Forget Pakistan, Modi needs to send a signal to his team
"When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk."
- Tuco, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Prime Minister Narendra Modi should send some of his esteemed colleagues to a busy traffic signal one of these June afternoons. To make it better, when the lights are off and a constable is on duty. Just to observe what a signal means. The Oxford Dictionary says the word signal is "a gesture, action, sound, etc, intended to convey warning, direction, or information; an intimation". Some need to note that no words are involved in the act of signalling. The essence and the meaning of this significant word are clearly lost on them.
Ajit Kumar Doval, the man who helmed the successful operation to kill the terrorists responsible for the massacre of Indian soldiers in Manipur, must be disappointed with the post-operation skullbusting bluster. In intelligence circles, legends abound of this man's missions. But those are legends and nobody, and definitely not he, goes around tom-tomming them. That's how covert missions are accomplished. The Indian Army's operation inside the Burmese territory was overtly a covert one. The nation only needed to know that a special squad had eliminated the terrorists and destroyed their camps. The details would have surfaced, sooner or later.
What happened instead was ministers going around detailing the operation. They did not stop at that. They made it a point to call it a signal to Pakistan. The chest-thumping has not gone down well with Pakistan and expectedly so. What should worry the government is that this is not in India's security interests either. Saying that this is a signal defeats the purpose of sending a signal. Defence minister Manohar Parrikar's image of a sensible, thinking man has eroded since he went on record about using terrorists to kill terrorists. That too was supposed to be a signal to Pakistan. With that careless stroke, he surrendered a significant chunk of traditional Indian moral high ground to the enemy. The Sharm al-Sheikh moment arrived early for this NDA government. In one of the most embarrassing Indian diplomatic slips vis-à-vis Pakistan, in the beach resort town of Sharm al-Sheikh, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had agreed not to interfere in Balochistan, thus weakening India's stated position that it never did. A large section of Pakistanis have always blamed every terror attack on their homeland on India. All turn out to be the work of their own homegrown terrorists. But in future, the mud may stick, thanks to Parrikar's off-the-cuff remark.
The last government was accused of being incommunicative. This government is being accused of over communicating. Over communication is not such a bad thing, if the talking heads know what they are talking after thinking. The pre-election blabber can be forgotten for being pre-election jumlas but the government of India's communication has to be clear and considered. The motormouth image of some functionaries and spokespersons has already damaged the government's credibility and focus. If a Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti learns to shut up, a Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi goes full Giriraj Singh. Then, there are party rowdies like Sakshi Maharaj and Yogi Adityanath who keep the cauldron heated. In this cacophony of crosstalk, all the good work that the government does or may be doing is drowned out. The prime minister's development agenda has to depend on Amitabh Bachchan commercials. We know what happened to both the India Shining shindig of NDA-1 and the Bharat Nirman blitz of UPA-2. The agenda has to be reiterated in one voice, all the time, because public memory and attention span are shorter than ever.
The Myanmar operation is significant in ways more than one. It's not often that India retaliates and takes pre-emptive action like it did. That India and Myanmar have an agreement to help each other in tackling insurgencies helped. But the loud proclamations put the friendly neighbour in an embarrassing situation. We made it look like Pakistan in l'affaire bin Laden, helpless in the face of a superpower thirsty for the blood of its enemy. No country would accept or swallow a slight on its sovereignty. The doctrine of this aggressive hot pursuit must include respecting the sensibilities of the partner nation. The objective of an operation like this is to send a signal to the terrorists. That objective was achieved. If the objective was to send Pakistan a signal, not so much. This will not instil fear but insecurity in the western neighbour. History stands witness that a sense of insecurity has never led to peace, the objective of all sane wars and military action.
That constant talking can switch the brain off is a scientific fact. The Broca's area, the command centre for human speech, does switch off when we talk out loud. Because the centre of the brain gets entangled in words and metaphors, meanings and insinuations. In his second year already, Modi needs to tell his talking heads to shoot, like Tuco, but not from the mouth.