined up within sight of $30 trillion by when it got to a Grand Old Party-mukt centenary.

The Agniveers thwarted the Army’s last-ditch institutional-interest driven backlash, siding with the deep-selected CDS to thwart the ex-National Defence Academy, combat arms cabal of generals. The generals pleaded that they had mistakenly taken the NDA prayer seriously, that has it: ‘Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.’ Judicial infrastructure was improved, especially judges residences, as was personal security. The judiciary tamped down challenges to the Constitutional make-over to Hindu Rashtra, arguing that the democratic verdict in 2024 indicated that it was the collective will – harking to the ‘collective conscience’ that did Afzal Guru to death.

To provide space for Hindutva to grow roots and sprout, Akhand Bharat was suspended till after Amrit kaal played out. Pakistan was offered ghar wapsi into an India-led South Asian federation. Diminishing marginal utility of the ‘Bangladeshi’ illegal immigrants issue catching up, after its use as another tool to beat Indian Muslims with the compilation of the National Population Register, they were given labour documents and their Aadhar, voter and ration cards taken away.

China, having displaced the United States (US) as the hegemon after the US civil war over Trump’s second loss in the Presidential polls – this time to a coloured woman - dissipated its status, could no longer be messed with.  Taiwan, with US having fallen off the radar, fell in line, putting paid to the hope of realist strategists that China would implode, leaving India as the new kid on the block. Dr. S Jaishankar was put to pasture and pension.

After Modi attained nirvan for his upholding the raj dharma ever since his 2002 ‘action-reaction’ days in Gujarat and Ram Rajya that made Amrit kaal possible, the British war-commemorating India Gate was displaced from its location and a temple dedicated to Modi was constructed. The humble tea seller in him had decreed from his death bed that its glory should not match that of the Ayodhya temple that he had conferred on the people.      

A truncated Amrit kaal

In retrospect, it appeared that the ‘developed nation’ strategy required sequencing. Being double-engined, there was more likelihood of a wreck. Both engines, trying to get ahead, tripped each other up. Getting to ‘nation’ required Hindus to give up their identity, anchored historically in caste. Depressed classes were offered cosmetic hand-me-downs, but then instances, as of the upper caste teacher thrashing a lower caste student for partaking of water from his pail, set back the idea. Muslims, already nonentities politically and marginalized socially, did not take up the ghar wapsi bait since it meant getting reinstated at the bottom of the pyramid whence an ancestor had fled. All indicators pointed that they were already there.

As for ‘development’, New India continued plunder of forests, extracted coal, sold it off to China and used the strategic roads - constructed to keep out China - for bringing in China-made goods in return. Corporates into export of armaments drew a blank as Ecuador took India to trade arbiters over imported Dhruv helicopters falling out of its skies. The Agnipath scheme could not absorb all the surplus would-be Agniveers. Most millionaires, not needing cue from the Lalit Modi and Vijay Mallya, decamped for Canada and the Caribbean, in footsteps of 31000 who’ve left since business-friendly Modi’s ascent. Unicorns turned out myths. The right wing control of Hyderabad and Bangalore, led up to restive social relations, frightening off the investments in the two Information Technology hubs. Tamil Nadu’s finance minister challenged the federal arrangement as keeping his people back. Tamils drifted back to its skepticism of the Center that it had given up during the 1962 War.

The Gandhi siblings - physically fit and relative young - took their street fighter avatar that fortuitously emerged from their faceoff with the Enforcement Directorate further. They were joined by the farmers, displaced tribals, Muslims threatened with disenfranchisement, the unemployed, assorted denizens of the Khan Market gang and Lutyens’ Delhi, climate change victims and laid-off Agniveers. Even though China rebuffed them – not needing to lend a hand to have India keel over since India was doing a fine enough job on its very own - the Maoists emerged from their forested hold-outs. Though the Bhima Koregaon detainees numbered into three digits, even though many succumbed to malaria in custody, their apologists in the academia helped forge linkages within the underclass. RSS shakhas were disrupted in the mohallas and rural unrest widened. Climate change heat waves pushed many into poverty, making the country side resemble India of the sixties.

Pakistan, espying opportunity, diverted some Punjabi jihadi energy to Kashmir. There was enough hardware from the $7 billion left over by the Americans in Afghanistan to equip them with. The army reverted from the Ladakh border. The Chinese 1959 claim line was conceded and de-facto Chinese occupation accepted with Ladakh demilitarized. This didn’t help in the western front since Pakistan was now a frontline state again, but being a Chinese proxy enjoyed impunity. It turned out, happily, that India’s nuclear weapons were indeed – unlike what Modi said – meant for Diwali.

In a succession battle, Modi was kicked upstairs as Rashtrapati and had the PM Cares fund to retire with. His saffron-robed successor won a Moghul era-resembling succession battle. Churchill, in his grave, was reportedly pleased to note India reverting to his description of it as a ‘geographical expression’.

A wishful Amrit kaal

The stench from the regime’s electoral pursuit was too much even for bhakts. People could see that though a Muslim, Bilkis Banu was a woman. An agitation equaling the one for Nirbhaya, forced her rapists – even though Brahmin - back into jail. This turned out the second peoples’ victory after the farmer’s agitation. As prices went up, people asked for acche din in return for their vote. Noticing that these were placed some 25 years away by the Amrit kaal rhetoric, they emulated counterparts in Sri Lanka. The once-failed Agniveer agitation - that went violent and lost peoples’ support - was revived. The Sarkar was prevented from disinvesting (euphemism of allowing a national asset to go to seed so as to have an excuse to hand over at a pittance to a capitalist crony). Godi media anchors started getting heckled, its reporters pushed around and its outdoor broadcast equipment mysteriously catching flames.

In 2024, Modi was voted out of power. His ghost-written memoirs only rivalled Mein Kampf sales in Gujarat. Critiques panned it as a Bunch of Lies, recalling RSS’ Guruji’s title, Bunch of Thoughts. His foray into speech-making, à la his good friend Barack Obama, flopped because the teleprompter cat was long out of the bag.

A peoples’ agitation, reminiscent of non-violent Quit India protests, got going in Kashmir. Its leadership invited the Kashmiri Pandits back, guaranteeing their safety and dignity. Pakistan, with a new dispensation in Islamabad - and the military duly chastened from their support and its aftermath for Imran Khan - was more politically able. India was in a position to restart where talks left off in 2008 and had sputtered to a halt with Sushma Swaraj’s Islamabad visit. India had secretly conceded more ground than Modi or Doval would care to admit, so the start point was mutually agreeable to both. Kashmir reverted to statehood and fair elections held.

China, deprived of a proxy partner to tie India down to South Asia, was more amenable to talks. Talks were upgraded to diplomatic level and mandated to deliver a border settlement in a time-bound manner. India was willing to countenance tradeoffs, and went public with the options. This transparency helped mould public opinion, allowing the two sides flexibility on the table. China, for its part, was sanguine that India not a rentier state for the US. Within India, Amit Shah’s ‘chronology’ abandoned, India could reach out to neighbours, together creating a South Asia at ease with itself. 

India made environmental laws stringent. Development was no longer at the cost of future generations or its adivasis. Climate change effects and extreme weather events were not denied any more in policy making circles. Cooperative federalism was more in evidence. Economic devolution to states was its spirit. The judiciary suddenly found its mojo and reopened the case of death of Justice Loya and the case he was engaged with when he died. The accused could not this time round circumvent court appearances.

The right wing party was purged off its extremist leadership that had taken over in a party coup by placing the party’s elders into a marg darshak mandal, and reverted to being a normal conservative party. The Left parties made a comeback with their critique of the economic path hitting home. Thus, India ended up with a four cornered contest: conservatives, middle roaders that included the Congress and identity-based ones, the Left and regional parties. Hinduism was wrested back from those perverting it. Reportedly, a shocked Churchill slipped and fell into purgatory.

Of the three scenarios, it’s easy to see where India is headed. A cataclysm lies ahead. A timeline that has Nadir Shah’s sacking of Delhi, the Mutiny and Partition well spaced out implies that another could be in the offing. The relations with neighbours and an internal situation that is delicate, strategic structural infirmities and doctrinal ambiguities and the leadership’s moral deficit all conspire to set up a ‘perfect storm’. The scapegoat - Muslims - is readily available, so are storm troopers and mass (mis)leaders. The RSS has inserted its tentacles into all walks of life, deflating all institutions of any moral worth. All the Chanakyan cunning of the presiding duo and the vaunted strategic acuity of Doval and his coterie will not measure up. This is known best by them, which explains India pussyfooting round Operation Swift Retort and in Ladakh. It’s far easier to badger a minority through micro-terrorism than to be confrontationist externally. Akhand Bharat is without any cost, being but tall talk. Internally, it is far easier to coast along than to chance reforms of the police and corrections system and insist on application of the rule of law. The fixation on the Dynasty shows up a fear, since the Dynasty can serve to focus and articulate the hopes of the people. If a mere tweet can have the trolls scurrying to the aid of the Emperor, other modes of political action are both plausible and potent. This shows some relief in the gloom. Even as the regime contemplates what to substitute the words, ‘We, the people…’, with ‘We, the Hindus/Sanatanis/Brahmins/Bhatkts….?, ‘the people’ themselves have merely two years to ponder who they are and who they want to be.