As the world’s Buddhists prepare to celebrate the life and teachings of The Buddha, South Asia is shaken by the latest military flare-up between India and Pakistan. And, Sri Lankans continue to worry over the threat to kin and livelihoods in war-wracked West Asia where the bloodbath and devastation can no longer be rationally absorbed.
In Rome last week the Roman Catholics of the world hailed the election of a new Pope, an American Church leader known for his firm criticism of US President Donald Trump and his Republican administration. On Thursday in the Vatican, United States’ Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost became the first American to be elected 267th head of the Roman Catholic Church, taking the name Pope Leo XIV.
Theological continuity
His election is seen by Vatican watchers as a rare theological continuity in the succession of leadership. Often a social activist Pope is succeeded by a conservative and, vice versa, in what had been a habitual theological swing throughout the past century to ensure the inclusion of the various ideological strands within the Church community.
Pope Leo’s predecessor, the late Pope Francis was known for his social activism and grassroots theology. The American former Cardinal, while being firmly Catholic mainstream, had nevertheless – like many other mainstream American Church leaders – been critical of Donald Trump’s seeming racism in cracking down on illegal immigrants and open favouring of a White America.
Whether the new Pope will also continue Pope Francis’ strong stand against the West-backed Israeli genocide in Palestine, remains to be seen. Certainly, such a stand by an American Pope will be a greater moral-political challenge to the Western power bloc’s persistently cynical underwriting of Israel.
But even if the world’s religious institutions – whether Buddhist or Christian or Islamic – are largely inactive on the human horror being perpetrated so blatantly in Palestine, the world’s geopolitical forces seem to be consolidating into dynamics that could soon challenge the West’s current dominance and impunity.
Russian military parade
On Friday, Russia conducted what is being seen as its largest ever military parade in decades to mark the 80th anniversary of Soviet Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Even if the Patriotic War Victory Day parade was not as big or internationally well-attended as similar parades during the Russia-led Warsaw Pact alliance’s heyday, analysts are acknowledging that President Vladimir Putin’s tamasha last Friday had great significance in terms of the strong diplomatic posture taken by chief guest Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Sri Lankans, however, would be forgiven if they pay less attention to events on the far side of the planet and worry over the confrontation in our immediate neighbourhood. India and Pakistan are South Asia’s two most powerful States, both nuclear-armed and, both known for their aggression toward each other from the very onset of their modern nationhood that was borne out of The Partition.
Last week, after a fortnight of politician and mass media-led revving up of Islamophobia and anti-Pakistan nationalism following the Pahalgam massacre of April 22, India launched airstrikes deep inside Pakistan. Islamabad claims at least 31 Pakistanis, all civilians, died in the aerial bombings by Indian attack jets and drones on various locations in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and, also inside Pakistan itself.
Charging Delhi with hitting civilian locations, Islamabad vowed a “measured” retaliation, with Government officials specifying that only Indian military installations would be targeted. Neither side is providing details of their military operations in terms of actual weapons deployed.
Until India’s launch of air strikes last Tuesday, both sides had traded long range artillery fire across their international border and the ‘Line of Control’ (LoC) that divides Pakistani and Indian-occupied Kashmir. The LoC is no more than the actual ceasefire line where the two countries’ Armies stopped fighting in 1948 after over-running their respective parts of the once fully independent kingdom of Kashmir.
The Indian authorities have yet to identify the perpetrators of the execution-style massacre of 26 male civilians – 25 Indian tourists and one Nepali – in Pahalgam, a beautiful mountain resort deep inside Indian-controlled Kashmir.
The actual number of attackers is estimated as six based on survivor accounts. Supposedly clad in military-style dress and some with helmets with mounted video cameras, the attackers had apparently spent only minutes in the remote forest picnic site to separate the Hindu adult men before shooting them dead at point blank range.
Disappeared without trace
The attack site is almost 100 km from the LoC, implying that if the attackers did cross from the Pakistani side, they had travelled a long distance without detection from the frequent Indian patrols. And they have now disappeared without a trace.
Without waiting to present any evidence to verify a Pakistani connection, Delhi has now made its charge of a Pakistani master-minded guerilla operation its official narrative. Based on this accusation, Delhi has already launched a series of drastic administrative and economic sanctions.
All airspace is closed, commerce halted, people movement stopped. Most seriously, India has seemingly suspended its side of the implementation of the Indus Water Treaty, on which Pakistan depends for much of its water supply for everything from agriculture, industry and human use to general land fertility.
The sheer scale of the Indian retaliation is seen by political observers as wholly disproportionate to the scale of the Pahalgam attack – a single, isolated incident with 26 casualties and no infrastructure damage. India’s suspension of its role in the Indus Treaty alone amounts to retaliation on a countrywide scale that potentially threatens the survival of a national population.
Even the other national-level sanction measures such as the stoppage of all inter-country commerce and travel is a direct targeting of Pakistan without provision of any proof of that country’s complicity. As these columns noted last Sunday, there is a whole history of Pakistani-orchestrated cross-border clandestine operations against Indian civilian and military targets over decades of Indo-Pak enmity. India, too, has some history of clandestine cross-border hostile actions against certain neighbouring states. Sri Lankans will not easily forget Delhi’s hosting of anti-Sri Lankan secessionist militia during a certain period.
Now, India has actually attacked Pakistan, not in some proportionate clandestine or small-scale manner but with its conventional military forces across much of the length of its border. According to geopolitical criteria, the greatly imbalanced proportionality is a clear escalation: that is, from a single incident to a countrywide hostile action, a ‘broad spectrum’ series of actions.
“Unprovoked”
The Indian Defence Ministry has said that the strikes – named “Operation Sindoor” – (a nod to the Vermillion powder applied on the forehead by married Hindu women) were to hold “accountable” those responsible for the attack in Pahalgam. Indian officials claim that the aerial attacks targeted suspected militia hideouts.
But Pakistan, which has denied any involvement in the Pahalgam incident, described the strikes as “unprovoked”. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said that the “heinous act of aggression will not go unpunished”. India says at least 15 civilians were killed and 43 injured by Pakistani shelling on its side.
Meanwhile, Pakistani defence officials said that Pakistani fire had shot down five Indian aircraft and a drone. India has yet to respond to these claims, which have not been independently verified. Some military websites have also reported that Pakistan had used Chinese-made weapons.
Significantly, some analysts say that Pakistan may make their claimed shooting down of five Indian aircraft as their ‘military’ response to the Indian attack. If Islamabad does allow this military exchange to end at this point without a reciprocal, proportionate, air strike into Indian territory then the ‘escalation’ much feared by the rest of South Asia will not continue.
Of course, within India, the BJP-led Government will have gained a powerful domestic political victory as seemingly having ‘punished’ Pakistan. However, India, being the far bigger regional power, will then give an impression of risking nuclear war while already wreaking much human trauma and economic – if not ecological – damage to another country and across the neighbourhood.
“Friendship of steel”
While South Asian states engage in geopolitical pettiness, two of the world’s greatest powers have also been busy forging an alliance they claim is for world peace and “strategic global stability”.
On Thursday, Chinese President Xi and his host, Russian President Putin signed a strategic cooperation agreement in Moscow in which the two nuclear powers seemingly concretised what Xi publicly (at their meeting) called a “friendship of steel”.
Issuing probably the longest, most comprehensive joint statement in years, the two countries affirmed their commitment to strategic cooperation on the world stage across a spectrum of global issues from energy to nuclear power to the many flashpoints such as Taiwan, the Koreas and, of course, Ukraine.
On Friday, Xi was the chief guest at the annual military parade in Red Square to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Soviet Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany. Twenty-seven other Heads of State or Government were also guests – including Egypt’s Al Sisi, Brazil’s Lula da Silva, Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traore and the premiers of Ethiopia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Serbia and Slovakia.
China’s over 100-man squad was the largest among the 30 foreign military contingents joining the over 11,000 Russian personnel in the massive parade which featured the latest Russian military hardware. The event marked a consolidation of an alliance that clearly aims at countering the West’s waning global dominance.
