Manoj Joshi - The Great Divider of India is Now Dividing its Armed Forces
In 2015, TIME magazine featured Narendra
Modi on its cover with the title, “Why Modi Matters”. Its hope, expressed in
the headline of its story, was that he would lead India to step up as a global
power. Four years later, with India in the midst of a keenly fought election,
the iconic magazine has featured
Modi on its cover once again, but this time under the title, “India’s
Divider in Chief.”
Ideally, such a mirror
should have been held up to the country by its own media. Unfortunately, most
of it has been busy pandering to the Modi cult, carrying interviews and puff
pieces on Modi and BJP president Amit Shah. The national media insistently ignores
the fact that instead of campaigning on issues that affect the life of the
people of the country, the duo have been talking about everything else – from
religion and nationalism and pride to former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s
holidays and unproven cases of corruption.
The “Divider in Chief”
jibe must hurt because it is true. It is difficult to recall another election
where the people have been so divided as a conscious strategy. It is true that
in democratic polities there is a natural process of division when citizens
choose their rulers from competing candidates. But when the ruling
dispensation shapes the debate in terms of labelling all those who oppose them
as traitors to the nation, and spares no institution from this toxic process of
polarisation, then we have a problem.
Consider how the Modi
campaign has divided both the Army and the Navy in this election
campaign.
In a bid to shore up the government’s credentials, the Indian
Army has officially deniedthat there were any strikes on terror camps
across the Line of Control before September 29, 2016, the date of the Modi
government’s self-proclaimed surgical strike. Modi himself referred to any
strikes conducted earlier as a “video game.”
This came after a
claim by the Congress Party that there had been six surgical strikes
conducted during the tenure of the Manmohan Singh government. Other
observers, too, have
listed out such strikes. The veterans who conducted these strikes
have expressed
their resentment at the government’s stand. It is well known in the
defence circles, that
cross-border strikes have been authorised since the time General B.P.
Joshi was the army chief in the mid-1990s. Military personnel
associated with the BJP who ought to have known better have chosen to back the
government claim. Prominent among these is General (retd) V.K. Singh, who
flatly denied that any had occurred in his tenure.Even if we do not
question the honesty of the deniers, the problem is of nomenclature. The BJP
mis-represented the September 2016 cross-LoC raid as a “surgical strike” and so
now, its government blandly claims that none have occurred before this hallowed
event.
To cut a long story
short, what has the BJP achieved with this debate, apart from the votes it
hopes it will get by politicising the bravery of soldiers? It has divided the
army on political lines and questioned the bravery and dedication of an entire
generation of army personnel who, at great risk to their lives, carried out
cross-LoC strikes against terrorists in the 1990s and the 2000s... read more:
In Varanasi, Soldier Tej Bahadur Yadav Reveals Hollowness Of Modi’s Campaign
