It’s gone beyond the Indian Chief of Air Staff. It’s reached the Indian Prime Minister himself. The IAF was beaten fair and square, and can’t really avoid the embarrassment of defeat. They look so abject, that one can only compare them to Pakistan after the Paltan Maidan surrender. There was one voice which said the 1971 embarrassment had been avenged. Well, we know that 1971 was not a military defeat but a political one. Yeh, right, Lt Gen ‘Tiger’ Niazi and his commanders were all office-bearers of the National Awami Party, just as Lt Gen Jagjit Singh Aurora was the Dacca Awami League finance secretary.
So far, the IAF and its apologists are taking the line the IAF won. That has been tried for 1971, but only halfheartedly. The main reason is that there is the incontrovertible fact of Bangladesh being on the map. All the rest, the UN membership, the recognitions, the new flag, the national anthem and so on, follow from the change on the map.
In the old days, unless there was a change of the map, it didn’t count as a war. It was a border skirmish. Another word they liked to use was ‘incident’. Before World War I, there was an incident more or less every year, mostly in the Balkans, but also in Africa, which was still being scrambled for by the Western colonial powers.
In fact, it is not just the incidents of the summer of 1914 that deserve study, but in the years preceding. Those were the ones that set in motion the terrible events of World War I. But then it was a very different environment. It was non-nuclear. Nobody had an air force, just Army Air Corps and Navy Air Arms.
One of the disadvantages of nuclear war is that the bombs will emit an electromagnetic pulse which will fry any electronics within a certain distance. If somehow any divide survives, the Net will certainly be gone. The young people today will probably prefer a painful death from radiation poisoning to life without the Net.
And by the way, has anyone noticed that both the Chiefs of Air Staff are Jats? Ours is of course a Muslim, and bears the name of the founder of the Mughal dynasty. Theirs is a Sikh. I’m also told he’s a Jat. Sikhs didn’t like the Mughals, whom they accuse of having wiped out the last of the Gurus. Now they have another reason.
If we had had an old-fashioned war, it would have involved Shehbaz taking oath as Prime Minister of India. India would probably have to be partitioned again, so that Pakistan would not have to be saddled with the South or the East. Then there would be the triumphal parade. Would Shehbaz ride an elephant or a white charger? Or maybe, this is a different era, he could lead it on an electric vehicle.
