How safe Pakistan’s nuclear weaponry is has been a matter of conjecture, which has often strayed to a dangerous scenario of their falling into wrong hands, say that of terrorists who are actively encouraged by the Army
A sense of frustration at defeat in the battlefield against India may be surmised in the Pakistan army chief Asim Munir rattling the nuclear sabre. True, it was only a private gathering of people of Pakistani origin in Florida, United States, at which the general, perhaps emboldened by the White House signalling support for him by feting him in a lunch with President Trump, revealed that he was willing to take half the world with him if Pakistan were to face an existential crisis.
Gen. Munir’s nuclear fulminations cannot be ignored as a trademark tactic of Pakistan generals who, in their short history, have always aspired to head not just the Army but the nation itself. Ridiculous as it sounds in this age when the nuclear Armageddon can destroy all human civilisation the world will still have to note the threat a general aspiring to be a dictator poses.
How safe Pakistan’s nuclear weaponry is has been a matter of conjecture, which has often strayed to a dangerous scenario of their falling into wrong hands, say that of terrorists who are actively encouraged by the Army. India has noted this and will be telling the world about this ultra-ambitious general who is being promoted as the answer to Pakistan’s feeling of febrile susceptibility, further fuelled by the economic edge of the precipice it stands on.
The social media world may have been amused at the general comparing Pakistan to a dump truck while imagining India is like a Mercedes coming on a highway like a Ferrari — whatever that means. But his threats to blow up any dams that India may build on west-flowing rivers of the Indus and take aim at India and the world’s largest petroleum refinery in Jamnagar, Gujarat, cannot be dismissed as the wild imaginings of an Army chief under pressure after his nation took several hits to military targets like airfields in Operation Sindoor.
Leading the Americans up the garden path has been a national pastime at which Munir is now showing he can excel, as he has with grandiloquent gestures to Trump and the promise of supposed unlimited wealth under the soil of Balochistan. Where all this will end is anybody’s guess but it has been India’s lot in the last 78 years to live with this mystifying paradox of a two-nation theory that colonial Britain put into practice. Asim Munir could turn out to be the worst symptom of a nation condemned to be in eternal flux.
