The attention being paid to three-star officers in India indicates that maybe there won’t be war after all. It seemed that something was happening. There was a new Vice-Chief of Air Staff. There was a new General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Northern Command. There was even a new chief of inter-services coordination in the office of the Chief of Defense Staff.
There was some speculation that these officers had been shunted out. It was even said that the GOC-in-C Northern Command had refused to launch an offensive against Pakistan. But the Indian government has had to scramble and explain that officers retired on reaching the age of superannuation, and had been replaced.
On the face of it, one might think that if you were about to have a war, you might want to keep your senior men in place, but with retirements, you can line up replacements well in time, and if you’ve told the replacements, you just go ahead with your deployments. I mean, people have to move, arrange about school and college admission for their kids and so on. Pakistan has even less reason to keep people from the golf of their well-deserved retirement, because they don’t even know if there’s going to be a war or not. Just imagine putting off someone’s retirement until after the war, and then there’s no war.
Retiring people has a weird effect, it seems, because there’s a retired major general in Bangladesh ALM Fazlur Rehman, who has come up with a weird and wonderful idea, that if India goes to war with Pakistan, then Bangladesh should take over the ‘seven sisters’, the seven Indian states in the North East, in conjunction with China.
That sent the Bangladesh government squawking, loudly saying that those were his personal views. I’m sure the Chinese government would have said the same if their spokesman hadn’t just woken up, saying, “Who? What? When? Where?” while scratching his belly. In this weather, perhaps he would only be in his singlet and shorts. General Fazl is an old Mukti Bahini man, by the way, getting commissioned into it, so his baptism of fire was against the Pakistan Army, and it was the Indian Army which carried out his training.
Yet now he wants to attack India, and annex its North East. It’s worth noting that this Forward Policy doesn’t extend to West Bengal. I wonder where he learned the pre-1971 axiom that ‘the defence of the East lies in the West.’ Not from the Indian Army, I would think. And this is a particularly vigorous application of the precept, for it means using the West as a cover for an attack by the East.
That seems to be pure aggression. While a lot of Pakistani leaders have said that the Pakistani nation will fight if war is thrust upon us, no Indians have talked about annexing territory. And Pakistanis have expressed no intent to take Indian land.
There have not even been any “Kashmir banega Pakistan” slogans raised, at least not that I’ve heard. Sure, we want Kashmir to be part of Pakistan, but that’s because we want UN Security Council resolutions obeyed, which specify that Kashmiris must exercise their right of self-determination through a plebiscite.
Interestingly, India has also written to the IMF, asking it not to give Pakistan the next tranche of its package. It seems as if India has taken over where the PTI has left off. The PTI, though, was talking about the lack of democracy. It’s interesting to see that Imran is exiting from the news. For that reason, he would probably be against war breaking out. He needs attention focused on him and his plight.
Meanwhile, think about the plight of Zimbabwe. They should stop playing cricket. I mean, getting beaten by an innings is bad enough. But getting beaten by Bangladesh? One can almost hear General Fazal, whose pictures make look a little bit like Yoda in Star Wars, saying, “Today Zimbabwe, tomorrow the Indian North Eat, day after tomorrow the world!”
