Mukul Kesavan - Reporting Balakot: the truth of a pantomime war
And what of our chickenhawk anchors? Edward
Thompson, the great historian, once described an English journalist who
specialized in publishing government leaks as “a kind of official urinal in
which, side by side, high officials… stand patiently leaking in the public
interest.” Marvellously apposite though this is, it’s wrong in one particular:
in the Indian case, the high officials are redundant. The ‘journalists’ in
question collect their leaks at one remove, from news agencies as independent
and as committed to the truth as the Soviet TASS.
The ongoing reportage on the cross-border skirmishing this last week has been bewildering. The average news-consuming citizen could be forgiven for wondering if anything he thought he knew about the Indian bombing of Balakot and Pakistan’s response actually happened or whether every event in this narrative was subject to continuous and radical revision.
The Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals: Written by Benedetto Croce (1925)
The ongoing reportage on the cross-border skirmishing this last week has been bewildering. The average news-consuming citizen could be forgiven for wondering if anything he thought he knew about the Indian bombing of Balakot and Pakistan’s response actually happened or whether every event in this narrative was subject to continuous and radical revision.
The first impression
anyone watching Indian news channels or reading its newspapers would have had
of the Indian raid was this. Indian aircraft crossed the Line of Control for
the first time since 1971. They didn’t merely venture into Pakistan- occupied
Kashmir; they flew into undisputed Pakistani territory, into Balakot in Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa, within a hundred miles of Islamabad, and bombed a terrorist camp.
Their attack left hundreds of terrorists dead. All Indian aircraft returned
undamaged from their daring and unprecedented raid on Pakistan.
The main takeaway from
this first draft of history was this: India had finally broken with the policy
of restraint in the face of Pakistani provocation. Instead of being blackmailed
into quiescence by Pakistan’s nuclear capability as Manmohan Singh’s government
had been after the terrorist rampages of 2008, Narendra Modi’s regime had
boldly chosen to draw new red lines. It had shown Pakistan’s deep State that
India’s response to ISI-sponsored terror would not be constrained by precedent
or convention, that India was willing to escalate the conflict in a precise and
targeted way.
Pakistan denied the
existence of such a camp or any casualties and showed photographs of a
ploughed-up grove of pine trees, claiming that the swift response of its air
force had forced Indian pilots to hastily dump their missiles on untenanted
landscape. (Pakistan’s climate change minister, manfully striving to establish an
equivalence of terror, subsequently accused India of bombing a forest reserve
and being guilty of “eco-terrorism”.)
Sober national
security pundits dealt with this mutating story by encouraging their readers
not to miss the wood for the trees. Whether India’s aircraft had killed
militants or pine groves was irrelevant. The big picture was made up of India’s
willingness to use air power to answer terrorism, the depth of the incursion
and the indelible lesson the Pakistanis had been taught: namely, that India
would not hesitate to strike Pakistan’s mainland if it didn’t mend its rogue
ways. This was not exclusively a bhakt position; sage security
experts, committed to the national interest, not Mr Modi’s electoral fortunes,
saw the attack as a necessary, if long-deferred, lesson.
The Pakistani
retaliation that followed almost immediately in broad daylight was first
successfully repulsed by India’s news channels, with ranks of F-16s sent
packing by the IAF’s MiG-21s. Pakistan had another story. Its spokespersons
claimed that two Indian planes had been shot down and two pilots captured.
After hours of silence, an official Indian statement acknowledged that one of
the IAF’s pilots was missing. In the meantime, Pakistan had uploaded photos and
videos of a captured pilot, Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman. Later in the
day, Pakistan walked back its claim that it had captured two pilots but
continued to maintain that it had shot down two Indian aircraft. Meanwhile
Indian officials claimed that a MiG-21 had shot down an F-16 and its pilots had
been seen parachuting into PoK.
So, from the precise
and bloody destruction of a terror camp, the official version had shifted to
the symbolic significance of raiding Pakistani territory (never mind the
damage) and from there, in the face of the undeniable fact of Wing Commander
Abhinandan’s capture, to a bid to establish parity in terms of planes lost.
India hasn’t yet produced radar, video or AWACS evidence for its claim. The one
factor in favour of the downed F-16 story is Pakistan’s own claim that it shot
down two Indian planes. Since there is no evidence to show that India lost a
second plane, it might just be the case that Pakistani spokesmen ran with the
two-plane theory and then backtracked because one of the planes was theirs: an
F-16 perhaps, or one of its Chinese fighters, the JF-17 Thunder.
Without concrete proof
of camp destruction or the shooting down of the F-16, and faced with the
embarrassment of a lost jet and a captured pilot, the Indian story shifted
again. The return of Wing Commander Abhinandan became the new horizon.
Politicians and anchors demanded his release... and received it. Imran Khan,
keen to earn global brownie points by de-escalating and with the propaganda
advantage of having made the only documented ‘kill’ in this skirmish, promptly
announced Abhinandan’s release as a “gesture of peace”.... read more:
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/reporting-balakot-the-truth-of-a-pantomime-war-after-the-pulwama-terror-attack/cid/1686059#.XHv6aB9lTjT.emailThe Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals: Written by Benedetto Croce (1925)
