O P I N I O N S

guest column
Gen Sharif’s earned his stripes, spots yet to show
The most important question is how new Pak army chief General Raheel Sharif will view the J&K dynamics. However, a reversal of policy is least likely, especially when there is a change of command.
Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain (retd)
General Raheel Sharif, as a protégé of Gen Parvez Musharraf, has a military pedigree many soldiers would envy. As a fellow of the prestigious Royal College of Defence Studies, London, he is in the exalted company of his mentor.

Touchstones
With power also sometimes comes the great fall
In this silly season of elections and dirty tricks, it is shameful that we have reduced a violation of trust at many levels into a political slugfest over who did what and to whom.
Ira Pande
AS I write this column, the city is in the last throes of election fever. There are just a few days left for the verdict on Delhi and hysterical speakers, unruly crowds and chaotic traffic are but to be expected. Add to that the start of the wedding season and you can understand why all of us want this week to end as fast as possible.

GROUND ZERO
Meet the other Rajapaksa
The Sri Lankan establishment may be seething with anger over the Indian PM’s decision not to attend CHOGM but it can’t afford to fly off the handle. That may explain why the Defence Secretary kept his India visit discreet.
Raj Chengappa
I hadn’t met Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s Defence Secretary, for over four years. He was on a private visit to India last week, and at a dinner hosted for him by industrialist Malvinder Singh I found he hadn’t changed much. His salt-and-pepper hair still swept across his forehead like choppy waves on an ocean. He was as usual phlegmatic and careful not to reveal too much. The last time I had met him was at his heavily guarded Colombo office on May 20, 2009, the day it was officially confirmed that V. Prabhakaran, the dreaded LTTE chief, had been killed.

guest column
Gen Sharif’s earned his stripes, spots yet to show
The most important question is how new Pak army chief General Raheel Sharif will view the J&K dynamics. However, a reversal of policy is least likely, especially when there is a change of command.
Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain (retd)

General Raheel Sharif, as a protégé of Gen Parvez Musharraf, has a military pedigree many soldiers would envy. As a fellow of the prestigious Royal College of Defence Studies, London, he is in the exalted company of his mentor.

Media reports ascribe to him the thinking behind Pakistan’s doctrinal aspects of countering India’s pro-active strategy. While being a great professional citation, this is hardly likely even if he is considered an expert at defensive, and not offensive, warfare because Pakistan’s reaction of moving some of its formations to strategically more viable locations was thought through well before General Sharif rose to the level of a Corps Commander (30 Corps, Gujranwala).

Hamid Hussain’s assessment that General Sharif “is probably not suited to lead an army engaged in a war” needs to be evaluated more comprehensively. Study of history belies the assumption that the body language of senior military leaders and their appearance can lead to definitive deductions about their military intellect, translation into ground execution and leadership skills under duress and stress.

Some see Sharif as a ‘defensive general’.

Of Pakistan’s senior leadership it can authoritatively be said that it is outstandingly wily and innovative at ‘conflict initiation’ but astonishingly unprofessional at taking the intent and aim to its military conclusion as part of ‘conflict termination’. This has been borne out in the 1965 Indo-Pak conflict, the actions in East Pakistan in 1971, in the operational content of Exercise Zarb-e-Momin in 1990, the Kargil misadventure in 1999 and in the recent exchanges on the LoC in Poonch, Mendhar and Keran.

None of these events led to any positive gains for Pakistan. In fact, the only decision which led to a possibly positive outcome was President Musharraf’s mutual initiative with the India to bring about ceasefire on the LoC on November 26, 2003, a decision which had far-reaching implications for both armies. Will General Sharif show similar cerebral capability and ‘soft’ approach towards the LoC to enable the task at hand on the more difficult western and internal security fronts, which are wrenching Pakistan apart? In fact, the most important question is how General Sharif will view the Jammu & Kashmir dynamics.

Will it be bravado at the LoC to display an offensive personality in charge? The negative spinoff of any such machismo will be an immediate effect on Nawaz Sharif’s declared intent of treading the peace path with India. Secondly, Pakistan’s current penchant with filling the Valley and Jammu region with infiltrated terrorists to retain options in calibrating the proxy war may well tempt General Sharif to project an offensive character. A reversal of policy is least likely especially when there is a change of command.

With Pakistan’s supposed perception that nothing major is likely on the diplomatic front over the next six months the situation points towards Mr Sharif giving his new army chief time and space to settle, even at the cost of a few flare-ups on the LoC. Although Mr Sharif has had negative experience with his chiefs, it is unlikely he will sully the internal military reputation of the new chief by placing unreasonable controls on him. We are therefore unlikely to see any major change in the policy on Jammu and Kashmir; only time and our response at the LoC will dictate which way the situation will head.

The Indian establishment needs to ensure that traditional assumptions of winter being a period of stability on the LoC are put at rest. The Pakistan defence establishment has been known for its innovations in conflict initiation. Whatever the personality of General Sharif, the dynamics of 2014 will force him to be aggressive on Kashmir. He may be forced by the hardliners to aid and abet the current Kashmir policy.

Some would expect that a personal loss in the form of his elder brother in a battle with the Indian Army in 1971 may have created in General Sharif a latent antipathy against India and this would be an opportunity for revenge. His credentials do not appear to suggest that. General Sharif is likely to think through any initiative.

The label of being less offensive possibly appears due to his track record of appointments and being an Infantryman. Flamboyant commanders are presumed to be black uniformed (Armoured Corps or Special Forces) with a record of commanding units and formations aggressively on the LoC, which General Sharif lacks. Possibly, PM Nawaz Sharif was advised on this and he deliberately chose to have a stable conformist. Infantrymen may not carry flamboyance, but it needs to be remembered that aggression comes naturally to them. On the Indian side the majority of iconic military leaders, Cariappa, Manekshaw and Aurora were all Infantrymen.

Predicting anything about Pakistan is fraught with danger, most of all the panning of personality of its military leaders. However, on balance, General Sharif’s tenure needs to lend stability in the approaching difficult and challenging years of the security scenario in the sub-continent. His politico-military compulsions of keeping J&K on the simmer (not boil) have to be assessed. He is unlikely to kowtow with radical elements beyond current levels knowing that tactical gains will not translate into strategic victory. Lastly, the Indian establishment needs to carefully evaluate whether General Sharif is the man to trust. In short, it is a situation where there are shades and shades of grey in which a black and white mind would only spell paralysis.

The writer is a Fellow of the Royal College of Defence Studies, London, and former General Officer Commanding of the Srinagar-based 15 Corps

Touchstones
With power also sometimes comes the great fall
In this silly season of elections and dirty tricks, it is shameful that we have reduced a violation of trust at many levels into a political slugfest over who did what and to whom.
Ira Pande

AS I write this column, the city is in the last throes of election fever. There are just a few days left for the verdict on Delhi and hysterical speakers, unruly crowds and chaotic traffic are but to be expected. Add to that the start of the wedding season and you can understand why all of us want this week to end as fast as possible. No road is free and regardless of the traffic snarls they cause or the colourful abuses hurled from irate commuters stuck for hours, the happy baratis keep on bhangra-ing their way to the bride’s home. Firecrackers are let off on the Ring Road, with smiling traffic cops enjoying the spectacle along with the groom’s friends. The same is true of the crowds that throng to cheer their local leaders out on their padyatras: the minute they sight a TV camera, they begin frenetic dancing and lusty slogan shouting; others wave and show the V-sign as if to say, we’ve got what we wanted: our three seconds of fame. The cops? Who can blame them if they smile along?

The truth is that for most of us election time is carnival time. It is when you catch a rare glimpse of your local political representative, who comes with hands folded to ask for your support so that he/she can con his/her way to another victory. After the emotional goodbyes to Sachin, we needed another vent for our adrenaline secretions to flow. Did I mention that we have just finished with the madness of the annual Trade Fair and that the Japanese Emperor and Empress are here for a week? So please forgive me for not being able to attend any of the exciting events that Delhi offered in the last fortnight. There was a spectacular series of lectures on at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts to celebrate the life, art and culture of the great Mughals, as an extension of the exhibition of an elevating display of rare paintings, manuscripts and maps from the collection of the British Library. The event was a collaboration between IGNCA, the British Library and Roli Books, who have made an international name for themselves as publishers of outstanding art books. Thankfully, the exhibition is on for some more time and so can still be viewed and I mean to go and see Shah Jahan’s recipe book, rare cartographic material (among them the route map from Delhi to Gandhar and an early atlas), a bird’s eye view of the Red Fort and a riverfront map of Agra.

Let us now come to what is now the talk of the nation (forgive me if I sound like a popular TV anchor but the disease seems to be infectious). I will call it the tehelka over Tehelka because there are too many Ts to be handled in one sentence. In this silly season of elections and dirty tricks, it is shameful that we have reduced a violation of trust at many levels into a political slugfest over who did what and to whom. Let us never forget the basic fact: a young woman was sexually violated by an employer who was also in some sense her mentor and guardian. She has had the courage to complain and stand by her accusation despite every effort made to deflect attention to other areas and other concerns. By every definition of the word, she is the victim so how can the accused now claim that space?

These are questions that many have already asked so let me not belabour the point but what is it about power and money that they corrupt even the best among us? Even TT’s worst critics have conceded that he was a bright young writer who created a great space for fearless writing. He and his team of journalists became known for their dogged chase of wrongdoers and the morally corrupt. When and how they themselves succumbed to their hubris and started taking shortcuts to reach higher and higher is best known to them but their list of sponsors and donors reads like a list of rogues and rascals of the lowest order. TT the writer evolved into an entrepreneur of ideas, and founded a number of trusts and companies to promote his special brand of ‘courageous activism’. Ironically, he became the upholder of public morality even as he funded his lifestyle with money from sources that polluted every inch of moral space. He fooled so many that several respectable public figures still prefer to defend him by referring to his past rather than his present avatar. The truth is that the TT who came out of Chandigarh all those years ago (visible in his debut novel, Alchemy of Desire) grew into someone else as he got involved in the murky corridors of power in the Delhi Durbar.

Hubris, money and power are a dangerous cocktail. If only TT had paid more attention to the Jacobean dramas he was taught in Panjab University, he would have avoided the tragic end of the overreacher.