ICYMI #The TribuneOpinion: From diplomacy to drones, India’s time of reckoning
India’s announcement of global outreach teams to expose Pakistan’s repeated attempts to foment unrest in India continued to make headlines throughout the week even as the ruling party and the Opposition kept squabbling over who’ll be part of the various delegations and who’ll not be.
Four Congress leaders broke off from the Congress party high command on the issue to be a part of the outreach teams even when their party did not recommend their names to the government. They showed the rest of the country the way, writes The Tribune Editor-in-Chief Jyoti Malhotra in ‘A question of grace and timing‘, comparing it to a déjà vu moment when, in 1994, Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao had asked the Opposition party leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee to lead a delegation on Kashmir to UNHRC in Geneva. Compared to the past, these days the lack of grace defines the political arena, and it’s clear that neither side respects the other, she writes.
On its sidelines, Operation Sindoor continued to be discussed and debated in TV interviews and newspaper columns. Former Navy chief Admiral Arun Prakash (retd) lays it bare in his OpEd ‘Silent Service stood tall in Op Sindoor‘, on how the Indian Navy, carrying the sobriquet the ‘silent service,’ achieved its objectives through ‘non-contact’ force projection rather than engaging in direct combat. With the help of maritime domain awareness, it can access real-time information through satellites, UAVs and coastal radars which provide it with situational awareness on a 24×7 basis. The Pakistani Navy clearly lacks such a system.
Adding another layer of complexity to the narrative is the diabolical role of Türkiye, which supplied drones to Pakistan against India during Op Sindoor. Centre for Land Warfare Studies researcher Aishwarya Airy throws more light through her information-packed article ‘Why the world ignored Turkiye’s role in Indo-Pak conflict’ on the role that Türkiye is playing in the geopolitics of the region. She highlights that disconcerting for India are the recent back-to-back developments during this period—Pak PM‘s visit to Türkiye on the day of the Pahalgam attack, Turkish naval warship being docked in Karachi port, Turkish intelligence chief visiting Pak Air Force HQ, and the sale of Songar-armed drones to Pakistan being fast-tracked by Türkiye between April 22 (Pahalgam attack) and May 7 (Op Sindoor). And last but not least, both Pakistan and Türkiye have been simultaneously engaging with the US with Donald Trump in the saddle, and, China and Russia and nobody is questioning them.
In another section of the OpEd page, “Two Views” the bigger implications of Op Sindoor were further dissected from both technological and diplomatic standpoint. Air Marshal Amit Tiwari writes in his article ‘Brahmos: The bolt from the blue’ that the success of the BrahMos in Op Sindoor is a testament to the changing nature of the battlefield, shifting from tactics to tech-driven warfare. Giving another viewpoint, Maj Gen Ashok Mehta writes in his article ‘Breaking Gordian knot of terror and talks’ about how Indian diplomacy could not keep pace with the brilliantly executed Op Sindoor operations.
Apart from Op Sindoor and its fallout, there were other interesting topics that drew the readers’ interest in the OPED pages. Former Planning Commission chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia and former Cabinet Secretary KM Chandrasekhar write about the success of India’s first deep-water Vizhinjam port in Kerala in ‘Takeaways from the Vizhinjam success story’ and how it has become a relevant role model for infrastructure planning. Despite political differences between ruling parties — whether it was the BJP government at the Centre or late Oommen Chandy’s Congress government or CPM-led LDF government led by CM Pinarayi Vijayan — it signalled policy continuity and political federalism.
In yet another interesting read ‘50 years on: Inside story of Sikkim’s merger‘, GBS Sidhu writes how Sikkim was merged into Indian territory in 1975 aided by a R&AW-sponsored covert operation at the go-ahead of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, otherwise we might have found Nepal in the possession of this beautiful hill state.
Holding a completely different fort is sociologist Avijit Pathak’s soul-stirring article ‘Toppers and losers: What our education system has got wrong‘. He awakens us to how, while eulogising the toppers, we fail to acknowledge the agony of the losers who might not have been able to make it, maybe because their parents could not afford to hire tutors or send them to ‘traders’ of physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. In the process, young minds are losing their wonder years and damaging their creativity and sensitivity to life, he warns.
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