Generals, Gentlemen, and the Fine Art of Sabre-Rattling

https://www.business-standard.com/opinion/columns/asim-munir-tightens-grip-but-fifth-star-won-t-alter-ground-realities-125053001946_1.html

 By all means, Shekhar Gupta’s column “The Weight of the Fifth Star” could have been a sober, strategic analysis of civil-military tensions in Pakistan. Instead, it reads like a warning flare fired in the dark—noisy, dramatic, but ultimately directionless. While the piece accurately captures Pakistan’s descent into hybrid authoritarianism, it ultimately leans too far into speculative geopolitics, bordering on the theatrical.

Let us begin with what is beyond dispute. Pakistan remains a garrison state, where the military tail wags the civilian dog. The Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, is not a national leader but a ceremonial compère reading scripts drafted in Rawalpindi. The President, Asif Ali Zardari, continues to weave his intrigues—but these days mostly in the salons of Karachi rather than the corridors of power. The institutions that should serve as checks—Parliament, Judiciary, Press—have either folded or been forcibly folded.

General Asim Munir, now elevated to Field Marshal, has risen as an outsider. Unlike the usual upper-crust generals produced by the Pakistan Military Academy, Munir is a product of Mangla’s Officers Training School. His rise reflects ambition, opportunism, and perhaps deft timing—but not necessarily vision or gravitas.

To his credit—or discredit—Munir has accumulated more authority than any Pakistani military leader since Zia-ul-Haq. He has jailed Pakistan’s most popular politician, Imran Khan, subdued the judiciary, and presides over a stage-managed Parliament. But to extrapolate from these developments a looming strike against India, as Gupta implies, is not analysis—it is conjecture. Worse still, such conjecture risks provoking strategic miscalculation.

Understanding South Asia’s instability requires more than speculating on generals’ impulses. It requires attention to the decay—or deliberate dismantling—of institutions. Munir is not Zia, and he is not Musharraf. He is a general whose authority reflects the weakness of Pakistan’s civilian state, not the strength of his own command. The promotion to Field Marshal, coming in the wake of a limited air skirmish, smacks of pageantry over professionalism—an attempt to control narrative, not territory.

That said, India must resist the temptation to congratulate itself as the region’s stable democracy. The reality is far more troubling. The opacity around Operation Sindoor, the government’s silence on losses, and the incoherence of its foreign policy messaging betray a dangerous trend. The External Affairs Ministry mumbles; the Prime Minister roars. Neither informs the citizen.

Prime Minister Modi’s rhetorical theatrics—“Modi ki goli to hai”—may rouse crowds, but they do little to answer serious questions about strategy, diplomacy, or losses sustained. Strategic ambiguity, when used to manage deterrence, can be wise. But when used to conceal failure and avoid accountability, it becomes a disservice to democracy.

Let us not forget: Modi is a politician who excels not in military timing, but electoral choreography. Balakot was not about deterrence; it was about dividends—measured in votes, not security. Where Munir struggles with too many adversaries at home, Modi enjoys the dangerous comfort of having none. An emasculated opposition, a sycophantic media, and a bureaucracy trained to salute before it thinks—these form the ecosystem in which theatre becomes governance.

The American claim that it brokered the ceasefire post-Sindoor—repeated publicly, never denied by India—exposes a government reluctant to level with its people. If a foreign power had to mediate, why was this not shared with Parliament or the public? Is national security now to be guarded by opacity and spun by public relations?

Gupta is right to be wary of Munir’s rise. But the real danger may not lie west of the Radcliffe Line. It may lie at home, in our quiet acceptance of political spectacle over institutional integrity. If India truly believes in its democratic promise, it must demand answers—not merely from its adversaries, but from its own leaders.