While India, which is on the way to being the third largest economy in the world, has the resilience to undertake a long war of attrition, Pakistan does not.
A grievous wound was inflicted on the subcontinent of India in 1947with its partition into India and Pakistan. Whether Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs,Buddhists, Jains or any other faith including that of Atheism, the DNA of the population of the subcontinent is the same. It is composed of each of those strands, woven together into a composite. The British knew that they were finally on the way out, and first separated Sri Lanka and Myanmar from the subcontinent before making the deepest cut of all, the partition of India into Pakistan and India. The history of the subcontinent is recorded for at a minimum 6000 years, and all but 300 of those years was sought to be smudged over before being obliterated. The next 600 years also got some attention, but the period before that was largely dismissed as a myth. Such a truncation of the history of India was inscribed in the history books and in the school and college curricula drawn up by the British. And small wonder, for learning about the entirety of the clearly recorded history of 6000 years would have made the people of the subcontinent aware of their unique civilisational heritage.Such knowledge would have motivated rebellion against the colonial oppressors, who left India a divided and pathetically poor, illiterate country, not accidentally but by design. In 1857, the bulk of the British Indian Army remained loyal to the colonial power, and the rebellion was put down. Beginning with the experience of World War I and maturing by the close of World War II, the soldiers and several of the officers of the Army hungered for freedom. Aware that the forces were becoming unreliable, by 1946, only diehard imperialists such as Winston Spencer Churchill suffered from the delusion that the British could hold on to India. They could not, as Prime Minister Clement Attlee understood, so India was partitioned and the Union Jack lowered from the heights of Raisina Hill.
Much has been written about the decision of Prime Minister Modi to Suspend, perhaps permanently, the Indus Water Treaty, which along with the Versailles Treaty signed after the close of World War I, was among the most one-sided of treaties. History books in Pakistan had woven a fantasy portrait of the Indus waters, and based their entire legitimacy on it. They wrote that Pakistan was the custodian of the Indus civilization. By suspending the treaty, Prime Minister Modi removed the raison d’etre historians in Pakistan had created for their country and revealed in its nakedness the artificiality, indeed the artifice, which represented the formation of Pakistan. The suspension has put into crisis the painstakingly created “legitimacy” of Pakistan. A consequence will be an acceleration in the ongoing rebellions in Pashtunistan and in Balochistan, and placed on a fast track the nascent rebellion in Sindh. The retribution mapped out by the Armed Forces as directed by Prime Minister Modi will be another driver of such a process of disintegration of a country that from the start was an artificial construct. In such a situation, the timing and composition of the National Security Advisory Board has been opportune.
Led by the highly regarded former Secretary (R) in the Cabinet Secretariat Alok Joshi, the NSAB comprises three members from the Army, Navy and Air Force respectively, two members from the Indian Police Services and a former official from the Indian Foreign Service. A distribution which reflects the realities of the present. While India, which is on the way to being the third largest economy in the world by the close of the third term of Prime Minister Modi, has the resilience to undertake a long war of attrition, Pakistan does not. Certainly the CCP will seek to keep the logistics supply going to the Pakistan army to the extent that the Indian armed forces permit, but India has the US to turn to, and the time has come for the creation of a seamless security supply chain between India and the US. To fight and overcome terror from what can only be described as Terroristan. With this in place, it is only a matter of time before the Pashtuns and the Baloch secure their own independent countries, followed by the Sindhis. Such a development would be a significant achievement in the War on Terror that all democracies are battling against, some such as the US, Japan and India and others somewhat more clumsily