Off target

Govt should share information on Balakot

One of the key reasons for India’s diplomatic victory over Pakistan in the latest skirmish is that the country is a functioning and vibrant democracy, not a failed client state like its adversary. As with all democracies with elected governments, the government is liable to be questioned by its citizenry about acts of domestic and international significance that are conducted on behalf of the Indian people. The proclivity of the ruling dispensation to equate basic and obvious questions about the Indian Air Force’s actions in Balakot as “anti-national” is wide of the mark. To suggest, further, that seeking information about what the IAF, crossing the international border for the first time since 1971, actually hit and the number of casualties implies criticism of the Indian military is even more off target. The military’s capabilities are not, and never have been, in question. Indeed, such observations betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between the government and the armed forces. Unlike Pakistan, the military in India answers to the executive, not the other way around. It is a fundamental founding principle of the Indian state. So, the clarity that is being sought post-Balakot is an issue only the government — not the military — should answer.

This is all the more important as reporting by the international media suggests that the IAF mission either hit non-existent targets or missed them. They have also reported one minor casualty, not 300 dead terrorists, information “unofficially” circulated and which the media appeared to accept. But so far, the official communication strategy has comprised stolid statements from foreign ministry spokespeople (who took no questions from journalists) and a chaotic press conference by the armed forces that provided a partial picture. Instead of providing corroborating evidence — basic things such as before and after satellite imagery — the government has chosen to enmesh the issue in emotive election rhetoric. This is feeding into such dangerously febrile expressions of muscular nationalism that an academic was attacked for critiquing the air strike on social media. 

On Monday, the government had Air Chief  Marshal B S Dhanoa address a press conference, at which he stoically insisted the IAF hit the targets they were given — an elliptical reference to coordinates that are fed into missiles based on intelligence. On casualties, he flatly said only the government could answer. Yet, it was not a member of the government, nor of the Cabinet Committee on Security nor, indeed, of the security establishment who offered an answer but Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah, who told a rally in Gujarat that “over 250” Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists were killed in the Balakot strike. He did not quote any source for his information. Why a party functionary should make such claims when the government has not confirmed them is a mystery. Over the past week, the prime minister’s triumphal statements on Balakot suggest that electoral considerations are overriding the need to give the Indian people an honest accounting of a major offensive operation that brought us to the brink of war. The best way for the government to blunt criticism and silence questioners is to provide facts.