As our government demands we celebrate "Surgical Strikes Day", we should instead reflect. And feel disturbed - because not for decades has a government so blatantly politicised Indian defence and India's military. The Bharatiya Janata Party has shown that it is willing to compromise on India's security just to try to win a few elections.
Let's recall for a moment exactly what we're commemorating. Two years ago, the Indian military crossed over the Line of Control in the Kupwara and Poonch districts of Jammu and Kashmir to attack forward camps where it believed militants planning to sneak into India were briefed. The commandos, believably, say perhaps 40 militants and a couple of regular Pakistani soldiers were killed. In other words, the strikes were a tactical success.
But the action was a strategic failure: because it has signally failed to deter Pakistan. Far from changing our neighbour's behaviour, in the two years since the strikes across the border - ceasefire violations have gone up four-fold. Security personnel are being killed on a regular basis; infiltrations do not just continue but in fact have intensified beginning in 2016. The Indian army carries out the orders of its political masters; tactics are the domain of the commanders on the ground. But it is clear that strategic thinking is absent in New Delhi. So should we not also on this day commemorate the strategic errors of the government? Should we call it "Strategic Failures Divas" instead?
This is just one more way in which the government has chosen to stoke the fires of Kashmir, irresponsibly and short-sightedly, in order to pump up its "nationalist" credentials in the Hindi belt. Back in 2014, discontent in the Valley was under control. There were barely 200 militants, probably less, left. Local recruitment was negligible. In the years since then, fuelled by the BJP's irresponsible politics locally and by its divisive rhetoric nationally, the number of young Kashmiris turning to militancy has sky-rocketed. This should give any nationalist Indian pause. But apparently it means nothing to India's "nationalist" party. It would seem that only election victories matter and since the surgical strikes helped them win the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, their memory must be kept alive.
In the meantime, the Indian government's approach to Pakistan where it matters has been embarrassingly schizophrenic. Most ridiculously, it cancelled a meeting between External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and her Pakistani counterpart in New York barely 24 hours after it had been announced. This followed a negative reaction from some of its more jingoistic supporters online. Nobody can fault the government's reaction time. But security policy and diplomacy cannot respond to Twitter trending topics. The silliness didn't stop there: an absurdly worded statement from the foreign ministry - "the true face of Imran Khan has been revealed to the world" - needlessly personalised the issue and deliberately alienated the man who is now, for better or for worse, Pakistan's prime minister for the next five years. All this did was put Khan's back up, and cause him to tweet something equally silly about his Indian counterpart - "small men who occupy big offices". India's job should be to detach Khan from the military, and to widen civilian-military gaps in the new administration. That is where our security lies - and, of course, it would be good for Pakistan as well. But the Indian government is so scared of its own social media trolls that it would rather behave like them than in India's interest.