Strategic Playbook continues……….

The third most critical influence has been the India factor. Besides the horrors of Partition, for which many officers who witnessed it blamed India, the Radcliff Award had considerable influence on the intense anti-India feeling among the officer corps. Although many of them had come from the Indian Military Academy, they saw the accession of Kashmir, the military operations in Junagarh and Goa as a run up to India’s plans to militarily annex Pakistan. These conspiracy theories prompted some of the senior officers to adopt the weapon of religion to counter imagined threats from India. Major Akbar Khan, for instance, raised the bogey, ‘Islam in Danger,’ among the tribal leaders in Pakistan’s frontier areas to persuade them to launch an attack on India to liberate Kashmir in 1947-48.

Although the Kashmir adventure met with a stiff counter- attack from the Indian forces, Pakistani officers developed a superiority complex, largely based on overblown accounts claiming historical conquests of Indian territories by Muslim invaders and a naïve belief that ‘Hindu banias’ (trading community) were a cowardly lot and had no stomach for a fight. The initial military success in the Rann of Kutch (1965), strengthened this belief and fanned a wave of ‘jihadi’ hysteria among men, officers and the public alike. Stephen Cohen noted that the officers had an “overblown estimate of their own and Pakistan’s martial qualities and some came to believe implicitly the myth that one Pakistan soldier was equal to five, ten or more Indians.” This attitude was fuelled by the exaggerated tales of valour by Islamic warriors and books like The Quranic Concept of War.

To be continued……...