When a failed general becomes Field Marshal: Pakistan’s Medina mindset makes Bharat an enduring enemy

Within days after getting a bloody nose in Bharat’s Operation Sindoor, Pakistan Army chief gets a promotion. He is now called Field Marshal Asim Munir — the second Army Chief in Pakistan to get this accolade after Gen Ayub Khan in the 1960s.

It may seem ludicrous to see a person getting promoted after making a total mess of his job. But then, here we are talking about Pakistan, a land “beyond reason” where, to use VS Naipaul’s words, “the fundamental rage” is against its own past. To be in Pakistan is like living in an alternate, almost contrasting reality. Here, war is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

It’s not that there is no method in this Pakistani madness. It is a well-thought-out manual. It’s just that it’s a jihadi toolkit that has nothing in common with the so-called civilised code of conduct that the rest of the world prefers to abide by. The Pakistani jihadi manual, which the military of that country swears by, is the outcome of the Medina mindset with which the country was carved out of Bharat — a nation that, writes Venkat Dhulipala in his book, Creating A New Medina, “was not just envisaged as a refuge for the Indian Muslims, but as an Islamic utopia that would be the harbinger for renewal and rise of Islam in the modern world, act as the powerful new leader and protector of the entire Islamic world and, thus, emerge as a worthy successor to the defunct Turkish Caliphate as the foremost Islamic power in the twentieth century”.

More from Opinion

Sergio Gor’s senate hearing signals the future of Indo-American ties How Trump’s ‘War on Drugs’ buildup against Venezuela has a hidden agenda

It is this Medina mindset that makes Islamabad a perennial adversary of Bharat, with the predominant belief that “retaining the ability to challenge” New Delhi itself is victory for Islamabad. This may explain why Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was seen celebrating the country’s defeat post-Operation Sindoor as a victory for Pakistan. This may also explain why post-defeat the Pakistan Army decided to promote Gen Munir as Field Marshal.

American author C Christine Fair writes in Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War: “For Pakistan’s men on horseback, not winning, even repeatedly, is not the same thing as losing. But simply giving up and accepting the status quo and India’s supremacy, is, by definition, defeat.”

Impact Shorts

More Shorts

How army remains Pakistan’s biggest business house

60 years on, why 1965 India–Pakistan war still matters

Fair elaborates on this as she writes, “Pakistan’s generals would always prefer to take a calculated risk and be defeated than to do nothing at all. Pakistan’s army will insist on action at almost any cost, even that of presiding over a hollow state. After all, if the Pakistani state were to make such concessions to India, it would no longer be a state worth presiding over. By seeing victory as the ability to continue fighting, Pakistan’s army is able to seize victory even from the jaws of what other observers would deem defeat.”

This mindset explains Pakistan’s incessant support to terrorism in Bharat. This also explains why Pakistani generals are ever-ready to take insane gambles, like the ones taken by Gen Pervez Musharraf in Kargil (1999) and Gen Munir in Pahalgam (2025). This may answer why the Kargil misadventure and Pahalgam disaster only ended up promoting their two architects: Gen Musharraf became the President of Pakistan, while Gen Munir became Field Marshal.

Pakistan’s Medina mindset further means Bharat should be prepared for a perpetual state of warfare, overt or covert, with its western neighbour. Pakistani politicians and generals may occasionally talk peace and raise the K-bogey, but the fact remains that for Islamist Pakistan, the real problem is the very existence of Bharat.

This is where Bharat and its people have a history lesson to remember: If Pakistan senses its victory in defeat, then Bharat has to change the very goalpost of victory. The political leadership of the country must realise that any victory that doesn’t decisively defeat Pakistan, making it physically divided and economically impoverished, won’t be seen as a defeat in Islamabad. Bharat has to hold on to the gains it makes militarily, whenever opportunity comes its way. Imagine if Indira Gandhi had pushed the cornered Zulfiqar Bhutto to hand over Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in 1972. Today, in that case, Bharat would have had a geostrategic advantage in the region over its neighbours, especially Pakistan and China. Similarly, the best possible way to deal with recalcitrant Bangladesh would be to use the latter’s provocation to cut Dhaka’s two chicken necks. Once a superior power occupies a territory, the situation ‘normalises’ over a period of time, and the gain becomes tangible, substantial and, in most cases, permanent.

What if a dharmic nation like Bharat doesn’t go for the kill? If this is the case, then the problem remains pending for future generations to deal with. This works well for an enemy like Pakistan whose “shatrubodh” (sense of enemy and enmity) is absolute and perpetual. It will keep attacking the enemy — Bharat in this case — and won’t stop till the objective is achieved. Bharat doesn’t have that kind of shatrubodh. (This is good as it stops us from being a perpetually besieged society, but the flipside makes Bharat susceptible to Islamist threats in the long term.)

The advantage with an Islamic state like Pakistan is that it just needs one chance to win, while a dharmic state like Bharat has to win all the time. The one, single time it is defeated, and all hell would break loose. Those who are eager to dismiss it as the author’s nightmarish scenario must look back at Bharat’s past. The mighty Vijayanagar empire, for instance, fought the Bahamani kingdom, which was succeeded by five independent Muslim states, but never pushed any of them to extinction, but when things turned awry for Vijayanagar, the latter was wiped out of the face of the earth in 1565 AD.

It is, therefore, incumbent upon Bharat’s political leadership to take up the Islamist challenge and take it to the logical conclusion, if it believes it is strong enough to deal with it now. If not, the country should prepare for the eventuality in a warlike mode.

Pakistan, unlike China, never hides its claws. It’s just that Bharat has refused to see them. The writing on the wall is loud and clear: That Bharat’s war with Pakistan is civilisational, and would only end with the colossal disintegration, if not decimation, of one side. The terrifying eventuality of Bharat being on the wrong side of history can be evaded if the country acts, and acts strongly, when it is in the position of strength, establishing unbreachable advantage over its rival. As Pakistan ‘celebrates’ its second Field Marshal, the political leadership of Bharat needs to update its Pakistan policy — a policy in which there is no space for the middle path (madhyam marg). The enemy, after all, won’t be forgiving if they get a chance — even half a chance.