Even those simpatico are puzzled, to say the least, at the Government’s ham-handed effort to gain political mileage

There is not an Indian citizen who is not proud of our country's Armed Forces. Certainly, information about their successes and challenges must be — in a respectful and subtle as opposed to in-your-face and hagiographic manner — conveyed to the country's youth in a well thought out campaign which evokes respect for our women and men in uniform in the line of duty but without necessarily promoting a militaristic mindset. That's what it takes to make matters military and issues of national security part of a holistic nation-building process. The University Grants Commission's proposed celebration of 29 September a surgical strikes day at universities and their affiliated colleges in India, on the other hand, does nothing of the sort. This extension of a mindset which thought putting tanks on display on the JNU campus — though leading members of that institution from both the students' and teachers' bodies do in many ways symbolise all that is wrong with the deracinated, entitled left-liberal elite in our country — is far too crude a ploy for a nation that has had a tradition of sophisticated public discourse or samvaad from antiquity.

That the current dispensation thinks the body in charge of higher education in the country should spend its time organising marches by NCC cadets, speeches by ex-servicemen, cultural programmes and the like next week to commemorate an effective cross-border raid against terror bases by the Indian Army two years ago, betrays just how thin on the ground it feels its achievements record has been. For, if surgical strikes by a professional and superbly led Army is what the Government is reduced to playing up to generate ‘nationalist' fervour and the not-so-subliminal identification of the BJP as the party which best represents that emotion, it stands to reason that the party feels its other achievements, of which there have been quite a few, ironically, as there have been some major mistakes, are not gaining enough traction. As for the strike themselves, while the scale and modus operandi of the 2016 cross-border intrusion by our forces may have been different from previous occasions and could arguably (though experts disagree) be considered strategic in nature as opposed to earlier such operations which have been conducted since the 1990s that were more tactical, it is certainly safe to say the wheel in this regard was not invented two years ago. From posters celebrating the strikes to ‘going public' with them to leverage support in a lowest common denominator public discourse shaped by the mass media may or may not get the BJP votes. But it will certainly will end up making a tamasha out of one of the last institutions in the country marked by a very necessary degree of discreetness and professionalism.