The delusions of a bully

By the time this is published, much of the world will have known how the ceasefire between Pakistan and India happened, and how Pakistan called India’s bluff on the morning of May 10 and mounted a strong and decisive response, taking out its air defence systems in the north at Adampur base near Amritsar and the south in Bhuj in Gujarat.

Within less than half a day of that response, the ceasefire was announced by US President Donald Trump through a tweet. Pakistan welcomed the ceasefire, and India and the Modi government, for very understandable reasons, tried to disassociate themselves from the announcement. Understandable because India has been humiliated and this was a face-saving way out for Modi, but he wasn’t going to accept it publicly, because that would mean further humiliation. Instead, the Indian government, along with the pliant Indian media, went about pushing this odd narrative, which didn’t make sense at all, that it was Pakistan who had asked for the ceasefire and so on.

Let’s go back a few days before the ceasefire was announced. After its embarrassing humiliation on May 7, the Indian Air Force was grounded and retreated 300 km from the border with Pakistan. Its entire fleet of Rafales (minus the three that were lost that day) was grounded and kept away from the battlefront.

That's the reason the IAF planes didn't make even one sortie and India had to resort to using kamikaze drones – a desperate India trying to spread panic and somehow try and get some advantage over Pakistan.

The IAF fleet was grounded and kept away from the western border - and even today, at the writing of this article on May 13, a stretch of airspace some 200-300 kms wide all along India's border with Pakistan is not being used by Indian aircraft – and it has been closed since May 7.

India's fear since that day is that if any of its jets were to go up in the air, they would be picked up by Pakistani radars and the same missiles would come into play. These are the PL-15 missiles that the Indian Air Force jets, including the Rafales, couldn't see or pick up because their range is much farther than those used by the IAF. And that is in fact what had happened on May 7 as well, when the missiles that brought down the Rafales were fired from so far away that the IAF pilots never saw them coming and their aircraft’s radar never picked them up.

Moving forward to post-ceasefire and May 12, Modi finally addressed India, and his speech was part rabble-rousing and part delusion. He kept on saying that India’s Operation Sindoor was not over but suspended, as if he was trying to convince a jaded population angry at the beating the Indian military had received under his government.

In fact, it would be safe to say that India's behaviour is clearly that of a defeated bully. Modi didn't respond to the ceasefire while Pakistan accepted it wholeheartedly – because it knew had emerged victorious and would now be negotiating/talking from a position of strength.

Contrary to this, India and the Modi government initially said nothing about the ceasefire, too humiliated to face the media. And what they did instead was to use the pliant Indian media (it's called 'Godi' media for a reason) to push the narrative that India was pushed into a ceasefire it didn't want and that it was Pakistan who had asked for it.

Unfortunately for Modi, the facts don't tally with or back that narrative. Furthermore, just a day before May 10, the Indian mainstream media had made a complete and utter fool of itself by running all kinds of fantastic claims (presumably at the behest of the Indian government and military). When these reports turned out to be completely untrue, even Indian audiences turned against it. So currently, mainstream Indian media inspires not even the slightest ounce of confidence among even many Indians – not that it did earlier.

That is also why it now keeps referring to the ceasefire, duly agreed to and pushed for by its own government, as the "so-called ceasefire”.

This is nothing but overkill and mainly stems from the fact that we now see a badly beaten and humiliated bully now trying to huff and puff and throw tantrums in the hope that it may get some of its honour back in the eyes at least of its own population. However, the more it acts in this manner, the more the perception is reinforced of it being a bully who was made to stand down and was badly beaten.

With such a delusional and unpredictable individual at India’s helm, the next few months and, in fact, years promise to be rocky for South Asia as a whole.

The writer is a journalist based in Karachi. He tweets/posts @omar_quraishi and can be reached at: omarrquraishi@gmail.com