Aditya Sinha Column: Pak ties: Modi's toughest asana yet

On Saturday night Home Minister Rajnath Singh told India that the terrorist attack on Pathankot was over and we all went to sleep thanking god it had ended The next afternoon upon flying into Delhi I was momentarily disoriented to find that the terrorist attack was not yet over More defence and paramilitary personnel had died That it still continued was to me more shocking than the fact of the actual attack It was scaryMembers of the Anti Terrorist Front AIATF protest in Amritsar on Sunday against the militant attack at Pathankot Air Force base PicPTIFortunately Prime Minister Narendra Modi disappeared from Delhi for the weekend away from the media frenzy He avoided having to make his natural response mdash as in September 2014 following a ferocious exchange of fire on the LoC mdash which would have been of a titfortat tone because anything less would be a dilution of lsquoBrand Modirsquo Instead he issued a banal tweet about the enemies of humanity and to the delight of detractors he tweeted the glory of yoga Considering his macho image such calm in the face of terrorist provocation would be no less difficult than kurma asana tortoise pose or shirsha asana head standModi clearly wants to see the peace process with Pakistan through Otherwise the attack on Pathankots airforce base was a good occasion to call it off if he had even the slightest doubt And the attack came just under six months after a similar attack on a police station in Gurdaspur like those terrorists attacked a bus the Pathankot attackers snatched a policemanrsquos beaconlit car these guys also sneaked in through a nala drain they were also heavilyarmed indicating they intended to fight to the finish And the operation ran on into a second day despite an intelligence alert that occasioned the deployment of around 50 security personnel in Pathankot sometimes nothing less than pinpoint intelligence will doModi and National Security Advisor NSA Ajit Doval justify Indiarsquos current engagement with Pakistan on the ground that we now have a direct line to the military establishment in the form of their NSA retired LtGen Naseer Khan Janjua Then how do we rationalise this attack The JaisheMohd is a nonstate actor but this operation could not have been pulled off without infrastructural or planning help from the lsquodeep statersquo the Pakistan armyrsquos InterServices Intelligence ISI agency At the very least it was launched from Pakistani soilWersquove long heard about a rogue element mdash some sort of mysterious and unaccountable ISI officers who are out of control of even the military establishment That defies the essential nature of any armed force everyone reports to the army chief Even the rogue element Indeed why is that US President Barack Obama never told the Pakistan Army that he was sending his Navy SEALs to Abbottabad in 2011 to kill Osama bin LadenIt is said that the 2611 attack on Mumbai was a plan approved by President Pervez Musharraf before he was deposed mdash perhaps in frustration that the peace deal he was working with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had slipped out of his grasp Our intelligence establishment believes that sophisticated terrorist attacks are part of the Pakistan army mindset mdash that once in a while the bloody Indians need a kick in the butt It is not surprising then that opinion in India is divided on dealing with Pakistan Some in Modirsquos own party say that bilateral relations ought to be frozen for a decade and then resumed when India can easily dictate terms to Pakistan Some say we must keep engaging despite the expected ldquopinpricksrdquo by elements that are hostile to improvement in bilateral relations Some oddly talk about Akhand Bharat And some say we must retaliate to these ldquopinpricksrdquo though such a suggestion is ironic given that wersquove made a hash of securing one of our most important forward airforce basesBut if Modi is resoutely pursuing peace mdash and he should not because the Americans twist his arm to do so but because it is the only thing that makes longterm sense mdash then he has got to know that there are going to be more ldquopinpricksrdquo in the future To stay the course will be difficult and to keep his own establishment in line hersquos going to have to occasionally pull out of his hat another rabbit like the Christmas Day stopover in LahoreIt is clear that 2016 will be the actual year that defines Modirsquos tenure as prime minister He is taking the biggest gamble of his career because to stay the course he has to further invest himself in pursuing peace That will only get him deeper invested mdash and the deeper he is invested the more exposed he is to failure So he will have to invest more Itrsquos a difficult asana letrsquos wish him luck Or else for Modi 2015 will seem like a riskfree cakewalk compared to this yearJournalist and writer Aditya Sinha is the coauthor of Kashmir The Vajpayee Years He tweets autumnshade Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycom