Pulwama, China and Atmanirbharta: Is Modi at the End of His Tether?

The Pulwama attack had faded from public discourse after the 2019 elections. So why are moves afoot to bring it back into the limelight again?

Prime Minister Narendra Modi along with Defence Minister Rajnath Singh arrives to take part in the 74th Independence Day celebrations, at Red Fort in New Delhi, Saturday, Aug. 15, 2020. Photo: PTI

A decade, or just seven years ago, I would have treated the recent Hindustan Times’ ‘exclusive’ that the “Pakistani government” had been “directly involved” in planning, training the perpetrators, and executing the February 2019 Pulwama attack as a scoop.

But with the PIB’s accreditation (that gave special correspondents unfettered access to officials) withdrawn from the four most important ministries; with CCTVs recording everyone who goes in and out of a government office, and with officers a reporter wants to see having to come to the reception to receive her or him, I am left with no option but to consider the report as a government plant.

This suspicion is reinforced by a propaganda video inserted as an advertisement on YouTube videos, which I personally saw several times on August 14 and 15. I don’t know who paid for or sponsored the advertisement but it refers repeatedly to the Pulwama suicide attack and carries parts of an interview with external affairs minister S. Jaishankar in which he describes Pakistan as a difficult neighbour that has used terrorism as a diplomatic tool, and refused to normalise relations with India despite several overtures by New Delhi.

The Pulwama attack had faded from public discourse after the 2019 elections. So why are moves afoot to bring it back into the limelight again?

The answer is obvious: it is because Bihar is going to the polls in October, and the single largest contingent of migrant workers, who suffered the most from the sudden lockdown and denial of facilities to travel home in March, belong to that state. With nothing to woo them with, Modi has found himself at the end of his tether and fallen back on the tried and tested weapon of hyper-nationalism.

This may be why the version of the Pulwama attack that the NIA has leaked has gone beyond the accusation that Modi and defence minister Arun Jaitley had made in February 2019, that “Pakistan had orchestrated the attack on the convoy in Pulwama”.

According to the newspaper’s informant, the chargesheet, which will be ready by the end of this month, will prove that “Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its proxy, Jaish-e-Mohammad, planned and executed the state-sponsored attack, for which highly-trained terrorists were sent to India”.

A damaged CRPF vehicle being taken away after the Pulwama attack. Photo: PTI

More disturbingly, “that Islamabad i.e the elected civilian government, was also in the know of the attack. It claims that ‘strong technical, documentary and material evidence have been collected, apart from experts’ reports and evidence shared by foreign agencies, which prove that the Pakistani government was directly involved in the attack, aimed to create unrest in India”.

The strength of these extremely serious accusations will be known only when the chargesheet becomes public. But the calculated leak has raised a host of questions that, one is sure, Modi would have preferred to remain buried.

The first is, why now, when we are in a standoff with China that is inevitably bringing it and Pakistan closer together? Why bring forward their marriage, instead of seeking ways to postpone, if not prevent it?

The second is, why give your opposition within the country a chance to rake up issues and ask questions whose answers can only hurt you? For the fact is that even if everything the NIA chargesheet reveals is well founded, it will still not explain why Modi, who knew that a serious attack in Kashmir was imminent, did nothing to prevent it, either by warning Pakistan against it in advance, or by putting troops in Kashmir on high alert, and taking steps to minimise their exposure.

Let us take these sins of omission one by one: One week before the suicide attack, which took place on February 14, the Pakistani army suddenly moved to battle stations in Kashmir. This is a huge movement that could not but have been reported to Delhi and Srinagar. There could have been only one reason for making this extremely expensive and, as the radio chatter in the Pakistan army showed, unpopular move, in the dead of winter. Pakistan had planned, or had got to know of, a major attack that was imminent in Kashmir, and felt it necessary to be ready for a reprisal attack by the Modi government.

Analysts in Indian military intelligence leaned towards the view that Islamabad did not get to know of this attack till February 7, because it had received no information about any such impending move from its sources till then. But it could also be because Islamabad had been kept out of the Jaish-ISI loop till the last moment.

Whatever the truth may have been, by the evening of February 7, there was absolutely no way in which Delhi would not have been aware of Pakistan’s sudden action.

It could have been a coincidence, but the very next day, February 8, an intelligence note, marked “extremely urgent” was circulated to all branches of the Central Reserve Police Force, Border Security Force, the Indian Army, the Central Industrial Security Force, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police and the Jammu and Kashmir Police. It warned of a large scale attack using IEDs or improvised explosive devices.

Four days later, on February 12, i.e two days before the attack, the Jammu and Kashmir police shared another vital intelligence input. It was a 33-second video on Twitter of a similar car bomb attack on soldiers in Somalia uploaded by the Jaish-e- Mohammad. J&K police had also prepared a dummy video to explain how militants might carry out such an attack. These inputs too were shared during a meeting held on the same day and all the security and police formations were fully alerted.

On February 12, two convoys with 70 trucks carrying 2,500 soldiers were stuck in Jammu because of heavy snowfall on the Banihal pass. The home and defence ministries both knew from bitter experience that the security forces were at their most vulnerable when they were on the road. So they regularly took elaborate precautions.

The site of the Pulwama attack. Photo: PTI/Files

These included sending road opening parties (ROPs) ahead to inspect the road for buried IEDs and to secure every road crossing before the convoys passed. Even had they not received the warnings of an imminent attack they would have known that such a large convoy (70 buses) would be a tempting target. So the CRPF asked the home ministry to allow it to fly the soldiers into Srinagar.