So there is a serious new wrinkle in our policy of zero tolerance for terrorism. We have this on good authority because our defence minister assures us that our “new posture” has scared Pakistanis into reacting to the way our special forces penetrated and destroyed two militant camps deep, very deep inside Myanmar, about 10 kilometres deep. We know two camps have been destroyed because we have been emphatically told it has happened. Equally emphatically we have been told by Yangon that whatever happened—if it happened at all—happened not in Myanmar but within Indian territory. Certainly no credible image or video to this effect has been released to buttress our claim and the single picture that was put out turned out meretricious. (In any case, the helicopter was a dead giveaway. I’m no military expert, but you don’t send in a noisy whirlybird for a covert operation, only eight kilometres deep into friendly enemy territory in the middle of the night). For all we know, the real story may be different: our boys may have killed double of the number claimed. But most heartening of all: we know the Pakistanis are now properly frightened because they have told us to stop daydreaming into letting ourselves believe that Pakistan is another Myanmar.
Our own ministers are charmingly divided over whether what happened amounted to “hot pursuit” or “pre-emptive strike”. I hesitate to go along with the “hot pursuit” advocates because we have not yet been told that our army men got the very same terrorists who were responsible for the deaths of the eighteen 6 Dogra Regiment soldiers by closely chasing after them hot on their heels a full four days after they had shown a clean pair of heels. “Pre-emptive” sounds a whole lot better because I am assuming that those who were killed by our action are no longer going to be in a position to kill anybody, especially our soldiers. I am not particular which terrorists our soldiers killed so long as they were terrorists arrayed against us; the Northeast is a great big grey area to us, but we know all the bad guys there in that terrorist alphabetic soup know each other, or are related to each other, or are connected in some way or the other to Shangwang Shangyung Khaplang, our Northeast equivalent of Dawood Ibrahim, and who, some privately argue, is another one of our very own delightful creations, like Velupillai Prabhakaran, or Bhindranwale.
I am shying away from calling our action unprecedented for reasons you will see, but certainly there is some loud signalling going on that a firm line has been drawn by our security planners and that line can be seen by one and all, including those in Naypyidaw and Beijing. Previously, our troops went into Myanmar on the quiet. They kept the local Myanmar post commander informed, mostly at the last minute, for they did not want to sneak all the way to a camp only to find a couple of bedsheets left behind in a clearing and underwear as well, drying by the side of a hastily put out fire. Certainly they did not issue press releases or hold briefings or release misleading pictures after they got back from their missions. Myanmar does not spread its army thickly along the boundary because the fear that India will take over their territory does not keep them awake at nights, unlike some other neighbour of ours. A soldier I know first entered Myanmar in the late Sixties on a similar surreptitious mission, but more of that later.
Sudarshan is the author of Anatomy of an Abduction: How the Indian Hostages in Iraq Were Freed
sudarshan@newindianexpress.com