What Do the Echoes of Operation Kabaddi Really Say?

Two unconnected headlines at the start of the week are connected in this article. In one, the spokesperson of the United Nations Secretary General expressed the limitations of mediation as a conflict resolution mechanism for the conflict in Kashmir, arguing that both sides – India and Pakistan – needed to be on board for the Secretary General to exercise initiative under his good offices mandate enabled by UN Charter Articles 98 and 99.

While Pakistan repeatedly brings the Kashmir question to the attention of the UN – most recently during the visit of the President of the General Assembly to Pakistan last week – India takes the cover of the Simla Agreement that buried the UN role in Kashmir by calling for a bilateral settlement of the dispute.

With India reluctant, there is little possibility of mediation figuring as a conflict resolution tool or the UN taking center stage in bringing to a closure its longstanding interest in the Kashmir question (To recall, the second longest serving UN observer mission is along the line of control (LC)).

However, there is one situation that can potentially propel UN center stage. This would be so if the actions hinted at in the second headline come to pass.

Among the contents of a book by a Jawaharlal Nehru University academic, Line on Fire: Ceasefire Violations and India-Pakistan Escalation Dynamics, is reportedly the revelation of an Indian plan to capture a few posts along the LC in late 2001, in a operation codenamed Operation Kabaddi. Apparently the operation was aborted by the intervention of 9/11 and onset of the United States’ led Operation Enduring Freedom in the region.

The book has it that the plan envisaged the capture of some 25-30 Pakistani posts along the LC in order to prevent the infiltration of terrorists into Kashmir, after preparations had been completed in end September. In the event, the plan could not be actioned even though there was a possible incident on October 1 that could have triggered the multiple attacks across the LC: the terrorist strike on the Kashmir Legislative Assembly in which some 38 people were killed.

The plan is precursor to the latter day surgical strikes of end September 2016. The surgical strikes did not have the same scope or magnitude, and with good reason.

Any operation – even if not as ambitious as made out in the book – would focus the UN Security Council on the escalatory possibilities connected with the outstanding issue that remains on its agenda as the ‘India-Pakistan question’ since the passage of its Resolution 39 (1948) on January 20, 1948. Mindful of the possibility of being forced to the table by a Security Council resolution, India sensibly restricted the scope of the surgical strikes, assuring Pakistan the following day that the operation had ceased.

Even so, the army’s ongoing reforms reportedly cater for leveraging its conventional advantage. After playing footsie with Cold Start – the freshly minted doctrine in wake of Operation Parakram in 2002-03 – by acknowledging its existence in fits and starts over its lifespan, the army owned up to it definitively, early in the tenure of the current army chief.

The army is currently engaged in a reform initiative in which the integrated battle groups that found mention in the doctrine are firmed in. The idea is of dedicated formations – likely heavier than brigade sized combat commands – formed for territory centric or destruction tasks. Pre-designated and programmed and having the requisite resources – firepower and engineer – intrinsic, these would be in a position for an early launch from a ‘cold start’, as envisaged in the evocative, if colloquial, name of the doctrine.

The JNU academic and author of the book Professor Happymon Jacob, hopes to focus attention on the continuing escalatory possibilities resulting from incidents along the LC which numbered some 3,000 last year, and the need for formalising the ceasefire dating to November 2003. The ‘ceasefire’ was not the result of a document, but is an understanding. This only reinforces Jacob's fears of escalation, apprehensions that in light of the nuclear dimensions to war it can only bring the security minders of the international community – the Security Council – down on South Asia in quick time. The international community has a genuine interest in preventing a nuclear war outbreak, since the consequences are potentially global.

While India would press for having Pakistan in the dock for provoking the conflict in first place by a terror incident or a series of incidents that it could interpret as an armed attack, there is no guarantee that the Security Council will stop at that. This could release the Secretary General from his limitation encapsulated in the first news article referred to above, which incidentally was also voiced earlier in April last year.

India would be required then to engage with Pakistan meaningfully over Kashmir, something it is loath to do.

India therefore needs to reappraise its hardline in regard to Pakistan and in Kashmir. The hardline creates the conditions for a bust up over Kashmir. The army chief among his numerous media interventions has indicated that India has options up its sleeve along the lines of surgical strikes, but of a different sort and order that he did not dwell on in detail, keeping surprise in mind. In future such strikes cannot be as tame as the surgical strikes, fobbed off by the Pakistanis as a non-event.

Any future such strikes would need to be of the order of the hype that has since attended them, rather as they are depicted in the somewhat misnamed recent release Uri, which dramatises the surgical strikes. If the up-gunned Integrated Battle Groups are up and running by then – the exercises to prove their new design are due this summer – then their employment would have to reckon with the unintended outcome: international attention forcing India to the table to discuss Kashmir meaningfully.

For India, meaningful talks imply getting Pakistan to vacate its occupation of areas of the erstwhile kingdom of the maharaja. Keeping its claims alive, only last week India protested a Pakistani court order extending its sway over Gilgit-Balitistan as interference in India’s internal affairs. Its chief objection to the Chinese lifeline to Pakistan, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, is that it trespasses Indian territory. While India’s contention would no doubt figure in the talks forced on India, the casus belli (case for war) would likely lie in the tinder accumulated in Kashmir which would have to be reckoned with. Though distasteful, it would be a consequence of any Indian military action.

Proceedings at a book release function over the weekend organised by the Center for Land War Studies do not lend confidence that there is enough appreciation of the unintended consequences of military response. A significant reservation voiced by the speakers comprising retired members of the military brass who contributed to the CLAWS publication – Military Strategy for India in the 21st Century – was that there is little government-military interface on the nature of India’s military options.

This is little different from the criticism governments have faced over the past, which indicates this government’s security mindedness has been little different from its predecessors', notable in light of its assiduous distancing from the past and its tom-tomming of the same. The difference is its hardline, which can land the region in a soup in quick time, absent mechanisms, other than routine diplomacy, for engaging Pakistan.

While to peaceniks the unintended outcome – meaningful talks perhaps mediated by the international community – of military action in line with Operation Kabaddi is not unwelcome, this is perhaps not an outcome sought by NSA Ajit Doval’s team. In which case, Doval is best advised to read the CLAWS publication on military strategy and be mindful of the inadvisability of military options, and preventively defuse the conditions that keep Operation Kabaddi plans well dusted.