ICYMI #Tribune Opinion: India resets the new normal; ceasefire against Pakistan just a pause if it doesn’t behave
Late last week, the India-Pakistan hostilities ceased after India hit Pakistan’s air bases, making the Pak DGMO beg for a ceasefire. Later, giving a clear message to Pakistan, Indian PM Narendra Modi warned that talks, trade and water will not be discussed till terror originating from Pakistani soil ends.
After decades of attempts at every possible approach to hold Pakistan accountable for acts of terrorism, India had reached a point where an aggressive shift in policy became inevitable. Now, a new normal has been established by PM Modi. As per this new normal, this ceasefire is not an end but a pause to Operation Sindoor and the terms and conditions have been laid down, writes Jawed Ashraf in his article 'Not going back from the new normal'.
However, in her Op-Ed piece, 'The hyphen stays between India and Pak', senior journalist Nirupama Subramanian brings to the fore that the ‘new normal’ of treating every terror attack as an ‘act of war’ is unsustainable in the long run. Next time, Delhi’s friends would want to see concrete evidence of Pak involvement before India retaliates. The danger is that we have handed the levers to trigger an India-Pakistan conflict to the adversary with the act of war pronouncement, she writes.
From India’s policy shift to the core contradictions in the West’s response to terror, Lt Gen SS Mehta (retd) writes in his Op-Ed piece 'To win the war before the war' that when it hurts the West, it calls it terror but not otherwise. Now India has rewritten the rules of the game, which is to win the war before the war. This is the new norm in the escalatory ladder.
Meanwhile, super cop Julio Ribeiro complimented the prime minister in his article, 'PM Modi has come up trumps' with the way he handled the situation after the Pahalgam attack. But he also had a word of advice for the PM -- he would have to win the hearts of the locals, all of whom are not extremists -- to end terrorism in J&K.
Unlike Ribeiro, in a critique, former Ambassador to Iran and UAE KC Singh has pointed out that if the dialogue process with Pakistan, based on the Gujral doctrine, failed, so has the post-2019 Modi doctrine. The Pahalgam attack meant that deterrence like the Balakot strikes, constitutional changes in J&K, et al failed. And Pakistan would often hint that terrorism would end if India ceded Kashmir. Now, India has a matching card—you will get Indus waters once terror ends.
Amongst all the discussions on the post-India-Pak flare-up, later in the week one good thing happened and that was the meeting of External Affair Minister S Jaishankar with Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi. And to top it all, India did that openly without unduly bothering about what the world would say. So, the story of how India won over the Taliban is perhaps the most fascinating of all, this week, writes The Tribune Editor-in-Chief Jyoti Malhotra in her weekly column The Great Game 'Three morals and a Trump story'.
Shifting focus from the battleground to the digital frontlines, we saw the social media warriors armed with half-facts and half-lies during the standoff. Yashwant Deshmukh and Sutana Guru in their article 'Social media warriors join ranks of useful idiots', took the shameless social media warriors to task who blatantly trolled Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri while he was working round the clock handling the fallout of Operation Sindoor. Also bearing the brunt was Himanshi Narwal, all of 22, newly married and tragically widowed in the Pahalgam attack. All she had done was ask fellow Indians not to target an entire community in the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack. And immediately, Himanshi, who had been till then elevated by these social media warriors to the status of Mother India, had to face incessant abuse, and conspiracy theories were floated about how she had been indoctrinated during her days as a student in JNU.
