To be great is to be misunderstood. No one exemplifies it better than the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is misunderstood because he is great; just like Pythagoras, Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. If you need more proof of my assertion, please remember your Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency, a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speaks what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
You can blame Modi for anything but not for consistency, especially when it comes to Pakistan. His is not a ‘little mind’ to have a consistent policy to target, punish and hurt Pakistan. He possesses a great mind to entertain – and act on — contradictory thoughts simultaneously. While his foreign minister Sushma Swaraj thunders in the Lok Sabha against Pakistan’s ill-treatment of Kulbhushan Jadhav’s family in Islamabad, Modi’s man-Friday, the National Security Advisor Ajit Doval is parlaying secretly in Bangkok with his Pakistani counterpart. Why Thailand? And why keep the meeting secret?
These are the kind of questions a great man like Modi doesn’t answer. Has he answered what prompted him to invite Nawaz Sharif for his swearing-in ceremony in May 2014 after thundering against Pakistan during the election campaign? Or why he jumped aboard an aeroplane to attend a wedding in Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif’s family and wish him “Happy Birthday” on Christmas in 2016? As the outcome of each of these photo-ops has shown, no preparatory work had gone for these ‘tamashas’. Only if diplomacy was so simple, based on the personal whims and fancies of a great man!
Pakistan-based terrorists attacked a premier air force base in Pathankot – we still don’t know how nothing of two of the six terrorists claimed to have been killed on the second day of the operation has been found. This was the operation again being directly controlled by Modi’s man-for-all-seasons, Doval. Forget him botching up the operation despite having adequate warning, army troops and NSG at hand, what was Modi’s response to a dastardly terror attack at an air force base, something which has never happened earlier?
In case you have forgotten, we didn’t do anything to punish Pakistan for Pathankot. Unless you consider inviting a Pakistani investigation team, including an ISI official – yes, ISI, the same three letters which symbolize everything evil about Pakistan in Modi’s eyes – to visit Pathankot as sufficient punishment. That investigation has not gone anywhere, and nor has Modi’s Pakistan policy. It has been a mixture of photo-ops, bombastic words, total silences on Pakistani terror attacks and some crazy action on the Line of Control (LoC).
Yes, the LoC, which has always been treated with sanctity by India as it came after the Shimla Agreement. It was the violation of the sanctity of the LoC during the Kargil War, effectively highlighted by the Atal Behari Vajpayee government – he was not as great a man as Modi after all – which earned Pakistan global opprobrium. Even China didn’t come out in Pakistan’s support then, and the US, no great fan of India then, read the riot act to Pakistan. But now Modi wants to treat the LoC with disdain, ala Musharraf when he claims ‘surgical strikes’ inside Pakistan occupied Kashmir. The DGMO was careful enough to claim that the ‘surgical strikes’ were only “along the LoC”, but Doval’s mouthpieces have gone berserk portraying Indian action at par with that of the US Special Forces killing Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad.
Forget getting Bin Laden or Hafiz Saeed or even Dawood Ibrahim; we didn’t get any big fish in those surgical strikes for which no evidence has been released so far. This when Pakistan continues to deny any such strikes ever happened. As Arun Shourie told Shekhar Gupta, the Indian army had conducted raids during the Vajpayee era inside Pakistan which went far deeper and were more damaging to Pakistan. There are reports to show that the same happened during the UPA government, but no political leader went up to claim the credit for them.
What was the outcome of the so-called ‘surgical strikes’? Nada, zilch, sifar, zero, nothing. Pakistan has not mended its ways, and terror strikes at military camps in Jammu and Kashmir continue unabated. Militancy in Kashmir is not going down either, and the internal security situation is so bad that the Chief Minister of the BJP-PDP state government is unable to hold a by-election in her own Lok Sabha constituency.
What is India’s response? To open heavy weaponry on the LoC, as the army chief acknowledged. Towards what aim? No one knows because this cycle of pique-induced retributive violence doesn’t serve India’s purpose. The 2003 ceasefire on the LoC was negotiated by the Vajpayee government because it helped India curb infiltration into Kashmir; look at the graph of militancy in Kashmir and you can see how it is directly linked to peace on LoC. But Modi, unlike Vajpayee, is a great man and soldiers are but cannon fodder for him in his projection of greatness to the hapless citizenry of this country. Wait, there is more.
Modi’s ‘great mind’ has inextricably linked Pakistan to Indian Muslims his thinking, and the only way to have the satisfaction of hitting out at Indian Muslims is to hit Pakistan. India’s strategic interests be damned, Pakistan may laugh at us as it sends terrorists across the LoC, China may continue to treat us the way Australia treats Zimbabwe in a cricket match, Maldives may puncture the 56-inch chest, Nepal laughs in a tone which rhymes with Chinese, and we remain incapable of satisfying Sri Lanka, but Modi will continue to destroy and finish Pakistan. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. Bhasmasur was not a little mind. Neither is Modi.
Toba Tek Sen was born in Kerala, schooled in Bengal and lived in Dubai. While continuing to slave for daily wages, he dreams of availing bank loans like Nirav Modi and sipping beer like Vijay Mallya.