Editorial: Who invited Donald to dinner?

We know that the address to the nation is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s signature political style. Not for him platforms of accountability such as press conferences or all-party meetings. Even special sessions of Parliament are reserved for celebratory occasions when he gets to be the star of the show. Speaking directly to a television camera at 8 in the evening allows him to appear urgent, avoid questions, and retain strategic ambiguity — essential in complex circumstances such as the four-day military confrontation we’ve just had with Pakistan.

The PM’s address to the nation on Monday, May 12, was an attempt to recapture the Pahalgam narrative. Over the previous four days, public discourse had become muddied because of the developments on the battlefront. Questions were asked about India’s military claims, especially the performance of its Rafales. The government did itself no favour by keeping tight control over information, indulging in optics rather than effective messaging, and allowing its pet media to get ahead of themselves with fantastic reporting. And then when Donald Trump crashed the party with his ceasefire announcement, the story New Delhi wanted to tell the world had begun to fray at the edges. It thus fell to Narendra Modi to do the 8 pm thing to recover the narrative.

While the speech predictably projected India’s muscularity vis-à-vis Pakistan, it contained two points that New Delhi’s diplomatic, defence and security pundits need to consider when they plan India’s future response to terror activities abetted by Islamabad. One was the PM’s assertion that India would not submit to “nuclear blackmail”. The inference is that the N-word was indeed thrown at New Delhi during those frantic 96 hours. We can only conjecture that Islamabad felt challenged enough to wield the threat. When India fine-tunes how it will respond to future terror acts on its people, it will have to game the nuclear factor as well.

The second point the PM underscored was the predominant use of air warfare, especially drone strikes. It’s evident that air power and unmanned strikes will be called upon sooner on the escalation ladder in future. It follows that modernisation of the IAF needs to be accelerated much more than we have been able to. It would be suicidal to scale up a future anti-terror response while the IAF languishes under-equipped and undermanned.

The biggest point of interest in the PM’s speech was how he would address the perception that it was Washington, not New Delhi, that brokered the Indo-Pak ceasefire, thereby inveigling itself into the Kashmir dispute. How had Donald Trump managed to get the jump on the Indian PM on two successive days, tweeting that he had brokered the ceasefire and then boasting that he threatened trade consequences to make the Indian and Pak leaders fall in line.

Modi’s address was carefully crafted to distance India from any hint that it welcomed US mediation. Yet the distancing was not emphatic enough. The Prime Minister should have made it unambiguously clear that India does not accept third-party involvement in the Kashmir issue. By failing to state this outright, he left the door ajar for speculation. At a moment when the perception of internationalisation is gaining traction — especially in global capitals and newsrooms — India’s silence may be misconstrued as acquiescence.

And if the events of the past five days do result in the Kashmir issue becoming internationalised, India’s Pahalgam response will be seen as a major strategic misstep.