56-Inch Self-Image

The cover story of the latest issue of The Caravan [March 2025] is titled The Balakot Misdirection: How the Modi government drew political mileage out of military failure. The essay that runs to over 20 pages is a bold slap on the glowing cheek of India’s Prime Minister. The entire series of military actions taken by Narendra Modi against Pakistan, right from the surgical strike of 2016, turns out to be mere sham in this essay.

War was used by all inefficient kings in the past in order to augment the patriotism of the citizens, particularly in times of trouble. For example, the Controller of the Exchequer taxed the citizens as much as he thought they could bear without violent protest and when he was wrong the King declared a war against a neighbouring country. Patriotism, nationalism, and religion – the best thing about these is that a king can use them all very effectively to control the citizens’ sentiments. Nowadays a lot of leaders emulate the ancient kings’ examples enviably well.

India’s Modi sent quite a few missiles across the national border whenever he was in dire need of his people’s patriotism. This is what I conclude from The Caravan’s long and erudite essay. “For all intents and purposes, the Balakot episode was a military failure for India,” the essayist Sushant Singh writes without mincing words. Singh was in the Indian Army before he became a journalist and writer, and he knows what he is talking about.

The Indian Air Force missed its designated targets, lost a fighter jet in an aerial skirmish, and shot down its own helicopter. But the Modi government’s propaganda machinery converted it all into an epic heroic attack on a monstrous enemy-nation. And it won him a second term in the Parliament.

Pakistan produced better propaganda out of it, Sushant writes, and their more credible video is still available on Pakistan Air Force’s YouTube channel.

India’s hollow chest-thumping versus Pakistan’s military professionalism is what actually came across in the end, in the writer’s opinion. The whole episode was similar to two teams of boys fighting on their school grounds and each making tall claims later. There was no bilateral discussion after the skirmish, no signing of any agreement, no sign of any mature response from either party. There was only “wilful lying by politicians and TV channels” with utter disregard for evidence.

I read The Caravan this morning. The last article I read before going to bed yesterday was an interview between Rajdeep Sardesai and Naresh Fernandez in a Malayalam magazine. Sardesai makes an interesting contrast between Narendra Modi and Mahatma Gandhi. Modi has a 56-inch image which is all hollow inside; the Mahatma had a frail body which had diamond inside.

The Caravan essay looked like a continuation of the Sardesai interview. Sardesai laments the death of media freedom in India. According to him, the TV channels in India now are circuses where the media people are the ringmasters and the public who watch them are the clowns. Ironically, Sardesai has been a media person throughout his career. Right now he is with the India Today group which is an unabashed sycophant of Modi. How long Sardesai will survive there is anyone’s guess.

Back to The Caravan. “A compliant media, conditioned to silence dissent and amplify government narratives, helps sell Modi’s supposedly muscular foreign policy to an unsuspecting audience,” the essay goes on.

But Modi’s ‘muscular’ policy seems to work only with Pakistan. In 2020, when India lost significant control over territory to China in the Galwan Valley, Modi didn’t wag his finger because he knew it would be dangerous to take on China. Sushant Singh is saying this, not I. I’m sure he knows what he is talking about. He probably knows also that he has nothing much to lose to an IT raid or an ED charge. Pakistan will remain Modi’s “favourite punching bag” because he knows where to pull his punches and where not to.

The real catastrophe is that Modi’s 56-inch inflated image has become the essence of India. So much so that even the military leadership of the country has been rendered “reckless and fumbling, unwilling to offer objective professional advice to check the hubris of political leadership.” Referring to the suicide attack on a 2500-strong CRPF battalions by Jaish-e-Mohammad on 14 Feb 2019 on a high-security road in the borderland of India, Singh says that “With its boastful claims and wild threats, the political leadership’s behaviour seemed closer to a dictator’s court than that of a responsible nuclear power.”

It's not the self-image of the ruler that matters in governance, but the profundity of the leader’s vision and the leader’s pragmatic statesmanship.