Whenever India beats Pakistan, it is usually an occasion for national rejoicing. Not this time though. When the Indian cricket team thrashed Pakistan in its Asia Cup fixture, the mood was sombre. Everyone was happy that India had won, of course, but there was also a second emotion at work: a feeling that the match should never have taken place to begin with.
I wrote a few weeks ago about why I opposed our participation in a tournament that forced us to play cricket with Pakistan, something we had decided we would never do, so I am not going to go over those arguments again. But what is clear is that the BCCI could not have proceeded if the government of India had objected. The government chose not to intervene, in a rare misjudgement of the public mood, and the anger on social media was so intense that people who are normally strongly pro-BJP quickly joined in the condemnation — though they carefully chose to roundly abuse the BCCI, a ploy that diverted attention from the government’s own tacit complicity in our participation.
Even the BCCI recognised how much anger there was, and opted for a symbolic rejection of handshakes between the teams, which, of course, raised its own questions: if you won’t even shake their hands then why give a terror state legitimacy by playing a globally televised match against Pakistan?
Unfinished business?
What accounts for the bitterness that now dominates the attitudes of most Indians when it comes to Pakistan? Why are we so angry even though we won a war against Pakistan and forced it to sue for peace? Why aren’t we just contemptuous and dismissive? Why is there still a lingering feeling of resentment and a sense that we have unfinished business?
The answers to those questions are complex, but here are some factors.
First, and perhaps the most important, is the anger over terrorism. The Pahalgam attack may have evoked an even more powerful desire for retaliation (or just revenge) than the Pulwama massacre, since the victims of the 22 April attack were innocent tourists who were murdered in front of their families only because of their religion. This was not about seeking ‘independence’ for Kashmir or whatever other bogus causes terrorists usually invoke. This was a calculated attempt to stir up communal tensions in India. The terrorists had hoped that Indians would turn on each other. Instead, we decided to strike at the heart of the terror network itself: Pakistan.
Though it is now clear that we did substantial damage to terrorist organisations within Pakistan, it still angers most Indians that Pakistan seems to have escaped global censure or opprobrium. It was able to pretend that the war was not about its role as a sponsor of terror but merely the latest episode in the long–running dispute over Kashmir. Much of the world bought this lie and treated Pakistan and India as moral equals.
This outrages Indians, and when our team goes off to play cricket against Pakistan, we feel it further legitimises Pakistan’s status as our moral equal.
Secondly, and this is crucial to the sense of unfinished business, we feel we were forced to pull back before we were able to teach Pakistan a lesson. The reason Pakistan asked for a ceasefire was because India had done significant damage to its military installations. Another two days of fighting and the damage would have been compounded.
But, before that could happen, even before we could reveal that the Pakistani military had asked for a cessation of hostilities, Donald Trump announced that he had arranged a ceasefire. We protested that this was not the case but Trump has doubled down on that claim, repeating it again and again. For Indians, it was as though we were denied the total victory that was coming because of the unwelcome intercession of a third party.
The Indian government has tried to assuage public sentiment by saying things like ‘Operation Sindoor is still on’. But clearly, it isn’t. Otherwise why would we be playing cricket with the enemy?
Thirdly, we have been confused and worried by Washington’s stand. Some of this is because we had grown smug about our relationship with America. A new generation has not been told about how the US armed Pakistan during the 1965 war or how it openly supported the genocidal Yahya Khan regime during the 1971 conflict, even sending the Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India. The Kashmir insurgency was launched in 1989 using arms that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had supplied to Pakistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. And many of the fighters who infiltrated into the Valley had been trained by the CIA.
We forgot all this once our relations with America improved, and believed that the US would never side with a country that had sheltered Osama bin Laden. It was not an unreasonable assumption, but Washington has always acted to advance its own interests not because of any love for India or Pakistan. In 1971, for instance, it turned a blind eye to the massacres in Dhaka because Islamabad was acting as a conduit to Beijing.
Also read: A social contract protected Indians abroad as the ‘model minority’. It’s tearing now
India can prevail
One day, we will discover the real reason why Donald Trump is now courting Pakistan, but the lesson is clear: India chose non-alignment for logical reasons. Our foreign policy cannot depend on the shifting interests of the great powers.
We managed to win two wars when America was on Pakistan’s side. We will do it again. And in any case, America changes sides all the time, so who knows when it will dump Pakistan again? But Indians still need to be convinced of this and must stop wasting too much time worrying about Trump.
Fourthly: though we don’t talk about this enough, many of us were surprised by the changing nature of modern warfare. We still think of wars as infantry battles with air support. That’s how we won in 1965 and 1971. In Kargil, it was hand-to-hand combat that allowed courageous Indian soldiers to win back occupied territory.
We are confused by wars that are fought mainly with missiles, aircraft, and drones. We don’t realise that those battles have their own rules and that losing aircraft (as we did) is not a major reverse if the air strikes are successful (as they were) and we do not lose our pilots.
At some subliminal level, we worry that this new kind of war will rob India of the advantage it has always had over the much smaller Pakistan. Do we now have to take Pakistan more seriously as a military threat?
The short answer is: no. We can prevail in this kind of war too. And if the last conflict had gone on for another two days, we would have proven that; which is why the Pakistanis asked Trump to intervene.
The public mood today is one of anger and bemusement. The government needs to acknowledge this. It needs to be upfront with the people of India about our military strength without obfuscations about lost aircraft. And it needs to globally isolate Pakistan as a terror state. The worst thing it could have done in such a situation was to play cricket with a country that opposes everything India stands for.
Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist, and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)