New Delhi’s recent push for a more substantive and muscular foreign policy doctrine found a new template to work on with the surgical strike by Indian Army’s Special Forces inside neighbouring Myanmar in the wee hours last Tuesday.
The ‘hot pursuit’ of terrorists holed up in two separate camps about 4km inside Myanmar along India’s northeastern borders was in retaliation of the deadly ambush of the 6 Dogra Regiment convoy of the Indian Army in Manipur on June 4, that had resulted in the death of 18 soldiers – the biggest blow suffered by the army since the Kargil War in the summer of 1999.
While Indian Army did not suffer any casualties in the Myanmar operation, according to sources, at least 100 militants were killed in the pre-dawn raid that took the extremists completely by surprise.
In the past, there were instances when Indian armed forces conducted special operations beyond India’s geographical boundaries – namely in Bhutan and in Myanmar as well.
Moreover, in June 1987, five Mirage 2000 fighter jets of Indian Air Force escorted five AN-32 cargo planes that airdropped relief material to stranded Tamil-origin minorities in besieged Jaffna town in Sri Lanka, even as the island nation fought a pitched battle with the dreaded Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
While the earlier operations in Bhutan and Myanmar were largely covert, the Jaffna airdrop was seen in international circles as purely a case of muscle-flexing by New Delhi to secure a hegemonic role in South Asia under the prime ministership of Rajiv Gandhi.
In fact, whatever foreign policy brownie points New Delhi did manage to garner with its Jaffna airdrop were later set at naught with the Indian Peace Keeping Force embroiled in a long, bloody and messy entanglement in trying to resolve Colombo’s decades-old internal conflict with the LTTE.
In the light of these past incidents, last Tuesday’s operation in Myanmar was certainly not unprecedented. However, there are a couple of points about the 3am surgical strike on Myanmarese soil that sets it apart from India’s earlier cross-border offensives.
To start with, this is the first time that the Indian government and its military establishment have openly acknowledged having undertaken a mission beyond India’s boundaries to tackle the menace of terrorism.
On numerous occasions in the past, terrorists and subversive elements had crossed into India from its western and northeastern borders. On almost all those occasions, the Indian security forces tried to thwart them from within the limits of India’s borders.
New Delhi’s resolve to fight terror was mostly confined to rhetoric and nuanced responses, in keeping with foreign policy niceties and limited by protocol. In that sense, this is the first recorded instance of New Delhi going one-up in the fight against terrorism beyond its borders and resorting to its fire-power in no uncertain terms, instead of merely making a diplomatic point.
The new dispensation at South Block, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has issued a bold statement through its Myanmar offensive: That New Delhi will no longer be a sitting duck in the face of a clear and tangible threat to its security. And that ‘hot pursuit’ is now very much on the dashboard of India’s counter-terrorism module.
Secondly, the timing. India’s counter-attack came in less than a week after its soldiers were ambushed in Manipur. The decision to cross over into Myanmar and launch a surprise attack was cleared at the highest level of political decision-making in New Delhi at lightning speed, with National Security Adviser Ajit Doval personally looking into the nitty-gritties of the operation, in close coordination with the top brass of the army and the Ministry of External Affairs. The blueprint for the surgical strike was given the all-clear by the prime minister immediately after his return from Dhaka last Monday.
The third point that needs to be taken into cognizance is that this counter-offensive by India strikes at the very heart of the terror mechanism that has been plaguing the Northeast for decades. It is an open secret that most of the terror outfits with a prominent footprint in India’s Northeast, such as the Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland (Khaplang), Kanglei Yawol Kanna Loop, Kamtapur Liberation Organisation, United Liberation Front of Assam-Independent, have used foreign soil – namely that of Bangladesh, Myanmar and Bhutan – to plan and launch attacks on Indian interests in the Northeast.
In recent years, a tough stance by the governments of Bangladesh and Bhutan against anti-India propaganda has left subversive elements with few hideouts and safe havens in those countries. So the attack on Indian soldiers in Manipur was a desperate attempt to rattle India’s security establishment and also to pump some oxygen into the latest move to bring several anti-India forces, active in the Northeast, under one umbrella -- the United National Liberation Front of Western South-East Asia. With the Myanmar ‘hot pursuit’, New Delhi has dealt a body blow, for now, to such designs.
The question that arises here, is whether New Delhi will be as proactive and daring in tackling terror along its western borders? While India’s latest, decisive counter-terrorism move deserves to be complimented for its speed, accuracy and sincerity of purpose, let this incident not be used as yet another excuse to fan the flames of jingoism.
The problems of insurgency and terrorism along India’s western and northeastern borders were never the same in nature. Though the broad-spectrum scourge is similar in its intent at both the flanks, the philosophical and institutional framework to tackle the menace has to differ in its form and substance. There can never be a one-size-fits-all, formulaic response to the two threats.
And there is no reason to believe that the current political establishment in New Delhi isn’t aware of the layered textures of the two scenarios. In the last one year, Modi’s foreign policy activism, so to speak, has indeed created ripples in shores near and far and the success of the Myanmar operation will only add more meat to the Indian premier’s resolve of “zero-tolerance” of terror. But discretion has always been the better part of valour and the South Block mandarins know it only too well.
