To join the politicised debate over the crossborder raid of September 2016 ~ popularly projected as “surgical strikes” ~ would be to descend to depths as murky as they are meaningless. They were not the first operation of the kind, and the term was used by the then Director-General of Military Operations in a sense routine in military circles.

Yet Raisina Hill latched on to the term as though it was indicative of decisive action that would put paid to jihadi militants using “launchpads” across the Line of Control for forays into J&K. That the term was over-used and exaggerated is confirmed by continued militancy. Even the raid across the eastern frontier into Myanmar has not proved decisive.

Advertisement

Why Opposition parties should have questioned the strike is as difficult to explain as to how a number of TV channels were a few days back “supplied” a video recording of the operation ~ it was not officially released ~ to re-fuel a sick controversy. Is someone so desperate as to re-cycle what is trumpeted as a success story? Well, that’s the level of contemporary domestic politics.

No less inexplicable is why the I&B minister should have accorded so much priority to placing his political hat (which he is entitled to wear) over the green beret of the over 200-year-old Grenadiers Regiment into which he had been commissioned? Did Colonel Rajyvardhan Singh Rathore not recall any of the military history he must have picked up during his career in uniform? It was legitimate for him to accuse the Congress of being unable to digest the mission of September 2016, but he has invited a degree of ridicule by a claim that “for the first time an Indian Prime Minister has sent a message to the world, by conducting surgical strikes, that India will not let its integrity go away.”

Is he unaware of which Prime Minister had opened a “second front” in 1965 that saw Indian tanks roll across the Wagah border and approach the outskirts of Lahore? Or who headed the government when the Pakistan army was shredded to ribbons that served as festoons for the surrender ceremony at Dacca’s race course in December 1971?

Or, even more recently, who occupied the PMO when the intruders were evicted from Kargil? In contrast with those military operations, even the Colonel-minister would concede, the strike of September 2016 is a mere footnote in Indian military history: a history that must never be twisted. And maybe there is need for young ministers to be told of the raid conducted by a unit of the Para Commandos led by Bhawani Singh of Jaipur in 1971.

It is conceded that military successes, and failures, should not be exploited for political advantage. But all ~ ministers included ~ are honourbound to adhere to lofty standards.