The Big Story: Striking out

Around noon on Thursday, Ranbir Singh, director general of military operations, had an announcement to make. The Indian Army had conducted surgical strikes along the Line of Control, targeting terror launch pads in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and inflicting heavy casualties, he said. It was acting on specific intelligence that terrorists had gathered there in preparation for attacks across the frontier. Singh carefully pointed out that these were merely preventive strikes and that the operation was now over. But in the corridors of political power, a different message was being sent out. Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah hailed the rise of a "new India", one that did not get "cowed down by nefarious designs of terrorists". Is the era of strategic restraint now over?

Strategic restraint, or holding fire in the face of provocation so as to pursue more long-term goals of stability, has been hard-wired into Independent India's political and military apparatus. According to some experts, the doctrine had its moorings in the worldview of Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru: it contained a moral aversion to the use of force, and recognition of its practical costs. It held through the crisis of 1990, when militancy rose in Kashmir and Pakistan threatened war. It even held after both countries went explicitly nuclear in 1998; in spite of the Kargil conflict, a full-blown war was avoided.

But after the Parliament attack of 2001, when Indian troops massed at the border to stare down Pakistan, there has been a growing impatience with strategic restraint. Operation Parakram, as it was called, proved to be costly and failed to contain more attacks. It was in those years that the Indian military is believed to have developed the "Cold Start" doctrine – a strategy of swift, limited strikes that could inflict damage without drawing Pakistan into declaring war. Former army men now say that the Indian military has conducted several strikes before, the difference this time is that the government and army are prepared to own it.

Ever since the attack at Uri, there has been a growing chorus of voices against old-fashioned restraint. They called for an India that acted with sufficient derring-do, in consonance with its growing global heft. Thursday's strike would satisfy that demand, though Pakistan denies that such an operation took place. But now what? If the response from across the border is another attack that the Pakistani establishment does not own, will India respond in kind, leading to an escalating spiral of violence? If the response is war, do the leaders of this emerging superpower have a roadmap to guide the Subcontinent through death, devastation and loss?

The Big Scroll: Scroll.in on the day's big story

Saikat Datta on how India went about planning the "surgical strikes".

Rohn Venkataramakrishnan on why it is important that India did not call the strikes revenge for Uri.

Dhirendra K Jha on how the Bharatiya Janata Party was battling angry cadre before the show of strength at the Line of Control.

Anita Katyal on how the Congress and other opposition parties have stood by the government in its decision.

Political pickings

  1. The Supreme Court has criticised the Bihar government for "inexplicably" delaying the trial of Mohammad Shahabuddin, member of Parliament from the Rashtriya Janata Dal. Meanwhile, security has been tightened at Siwan, Shahabuddin's old hunting grounds.
  2. The Aam Aadmi Party government's publicity department has shot down an advertisement targeting Modi.
  3. Union Water Resources Minister Uma Bharti has offered to go on hunger strike to resolve the Cauvery dispute between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

Punditry

  1. In the Hindu, Kumar Ketkar writes that the recent Maratha marches were an expression of the alienation of the community's lower and middle rungs.
  2. In the Indian Express, Gilles Vernier on how the rise of Akhilesh Yadav is an indicator of the same-old in the Samajwadi Party.
  3. In the Telegraph, Ruchir Joshi remembers his father's suitcase and the things it brought from foreign shores.

Giggles

Don't Miss...

Abheet Singh of IndiaSpend calculates the global cost of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan:

But the real costs would be higher and not just in India and Pakistan, where the first 21 million people – half the death toll of World War II – would perish within the first week from blast effects, burns and acute radiation, according to the 2007 study by researchers from Rutgers University, University of Colorado-Boulder and University of California, Los Angeles, all in the USA.

This death toll would be 2,221 times the number of civilians and security forces killed by terrorists in India over nine years to 2015, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of South Asia Terrorism Portal data.

Another two billion people worldwide would face risks of severe starvation due to the climatic effects of the nuclear-weapon use in the subcontinent, according to this 2013 assessment by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, a global federation of physicians.