Any conversation on Kashmir must be grounded in facts, not propagandist spins

Ejaz Haider

If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction

--Dietrich Bonhoeffer, pastor, theologian, dissenter, 1933

Written during the Nazi era, Bonhoeffer’s advice was stark: if a society or state has got the direction fundamentally wrong, it can’t run in the opposite direction to get it right. It needs to get off that train. 

Easier said. How does one get the Daedalion wings to escape the maze, the bind?

Indian politician, diplomat and public intellectual, Shashi Tharoor, penned a column last month for The Indian Express, titled ‘For India-Pak peace is not weakness, dialogue is not defeat’. It’s an improvement on what he wrote last year in April, ‘Hit Hard, Hit Smart’, though it still gets the cause and effect wrong. I shall come to that. But let me begin with what he wrote last year, a column that was dictated more by the flow of immediate passions than an understanding of war, its conduct or why the Sturm und Drang of war lays to rest the flawed assumption that the adversary is a cut-out.

I am not going to flyspeck Tharoor’s recommended strategy in that column because that would take us into the complexities of war, a phenomenon much written about, but whose intricacies continue to elude even the managers of violence. That said, to establish the point, I would take two examples from Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaigns, a general who spoke of coup d’œil but still made disastrous decisions because the battleground tactics are not the same as the politico-strategic objective, Clausewitz’s Zweck, for which the battles (Ziel) are foug