Opinion: Terrorist attacks continue, what will India's leaders do?

In 1948, when Pakistan attacked the northern part of India, our forces successfully repulsed their attack and were in the process of re-acquiring the lost territory lost when the national leadership announced not only a cease-fire but a UN intervention too. Arguably, this formed the base of the Kashmir conflict. Over the next decades, India had to fight five wars with Pakistan in 1965, 1971, 1984,1999 and the proxy war in Kashmir had been relentless.

In 1965, India captured about 2000 sq. km of Pakistan's territory in the sensitive Sialkot and Kashmir sectors but returned it with the hope that this would end eruptions of violence in the future. Despite the wars, the country was forced to fight, like in 1971, India has never dithered from the code of conduct of a winning side.

After the conclusive victory of 1971, India did hand over 93000 Prisoners of War and 5500 sq km of captured territory. We returned all of these and did not bargain for Kashmir at all.

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In the last decade of the last century, Pakistan started its proxy war in Kashmir, we kept on losing precious lives but did not do anything except strongly condemning all kind of terrorist attacks. Over 30 years of proxy war resulted in establishing the image of our country as a soft-willed one. Anyone can do anything to us and we have only one solution- strongly condemning the terrorist action and wait for another action to condemn again.

We have lost more soldiers in Kashmir than in 1965 and 1971 wars put together.

Having fought in Kashmir for so many years in the peak of insurgency and seeing the valiant soldiers fall to the political aspirations, I ponder at times as to what should be the role of our government, civil society members and the individuals?

What concerns me deeply is whether Pakistan sees India after all as a soft-willed state and, therefore, goes on to carry these attacks with impunity. Why do we experience the same cycle of events: an incident happens, politicians condemn it, citizens burn few candles and express grief on social media, Forces kept on making plans for revenge which never get a nod from the political leadership and blood continues to flow. After a week or so, everyone falls silent and wait for another incident to happen.

There have been numerous terror incidents, for so many years, Pakistani Army personnel has been coming to this side of the border, decapacitating our boys and taking their severed heads as a trophy and every time we are successful in orally condemning it and that too not strongly. They come to our territory, fire the American missiles on our soldiers, kill them and our political leadership is, once again, successful only in strongly condemning it.

This political weakness of our country is open to the world for last 70 years and the patience of a common citizen is perhaps breaking down. It is high time that the leadership of the nation should do something which can help it to regain the faith of common citizen and prove that India is able to protect ourselves.

So what should our leaders do now? It is a million-dollar question. Question is not the capability of the armed forces. The question is of a strong political will. The question is of acting, not just verbally condemning, and the most important question is when will it happen.

Last week I was on a panel with one of the national news channels and had a retired Lt General of Pakistan Army as a co-panelist from Pakistan. To my surprise, he was constantly vomiting venom and was very much confident that India will never be able to do any offensive action against Pakistan. Our weak political will has been proving that time and again.

After so many incidents now, this is the right time to take a hard decision and prove the worthiness of the leadership. I am sure that the government will listen and react instead of just strongly condemning it.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL)