MT Desk: Dear India! the land of multiculturalism, great religions and sects, beautiful people in good numbers, men and women with souls and hearts full of compassion, and many saner heads and wise minds. This open letter addresses you, and the Hindutva devotees under RSS, incarnated in Modi’s exclusion, hate and arrogance. Buoyed from relative economic success, howdy hugs, and having recently emerged from historic under-confidence and complexes, your leadership under Modi Sarkar is taking you on a frightful drive into an uncertain future, that has nothing except demons, dread and destruction.
First, your Army Chief, General Upendra Dwivedi, on October 3, 2025, warned Pakistan to stop state-sponsored terrorism “if it wanted to retain its place on the map”, vowing not to show “any restraint this time” – as if armed UAVs, cruise and ballistic missiles targeting Pakistani cities and public were indeed restraint in your government’s failed junket in May this year.
The same day, your Air Force Chief, Amar Preet Singh, claimed, without evidence, downing five Pakistani F-16 and JF-17 fighter jets during the cited war, making a laughing stock of himself and the IAF. IAF’s internationally known losses at the hands of PAF were acknowledged by none other than Modi’s howdy, President Trump. Even Air Marshall Rakesh Sinha acknowledged your losses while briefing newsmen on IAF Exercise ‘Cold Start’ recently. What a loss of command, confidence and coherence in a professional air force.
A day earlier, on Oct 2, your Defence Minister, Rajnath Singh, thundered out of the blue that any Pakistani incursions in Sir Creek would invite ‘resounding’ Indian response that would change ‘history and geography’. And Modi has also vowed to repay FM Asim’s ‘debt’. Although jingoism and hyperbole are not new to your leaders, this time around the choice of words speaks of bloated arrogance, the overconfidence of ‘presumed power’ and the intoxication of self-righteousness. Such noticeable, if misplaced haughtiness, does not auger well for your middle-class cozy lives in your numerous cities, enabled recently by freedom from historic poverty and deprivation. So, it seems that ‘Operation Sindoor’ continues and so does ‘Bunyan-um-Marsus’.
As you folks follow my writings, gauged from the civility of your comments, allow me to rationalise the perils of your leaders’ wayward jingoism. For a variety of political and domestically driven reasons, your RSS cabal rachets up jingoism, enabled by your non-credible media that survives on fake news, half-truths and outright deceit. And so, your leaders – civil and military – climb high on the escalation ladder, under self-induced socio-political undercurrents.
Now these high-perched leaders, wearing tilak and sindoor, fearing loss of face, cannot come down voluntarily without any military show-down with a presumably ‘weaker’ Pakistan, that you are led to believe is a cake walk. So, the war starts in the nuclearised South Asia because your leaders believe there is space for a conventional punitive war against Pakistan for any acts of omission and commission.