https://aliahd66.substack.com/p/hindi-hindu-hindusthan?r=i1fws&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Hindi-Hindu-Hindu-sthan

The last nails in the coffin of the Indian First Republic

Amit Shah launched a trial balloon recently. He opined that Indians must use Hindi as their link language since inter-citizen communication “should be in the language of India". To him, Hindi is the natural alternative to English. He misses that this advantages native speakers of Hindi over those whose language it is not, which evidently happen to be the majority. Thus, there is willy-nilly a subordination of one by the other: the non-Hindi speaker disadvantaged.

Howsoever delicate a policy is thought up for its spread it will amount to an imposition or be perceived as such. Official backing of Hindi elsewhere can tantamount to language imperialism, eliciting backlash, which in extreme can take on proportions of civil war. We need look no further than our neighbours, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In both cases, the term genocide figured to describe the consequence of the language policy imposing an alien language on those whose language it wasn’t. Putting down the civil war led to credible allegations of genocide in both cases.

This shows how sensitive the issue is and therefore requires looking at through a national security lens. That the idea has itself figured owes to ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindu-sthan’ conception of national security. India has not put out a strategic doctrine, but if it were to do so, this trinity would be at its center. The national security minders believe that for unity - signified by the latter term - India needs a dose of the first two. To them Hindu-sthan is not quite Iqbal’s Hindustan (land of the Indus as originally conceived) but abode of Hindus. This conjoins the latter two terms. While this conception builds unity between adherents, it divides these from skeptics, making of those with reservations, anti-national. Therein lie national security connotations of the Hindutva trinity, Hindutva being politicized religion or political Hinduism.

This national security conceptualization has had a life co-extensive with the Hindutva movement. Just as the movement made an advent into the center of national life from the margins in the late eighties and early nineties, it not only brought along its strategic perspective but the world view took further shape as Hindutva went on from the margins to dictating political culture within three decades.

Hindutva’s origins are in Hindu revivalism of the nineteenth century in face of British colonial takeover of India. Its content is captured by the imagery, context and lyrics of Vande Mataram narrated in the book, Anand Math. Though set in the colonial period, the antagonist was not the colonizer, but the Muslim community, that had itself been divested of power by the colonial power. The next influence was fascism in the early twentieth century, with borrowings on ethnic-nationalism from Europe. The competitive interaction with the Muslim League and Muslim separatists in the run up to Partition was its next shaping influence. With Partition, the right wing assumed its place unmistakably, precipitating and participating in the carnage. Partition was as much its handiwork, with its violence potential in conjunction with the separatist Muslim capability and propensities on this score, convincing the leadership that Partition was the only alternative to civil war of uncertain outcome. Though the right wing shot itself in the foot by inspiring the assassination of the Mahatma, its humanitarian interventions in aftermath of Partition could not be wished away. Consequently, the conservative part of the Congress spectrum continued to play footsie with it, even as Nehru kept it marginalized so long as the hangover of freedom lasted. The non-Congress conservative parties were buoyed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an all-India quasi-political outfit then mindful of upper caste and class interests.

Externally, the wars with Pakistan, and the continuing friction with that state over Kashmir, enabled the right wing to espouse an alternative strategic view. In Kashmir, its attitude to integration of that state into the Indian Union, forced the government’s political missteps that in turn led to disaffection in Kashmir. These were capitalized on by the right wing for its purposes of keeping the government on the defensive, a cycle that has continued till the right wing itself in time constituted the government. The government for its part tried to defuse right wing criticism by appropriating a portion of the right wing agenda – reducing the distinctiveness of the state granted in deference to agreements on its entry into the Union - thereby stirring the pot in Kashmir. As regards Pakistan, the right wing maintained an extreme stance of countenancing Akhand Bharat, a figment of imagination that lent itself better to iconography.

Internally, the presence of the right wing, kept the Congress system – that wished to be all things to all people – from doing little more than lip service to the minority Muslim community. Instead, riots were a fixture that helped the right wing take center-stage during their course. In the Indira period, the ‘foreign hand’ turned from being a reference to the United States (US) - with whom Indira was at odds for her socialist turn - to Pakistan’s intelligence agency, then fishing in troubled waters in Punjab. The Congress reaped the nation-under-threat electoral dividend, only to soon have the fiction rudely snatched.

It’s placating the right wings of both communities – Hindu and Muslim - with the Ayodhya opening and Shah Banu episodes set the stage for the right wing to gain center stage. Needing to keep both the Congress and the right wing out, VP Singh unleashed the Other Backward Communities. The right wing, seeing a threat to its upper caste base, seized an opportunity. Riding a chariot across India, its stalwart, Advani, sought to stitch Hindus together by diverting attention to the Ayodhya temple issue, inflating a local land dispute into a national issue. The bringing down of the mosque led to Pakistani complicity in the Bombay bomb blasts, close on the heels of the one-sided violence with state police participation and complicity, against the Muslim minority. This brought forth the ‘Hindu’ aspect of the trinity, with Muslims projected as the internal ‘Other’, a fifth column out to do the bidding of Pakistan, the external ‘Other’.

The tumult in the global order in the period heightened the seeming necessity for unity in diverse polities. Not only did the Soviet Union disappear, but Yugoslavia, another proximate country through the Cold War years, dissolved in violence. The lesson for national security practitioners was that diversity is not a boon. The knitting of Hindus into a vote bank for the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), then started, seemed to provide a way out of the diversity trap. Hinduism had presence across India, but was internally divided by the caste system. The caste system was parochially exploited by political parties. The BJP, not oblivious to caste, appeared to have an answer to political divisiveness and ability to end the era of loose coalition governments of the nineties. At this point, Narendra Modi was dispatched by Vajpayee to Gujarat.

The Muslim Other acquired new dimensions with Narendra Modi, ensconced in Gujarat, taking up his Hindu Hriday Samrat mantle rather seriously. The honorific was itself from his dubious role in the Gujarat pogrom. Those in the security apparatus who were also grappling with internal security issues were looking not only to a unifying potion but a political entrepreneur who could take it forward, ending their worry over fissiparous India. It is speculated here that a nefarious bond formed between the rogue intelligence operatives and the right wing icon. A story of which more needs uncovering is that well before India’s corporate honchos alighted on Modi as the next messiah, India’s intelligence-led ‘deep state’ (to borrow Josy Joseph’s famous description) had picked its mascot.

Evidence for this is in black operations launched by the deep-state comprising rogue intelligence elements in India’s unsupervised intelligence apparatus and right wing extremists. The Gujarat office of the Intelligence Bureau held the back of rogue policemen killing Muslims in encounters supposedly of terrorists out to avenge Gujarat pogrom. That this went on even during the subsequent Congress-led coalition term in office, suggests a ‘deep state’ was active.

There were foreign policy advantages of this that provided legitimacy of sorts: to arraign Pakistan. Since then a political outreach with Pakistan was on, this served to sabotage it. This would help the right wing outbid the government by tacit suggestions that it was the consequential interlocutor and that Pakistan hold its horses till the right wing returned to power. The internal political consequence was more consequential: to return the right wing to power through manufacturing a majority by leveraging the religious identity of Hindus and have them voting qua Hindus as against hitherto along caste lines.  

After some six years in power over two stints (the first of which was truncated after about a year and the second the first full non-Congress term), the right wing had subverted a major portion of the media, itself predominantly upper caste. Since Pakistani proxy war was ascendant in Kashmir and a fresh Indo-Pakistan war had been broadcast nationally, there were enough takers on the ‘external abatement-internal threat’ as the most significant of threats, in line with Chanakya’s thesis some two millennia ago. Thus, a Muslim threat was spuriously manufactured, propagated by closet Hindutavavadis in the strategic community and a media that knew better but was either bought or was a likeminded cheerleader.

The back-draft blew away rationality in strategic discourse. One eminence went so far as to say that the policy of blaming Pakistan for internal security suffered by acknowledging the Hindu provenance of terrorist acts attributed to Muslims, and therefore investigations not be pursued. This, though 26/11 did not require any more exertion on India’s part to keep Pakistan in the dock. Part of the cover up is to valourise the likes of Pragya Thakur and denigrate Hemant Karkare. The strategic community succumbed to the Doval’s stable, anchored in the well funded think tank he led after retirement. Apparently, the conspiracy to take down the anti-corruption movement that had caught the imagination was hatched in its precincts. Military veterans, ferociously looking the part, went on air on Arnab’s show to spread the invective. A former army Chief, who later was spotted in khaki knickers, invited Narendra Modi, till then a provincial chief, to make his debut on the national campaign trail to capture the impregnable Hindu vote bank. The rest as they say is history.

The trinity is a work-in-progress. It provides the framework for the regime’s actions. Hindu-sthan inspires legislation as the Citizens’ Amendment Act, helping turn India from a secular country to one for Hindus. That both Modi and his protégé, Yogi Adityanath aka Bisht, have been voted in twice-over, each with higher percentages the second time round, is the manufacture of a majoritarian democracy from a liberal one on the backs of Hindus. The spread of Hindi by the backdoor shows up the intent. The name tabs on dangrees of naval cadets at their training academy in Kerala are in Hindi.

Change is synonym of instability, since the status quo has to first be unhinged and then retethered to an anchor. The political opposition has been decimated, with the Left missing-in-action for over a decade. The possible contenders are pale imitations of the ruling party and dare not challenge its command of the ideological high ground. Activists, who could have held up a mirror and cried ‘wolf’, have been put on notice by jailing some and intimidating the rest.

The regime believes it has the security conditions in place. It has an intelligence czar as national security adviser. The communalization of the central police forces has been on for over two decades. Its success was most recently visible in the armed police forcing Muslims to sing the national anthem instead of saving them during the Delhi riots. One of these unfortunates died from such coaxing.

The military has been neutered by appointing of regime favourites, as was General Rawat. The current delay in appointing his successor owes to higher demands on virtue signaling by brass-hats for gaining the regime’s attention. Since Hindutva is in the final stage of consolidation before the assault on the Constitution is procedurally made, there is need for a believer in the orthodoxy to be in place, lest the military uncharacteristically get wrong political ideas into its head. That an Engineer officer has been positioned to take over as Army Chief shows coup proofing of sorts. An Engineer, being out of the charmed circle of combat arms brass, cannot be sure of taking it along if he ever needs to; besides, his being at the head undercuts the combat arms lobby. The three-year ‘tour of duty’ scheme must be seen as another example of coup proofing, so that even if the brass gets its wrong, it is unable to implement any ideas  since it would not command allegiance of a limited term rank and file. If it were to do so, a situation as developed for the coup against Erdogan can be expected.

Thus, though the regime has the elements in place for the final nails in the coffin of liberal democracy, it bears warning off. The trinity, seemingly an answer to India’s challenges, may not prove the best potion. If it fails then India is endangered. The potential for failure is intrinsic in the trinity itself. Hindi may not help with unity. The assumption is that with the BJP spread across India, the state governments would be able to administer the bitter pill. As in Karnataka, they can use the Muslim scapegoat to weld Hindus, but that still does not answer if it is enough for Kannadigas to take to Hindi. Tamil Nadu is an entirely different kettle-of-fish altogether. The Sri Lankan experience, including that of India’s vaunted military, must not be forgotten.

Being Hindu, as basis for first-class citizenship, may not build the solidarity to paper over the widening economic divides resulting from the corporatist bent of the regime. Muslims are being offered first-class citizenship, in case they ‘return’. Their choice is being conditioned by a foretaste of what second-class citizenship feels like, being administered from Karnataka to Delhi and Assam. Micro-terror in lynchings is supplement.

As for Hindu-sthan, it suffers the limitation of restricting India’s ambition to the Hindu demographic spread. India, at the center of the subcontinent, would be at odds with its periphery. It would end the strategic unity of South Asia, reforging of which is arguably the sole way for South Asia to transcend Partition and reclaim its pride of place lost with colonization, defined not as Hindutva has it, with arrival of Muslims but the advent of British.

The jury is out on the Hindutva project. It is not certain the electorate voted for it, but it is certain that most of the voters did not. Even so, since it’s the closest Hindutva has got to clinching the project, it will be taken to fruition. A benign outcome can be prayed for of course, but in case it goes awry, the use of the central police will add fuel to the fire. Layering by the Army may worsen matters since it will be the emerging, new Army of the second Republic, New India.

 https://aliahd66.substack.com/p/who-murdered-international-order?utm_source=twitter&s=w

Who murdered International Order?

Or Mystery of the Missing Body

International Order allegedly died at Bucha. It had been tottering over since the day Putin plunged a knife into Ukraine, but to the cognoscenti that knife was one borrowed from the Americans. The blood from their using the knife in Muslim lands had barely dried, when they lent it to Putin. Even as they were drawing blood with that very same knife in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, they set up an ambush using Ukraine as bait. Enticed, Russia took over the knife from the West and set upon Ukraine. So, for sure, we have two murderers: Russia and America. 

But, as commentators remind, both have supporters with bloody hands. While the Americans cobbled up coalitions made of up the West when they went about visibly digging the grave of International Order, the Russians have China holding their back. To the extent the West participated in twisting the knife, it is party to murder. Rumour has it that Putin got a tacit nod from China for sticking the knife into Ukraine when he went over for the winter Olympics. Though China has spooked its neighbours, it is at best accomplice to the crime, not having physically stuck a knife into International Order. Spectators are aplenty, those who might have played a part in staying the slaying. Instead, they either sat on the fence or swayed to one side. In not collectively stopping the murder, together they prospectively make the fourth murderer. 

International Order was killed since it prevented deeds the murderers wished to go about with, without feeling embarrassed about it. International Order valued sovereignty and non-interference, which the West could not see bandied by the countries of the Middle East. It backed status quo in the region based on pro-American authoritarian regimes for the sake of its local friend, Israel. This put out some locals, who ganged up and flew some planes into American buildings, killing many. 

Claiming this to be the first nail into the coffin of International Order, the Americans took the knife to Afghanistan to take out the Arab group that challenged the chaperon of International Order was hiding out. Tasting blood, they then went about reshaping Middle East in their own image, beginning with taking their feud with Saddam to the logical conclusion. They claimed Saddam first challenged International Order by an armed attack on his neighbour, Kuwait, though his armed attack on another neighbour, Iran, earlier had elicited not such complaint. Removing Gaddafi followed and then they overstretched by going after Bashar. The Iranian bomb-in-the-basement kept their knife at bay both from Bashar and Iran itself. 

The Russians – ruing loss in stature as a global power - saw their opportunity to get back at the Americans not only for Americans ambushing them in Afghanistan, but also for what followed: hara-kiri of the Soviet Union. Espying the Russians seeing an opportunity to do them down, the Americans, on their part, tied Russians down with colour revolutions. The Russians put up a fight in Georgia, pulling a Kosovo on the Americans. 

The Americans hit back, setting up Ukraine for an ambush of the Russians. With their Ukrainian client unsaddled by the Americans at the Maidan, the Russians went into Syria to steady Bashar - who the Americans wanted to unseat. Backed by China – that wanted to join the United States as superpower - the Russians punched above their weight. Putin wanted to replay the Soviet past he was loath to see disappear when as its intelligence official he saw it wither and die. 

The Russians were gratified to see the Americans wanting to leave Afghanistan. Taliban, receiving a lifeline through Pakistan, with Iran, Russia and China in the background, outlasted the Americans. The ignominy required Americans to get back at their antagonists. Against Russia, Ukraine provided an enticing killing ground. 

Having spotted an ambush site there in Russian occupation partially of Donbas and incorporation of Crimea into Russia when Yanukovich was displaced, they set about ensnaring Putin. Keeping up a din that he was about to attack, they handed him the knife they’d been wielding elsewhere. Enticed into using it, he stuck it into Ukraine, nailing instead International Order’s other vestment – preserving political independence and territorial integrity from armed attack.  

Pumping in easy-to-use, hand-held armaments for the Ukrainian army and a host of white-supremacist volunteers, the West stopped Putin from twisting the knife. Though Ukraine twists and turns in agony, it valiantly tries to snatch the knife and turn it on Russia. This keeps the two from talking peace, as each tries to bleed the other. The Americans, keeping the Ukrainians on life support and promising rehab, are waiting for Russia to implode. Unbeknownst is that their main adversary, China, is instead in their sights. A weakened Russia helps isolate China. Two birds with one stone, Ukrainians paying a price. 

And Bucha happened. Genocide made its appearance. It’s a vulture that alights when convenient, like in Darfur, but not in Iraq between the wars when 600000 children died from US sanctions. Knife wounds in Ukraine include humanitarian protection and human rights. Somalia, Yemen, Gaza, West Bank, Syria and Afghanistan did not elicit the expulsion of the perpetrator from the Human Rights Council. Libya was ousted the last time, but not the West for what they proceeded to do in Libya thereafter and for eddies across the Sahel. Neither did wars of aggression trigger off the International Court of Justice. The International Criminal Court stepped up even as the war started, and has begun investigations – happily breaking the jinx that its domain is only Africa. Certain is its proactivism cannot and will not include Israel and the West, least of all the US. That its domain does not yet include the crime of aggression is so convenient. 

Allegedly, International Order lies dead. There is the United Nations Charter in which is written up International Order. The Charter-era world order was instead first made up by the Cold War. The two sides did pretty much as they pleased, with the areas not part of the two sides serving as vent for to keep their warring cold. Once one of the two sides tired and died, the other touted International Order, even as it set about putting nails into its coffin. Resurrecting, Russia joined in nailing International Order. Rising China used International Order, without putting a check on either the West or Russia. Now it’s seeing Russia put the final nail into International Order, so that it can manufacture an International Order all its own when Russia has taken down America. The UN is missing-in-action, merely another forum in which to beat the other side. International Order turned out merely mistress of balance of power. No body found, there was no murder; only murderers left. 

 https://aliahd66.substack.com/p/chinar-corps-under-the-scanner?r=i1fws&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Chinar Corps under the scanner

Does its screening of The Kashmir Files matter?

As a tweeple, I have had a marginal existence in the cyber-world. My tweets do not normally score more than in upper double digits of hits. When inflated by a friendly boost from some or other cyber-world heavyweight, a few manage a four digits worth of hits. This piece is about one tweet that managed to get to an unfamiliar level of mid-four digits.

The tweet in question expressed my disappointment that the army thought it kosher to screen The Kashmir Files in the Chinar Auditorium at the Badami Bagh cantonment, Srinagar.

Reportedly, the movie was routinely screened for a week for movie goers in cantonments. On the surface, it is unremarkable that a movie that’s set post-Covid box-office records to have a run at the theater as its weekly fixture. Military families in remote stations must partake of national life, consuming cultural artifacts alongside the rest of the country being one way of sharing the nation’s idiom. It would be churlish to deny them their small delights – watching current hits - in a challenging environment. Besides it would be patronizing to believe that they don’t have a mind of their own and can be conditioned by a film’s well known drift. Some with multiple tenures in the Valley know enough to absorb only the relevant from the infinite open-domain resources of internet.

However, from the replies the tweet elicited, there was also a ‘screening’ – perhaps multiple - for select Kashmiris, including Kashmiri Pandits. This lends a pause.

A tweet in reply had it that ‘an endeavour was made to provide ppl (people) from all stratas (sic) of society to view a feature film which they otherwise had no means to watch!” Another reported that, “In fact, cause I’m a writer, I was politely requested to write an honest review.” An editor of Outlook, who attended a screening as part of his wider tour of the Valley, reported that the intent was to spread a ‘nationalistic message’. Since the phrase is in quotes, it may have been his uniformed minder’s words, with the minder either being from the publicity or Information Warfare Cell of the headquarters, Chinar Corps. As evidence of some success in information warfare activity, a couple of response tweets carried messaging from Kashmiris inviting their brethren Kashmiri Pandits back to the Valley, though unverifiable if this was in the aftermath of watching the film.

My original reaction to the Outlook piece informing of this bit of conveying of ‘nationalistic message’ by the Army to Kashmiris was prompted by knowledge that the film has turned out a political hot-potato. Though as admitted in an earlier post I have not watched it and have no intention of doing so, my impression of the movie is from the several critical commentaries I have read of it.

So what makes the Chinar Corps think there is a ‘nationalistic message’ in the movie that needs passing on to Kashmiris? The answer is easy: the prime minister and assorted political bigwigs have declaimed on the movie’s worth. Worse would be if the Chinar Corps itself thinks the same. Since, it’s a political movie – with the director admitting to an ‘agenda’ – the Chinar Corps’s action bears scrutiny.

The yardstick for forming a view on this has been received by the Indian Army at inception. The two extracts below help the reader make up her mind. It is interesting that there are no equally compelling writings or speeches by Indians that I can recall as easily which I could add here or use instead. Mahatma Gandhi’s words to visiting military officers, including General Thimayya, when queried on what should be their attitude to the freedom movement, comes close.

Clearly, the Indian Army has so readily taken on an apolitical character that no one post Independence thought it suitable to reiterate its necessity. Is it that this acceptance and internalization of the apolitical characteristic of militaries has made Indian Army complacent on this score that it does not reflect any more on what apolitical means in changing times? Alternatively, to refer to the apolitical identity would be to tacitly admit it is under stress, so no one wishes to rock the boat?

The two extracts below are from addresses to gentlemen cadets at Indian Military Academy, where the induction took place of intake fresh from a civilian, political, world. The colonialists wanted to alert those entering the Army to drop that part of their identity as they got into the uniform. The first is from Sir Philip Chetwode, who inaugurated the Academy on 10 December 1932. He said:

“I venture to offer you two pieces of advice. Firstly, the Indian young man of education seems very attracted by politics. May I urge you to remember that politics do not, and cannot, find any place in Army life. An Army can have no politics. It is the paid servant of the people, and is at the disposal of the Government of the day, whatever may be the political complexion of that Government. Once there is any suspicion that an Army, or any part of it, is biased politically, from that moment the Army has lost the hill, confidence of the nation who pays for it. It is no longer impartial, and that way lies chaos and civil war.”

The government at the time was a colonial one that needed the army on its side, when the freedom movement was getting into stride, so the emphasis on being apolitical is well taken. On Independence, in his address, General Roy Bucher, the British Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, retained till General Cariappa then engaged in chasing Pakistani raiders out of Kashmir was elevated to the highest rank, in his address in May 1948 said along similar lines:

“What then are hallmarks of a good officer – the outward and the visible signs? Firstly, I would put Devotion to the Service. The interest of the Army must come first in our thoughts and in your actions all the time. Remember that the Army and indeed all the Services, are the servants of the Government in power at the time and the political complexion of a particular Government makes not the slightest difference to the fact. As soldier you are not concerned with politics. There is nothing wrong in your having political opinions and in your expressing them with moderation in private conversation but that is a very different matter to expressing political opinions in public or allowing such opinion to influence your actions in any way. No army which concerns itself with politics is ever of any value. Its discipline is poor, its morale is rotten and its reliability and efficiency is bound to be of the lowest order. You have only to look at certain foreign armies which are constant mixed up in politics to realize the truth of what I say. It follows, therefore, that the Army has never the slightest right to question the policy of the Government. Implicit obedience to the orders issued by the Government is essential and only in this manner with the interests of the country be fully served. And so you see that devotion to the Service implies devotion to the Country as well.”

So does the Chinar Corps get away? It needs proving that theirs’ is not an apolitical act, a rather subjective proposition about which all manner of opinion can be mistaken as sound.

Chinar Corps is not on an island. It is well aware that there is a political cultural churn towards majoritarianism, with the ruling party as the flag-bearer. This has not superseded the erstwhile liberal-secular democratic system in which citizenship is of equals, as yet. The ruling dispensation for its part has exerted every sinew to shift the goal posts. The Kashmir Files is a right wing artifact to advance the political agenda and ideology of the right wing. No wonder it found appreciation at the highest level.

Importantly, Chinar Corps, being the lead in counter insurgency in the Valley and conversant with the period the movie covers, best knows the departures from the reality made in the movie. That the movie has uniformly shown all Kashmiri Muslims as repulsive should alert it to the suitability or otherwise for it to sponsor its viewing in Kashmir.

Indeed, it is arguable there is no need for the movie to have figured in the routine bill of fare for entertainment of troops and families at that military station housing the headquarters of the nation’s lead counter insurgency security force dealing with the country’s most significant national security problem. By all means off-duty troops can access any entertainment option of their choice, but considering that they are at the spear end of this national endeavour at ending the insurgency, their attitudes are significant. Inappropriate conditioning and exposures are avoidable.

If injected with hate – as the movie has reportedly done viewers in rest of India – how it impacts their dealing with the center of gravity of insurgency – the people – can reasonably be negatively conjectured. This makes professionalism of Chinar Corps suspect, since it reveals an absence of client orientation: the principal clients being the hapless Kashmiris on whose body politic and bodies, insurgency and its counter is playing out.

That military members are entitled to political opinions is their individual right. They don’t cease being citizens, only are citizens with added responsibility. However, none can use the vantage of an appointment to further a political position. In this case, Chinar Corps handle has the distinction of putting out the lone tweet wishing the prime minister on his birthday in an obsequious, unmilitary way. This is compounded by Chinar Corps’ act under scrutiny here, which if unremarked sets up a trend.

It can be argued that routine ‘A’ and Information Warfare matters don’t distract the commanding general, who takes a ‘wide-angled view’ instead – as was the leadership model favoured by General Arjun Ray for counter insurgent leadership at the operational level in his Kashmir Diary. A wide-angled view implies a political sensitivity and knowledge there-from of boundaries. Such sensitivity is not self-evident from this case. Apprehension of the reverse being the case cannot but surface, in that, the leadership may not be averse to propagating the content the movie projects.

A critique of the position taken here can well be that by making this an ‘issue’ politicization of a triviality is to the detriment of the force. It is itself politicization, the factor the article riles against. As – hopefully – demonstrated above, viewing of the movie either by Kashmiris or by counter insurgents does nothing to advance counter insurgency aims. In fact, it sets the clock back, not by harking back but by upending the reality in doing so. Neither is truth nor history trivial.

Trivialising both is instead to the detriment of the force. By all means, manipulating the truth is part of statecraft and the ‘internal’ – military members - are a legitimate target of information operations. They can be exposed to a sanitized version of the reality and preserved from counter narratives. However, in this case, there is no call for them to be exposed to demonization of Kashmiris, considering their role. The enemy is not the people. Chinar Corps’ action does not lend confidence that was merely holding up a mirror to Kashmiris, since the image is a distorted one, contorted by the political leanings of its creator. Are we to believe Chinar Corps was persuaded by the movie?

The Chinar Corps action provide yet another peg to make the wider point that though the military may not be interested in politics, but politics - as it is turning out - is interested in the military. Politics provides the context to a military’s role and its showing on its mandate. Changes in political culture potentially have knock-on changes in strategic culture and organizational culture. Therefore, the military will not be spared the political turn to India, just as no Constitutional institution has.

As a self-regarding institution with a national – as against a partisan and parochial – focus, it must maintain its apolitical character. If its self-regulation is found wanting in this, it is liable to be alerted by the attentive public, civil society and contending political forces. These have a right – if not a duty – to intercede for the sake of the Republic. Believing that their doing so is politicization, as against what they are alerting against, is instead to be political. At any rate the military cannot be a participant in the tumult – such as in this case by providing a forum for the movie – lest the military - a political novice - end up being (ab)(mis)used by a side or other.

Note: It is for another post whether and to what extent being apolitical in a circumstance of political change favours the change and is therefore to be political.