Modi's Message With Operation Sindoor: Revenge With Restraint

Modi chose the word Sindoor because it has resonance all over India, barring perhaps the south, and communicates restorative justice to the bereaved.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi seldom gets his political and emotional messaging wrong.

In Wednesday’s post-midnight retributive missile attacks on nine Pakistani terror hubs, including Bahawalpur and Muridke, home bases of the Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba, respectively, he has sent multiple messages that will resonate both at home and abroad.

Named Operation Sindoor, it is clearly a message to the Hindu women who were widowed in Pahalgam’s jihadi massacre of last month: Modi has just told them that the government shares their pain.

In theory, the operation, which involved missile strikes by the Indian army and the air force without crossing into Pakistani territory, could have been named anything.

But Modi chose the word Sindoor because it has resonance all over India, barring perhaps the south, and communicates restorative justice to the bereaved.

The message to Pakistan, which was clearly behind the Pahalgam outrage, could not have been clearer. No amount of Chinese help with military equipment and political support can save you from us when we are determined to hit back. Especially since Pakistan thought it was better prepared for retribution this time than after Uri and Pulwama.

The third message is to the world community at large, which has been queasy about the prospect of a full-blown war between two nuclear powers. By restricting the targets to known terror hubs, India has clearly shown that it has exercised maximum restraint.

In a post-Sindoor official statement, the defence ministry made this explicit: "Our actions have been focused, measured and non-escalatory in nature. No Pakistani military facilities have been targeted. India has demonstrated considerable restraint in selection of targets and method of execution."

Translated, this means if Pakistan does anything terrible and retaliates beyond acceptable levels of formal retaliation, which India can take on the chin, the world will be responsible for the consequences. The US and European powers should take note.

The fourth message is for China, and this messaging involves not only the Sindoor strikes, but the trade deal signed with the United Kingdom. It is not a coincidence that both India and the UK concluded the deal just a few hours before the missile strikes.

Few people are in any doubt that China may have egged Pakistan to get Indians angry enough to start a full-scale war without thinking through the consequences. Any such wider war would have damaged India’s growth prospects.

China has been seriously worried not only about the general rise of India, but the willingness of the US, UK and the European Union to sign trade deals with India, possibly at the cost of China in the long run. In the short run, the world needs China since it has become over-dependent on cheap Chinese imports to keep consumer prices down.

The fifth message is to our own opposition parties, which have been given adequate video footage on the missile strikes in Pakistan, including live coverage of areas where the damage was done. They can not demand “proof” like they did after Uri and Balakot.

To be sure, the Sindoor strikes are not going to deter Pakistan from pursuing its terror ops in India. If at all anything does deter, it will be the Indus Water Treaty, in which India holds the high cards as an upper riparian state that can control water flows by building a few more dams and diverting supplies elsewhere in the short term.

On the other hand, it is worth acknowledging that India had fewer kinetic options this time as Pakistan would have been more prepared. It would have fully war-gamed our responses, and, moreover, had China’s full backing, complete with real-time intelligence sharing, military supplies and diplomatic support.

Given this context, our best response in the short term was to strike with strategic restraint, and not indulge in a massive one-time retributive act. The latter is what China would have hoped for, for it would have given investors cause for pause on their Indian investments.

This is a game of Chinese Checkers rather than merely Pakistani Perfidies, as has been well articulated by Sreemoy Talukdar in an article in Firstpost.com. Pahalgam happened just when many global manufacturers, including Apple, are thinking of relocating more parts of their supply chains, especially those that focus on the US market, to India. China+1 is happening, and this is precisely what China does not want.

India’s rise and booming stock markets have become a big deal for China, especially since Donald Trump’s tariff wars are directed at China. His administration has indicated that India may be one of those countries with which it may sign a trade deal later this year. China will not let India benefit from its loss if it can help it. But, as the timing of the UK free trade deal shows, India knows what needs to be done. 

The tell-tale signs of India’s having limited options can be understood from these parallel developments after Pahalgam.

It is not a coincidence that China backed Pakistan’s call for an “impartial probe” into the Pahalgam massacre when there were Pakistani finger-prints all over it. It is not a coincidence that Russia, which needs China on its side till the Ukraine war ends in its favour, also called for a peaceful resolution of these tensions, as if there is some kind of moral equivalence between Pakistan’s jihadi terror and India’s efforts to seek justice for slain Hindus.

It is not a coincidence that Iran wants to broker peace between India and Pakistan, when it is under pressure from the US to abandon its nuclear plans and China is backing it. It is not a coincidence that just when India was weighing its kinetic options, a Turkish navy vessel began a goodwill visit to Karachi.

It is not a coincidence that a key aide of Bangladesh’s Chief Advisor Muhammad Yunus talked about Bangladesh invading the seven north-eastern states if India attacked Pakistan.  And, of course, it is no coincidence at all that Pakistan had begun violating the line of control (LoC) with daily firing. It has taken a BSF jawan hostage. India retaliated by detaining a Pakistani Ranger. 

Put simply, the Chinese and Pakistanis had put in too many deterrents in advance for anyone to believe that the Pahalgam massacre of Hindus was anything other than a plot to trigger a wider conflict. That would have tied India down with security issues instead of allowing it to forge ahead economically.

Given this background, it is important for those demanding a stronger response than Operation Sindoor to pipe down, for that could cause economic harm to us. We will get our full revenge, but we must bide our time, and that time is not now. 

Right now, we must think only about our long-term strategy on how to deal with three-and-a-half threats: from Pakistan, China, Bangladesh and our own internal enemies and ill-wishers.

We have to build “comprehensive national power”, which includes heavy investments in building military capabilities, boosting domestic growth by deregulating and encouraging entrepreneurship, and negotiating social harmony through dialogue and two-way compromises with the minorities and some caste groups. The caste census announced by the Modi government must be seen in this light, though it won’t solve anything.

At the very least, our long-term plans - which means a decade of work at least - must include a steady increase in defence budgets to 3-4 percent of GDP, a big step-up in cyber and information warfare capabilities, and a sharp hike in internal security budgets.

These can be paid for by whittling down the Centre’s spending on things that the states ought to be doing: funding viable agriculture and serving the poor, for example. States must get more fiscal powers, and so must local bodies, by which one means mostly cities, which is where jobs will be created. Deregulation must be the slogan for the next decade so that entrepreneurship and risk-taking take off vertically.

Our revenge on Pakistan has to be plotted for the long-term, which includes its dismemberment, and this means expanding covert support to Baloch, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sind rebels, and neutering Bangladesh by arming its minorities to protect themselves and also tying down its army, preventing it from adventurism around our Chicken’s neck.

We should have counter-measures in place to slice off Rangpur (near the Siliguri corridor Chicken’s neck) and Chittagong port (which also has a chicken’s leg vulnerability through Tripura), when required. 

As for China, we must bide our time for another 10 years, while quietly getting their supply chains to relocate to India. By 2035, India could be a 10-trillion-dollar economy with a capable military that has an effective air force, a strong navy that rules the Indian Ocean, and an agile army that can hold any territory or fight cyber and information wars.

And yes, the Indus Water Treaty must not only be kept in abeyance, but scrapped after building many more dams and pipelines to divert the water whenever Pakistan chooses to harm us. That would be a better deterrent to Pakistani adventurism than any short-term kinetic action.

The best revenge for Pahalgam is to succeed against the odds, despite Chinese and Pakistani efforts to slow down India’s rise.

This is not the time for war, but to invest in war capabilities, so that ultimately we can win without fighting. As Chanakya, Sun Tzu and Machiavelli could have told us.

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