When Ajit Doval’s name was announced as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s National Security Adviser in 2014, eyebrows were raised. He would have large shoes to fill. He was an operational man with no knowledge of statecraft, he did not have the “big picture” that his predecessors Shiv Shankar Menon, M.K.Narayanan, J.N.Dixit and Brajesh Mishra came with.
Spending eight months undercover in Pakistan is after all what all spies should do, critics said But it’s precisely these attributes that may have helped the super-spy craft India’s response with Prime Minister Modi and the Indian Army on calibrating the quantum of punishment to be unleashed on Pakistan–without inviting open retribution.
The precise, surgical strike that pulverized the seven makeshift terror launch pads that had come up across the Line of Control in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK), was a signal for those who understood the Pakistan Army’s terror modus operandi that Pakistan was readying to send its jihadis across the LoC. Jihadists that Pakistan’s generals could never own, just as they could not own the soldiers who lead former President and army chief Gen. Musharraf’s ill-concieved brainchild, Kargil.
The NSA’s years in Pakistan had also made him understand all too well that the military man assigned as his Pakistani counterpart, Lt. Gen (retd) Nasser Khan Janjua was there to send out the erroneous message that the civilian and military establishment were working in tandem on forging peace with India. Janjua was meant to distract Doval. Nothing more, nothing less. Sources close to the top team now say that there was a method to PM Modi’s seeming madness.
In reaching out to the India-leaning Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on his grand-daughter’s wedding day that was coincidentally also Mr. Sharif’s birthday, PM Modi was pursuing the first half of his Pakistan strategy – provoke the Pakistani deep state into wrecking the fledgling relationship built on the Indian prime minister’s ‘neighbourhood first’ policy that saw him invite the Pakistani leader ( whose affection for the BJP’s first prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was well known) to his swearing in. The Pathankot attack that followed, in fact, played right into Modi and Doval’s hands. It showed India as being large-hearted, invested in the belief that Pakistan would co-operate in bringing the attackers to book.
Among the investigators was a key Inter-Services Intelligence operative, with a known anti-India background whose photograph was splashed in all the Indian papers. Modi and Doval knew that Islamabad’s intransigence on Pathankot would be one more play in the Pakistan narrative that the Indian leadership was sharing with world leaders.
PM Modi’s Independence Day speech, which brought up the two parts of Pakistan that Islamabad’s patron China had earmarked for development – Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, Gilgit and Baltistan and Balochistan – was equally deliberate. He was telling China in no uncertain terms that India was not going to allow its ‘crown’ Kashmir to be co-opted by Beijing and that the Baloch insurrection would not give the Chinese an easy ride into Gwadar on the $50 million China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
Sweet music to Washington’s ears or not, as many have suggested, the emerging Modi doctrine has upturned years of Indian restraint at the behest of United States and major world powers who have cautioned against retaliation, citing Pakistan’s first n-strike capability, and the risk that any India-Pak conflagration posed to their own strategy in Afghanistan.
What changed? Did Doval know something that nobody else did? That the threat of nuke annihilation was a convenient bogey that Pakistan held over not just Delhi’s head, but over Washington’s too? Has Doval – and his mentor Pm Modi – called Pakistan’s bluff, for the very first time? Or is retaliation coming, big time when Delhi least expects it?
