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.
And when the Shaheens, all types, humiliate RSS’s inflated ego and Modi’s sense of superiority, your leaders go running to Washington, to stop further escalation and avoid more Rafael losses. And then, in the true Machiavellian spirit, your Sarkar, under inexplicable hubris, does not even acknowledge the hand that helped in ceasefire. And so, arrogance runs its full course around the brim of catastrophe and destruction.
Dear Indians! Your leadership is not cooperating but actively collaborating with Israel. PM Modi is keenly following pages from Netanyahu playbook, be it Harpy, Harop, Heron, Barak, intelligence collaboration, advisory support or interrogation and torture of freedom fighter in Kashmir. The list is long. And in doing so, he deepens domestic communal faultiness, spoils your relations with the wider Islamic world and your neighbourhood. Mr Modi does not realise that India unfortunately is not US-Israel combine, backed by an entrenched Jewry, the bold and the beautiful; that he is not Netanyahu; and that Pakistan is not some hapless state in the Middle East that will take things lying down.
And so dear neighbours! ISPR responded to your leaders’ uncalled for jingoism that rests on the humiliation suffered in May. ISPR declares that “Pakistan has established a new normal of response, which will be swift, decisive and destructive.” That the people and the Armed Forces of Pakistan “have the capability and resolve to take the fight to every nook and corner of the enemy’s [India’s] territory.” That “this time we [Pakistan] shall shatter the myth of geographic immunity, hitting the farthest reaches of the Indian territory.”
And responding to the nuclear card brandished by your Army Chief, our military with stoic determination and steely resolve warns that “As for the talk of erasing Pakistan from the map, India must know that if situation comes, the erasure will be mutual.” And that is a line my dear readers, I have been clamouring and waiting for your leadership to hear, digest and ponder. Because this leadership is taking you to a nuclear holocaust with unfathomable consequences for more of you, for less of us, for the region and for the world.
Dear People of India! Your leadership is blind to reason, rationale and recourse, as it rebuffs every peace overture. And perhaps you know that escalation in war between our two countries with close proximity of targets of value will quickly get out of hand. Pakistan under its ‘Quid-pro-quo Plus’ response regime will retaliate defensively with grit, resolve, determination and disproportionate force. Have no doubts about it. We go down together as the second-strike triad had been established for such a day and eventuality. The world where there is no Pakistan does not exist for us.
Allow me to rephrase Victor Gao, the gutsy Chinese Professor who recently spoke in Manila on the Sino-US war: Pakistan will never allow India to impose a war on Pakistan, conventional or nuclear, without suffering devastating consequences. Pakistan will not fire the first shot, but Pakistan will not allow India to fire the second shot. Restraint be damned!
These are the iterations of a soldier who knows the perils, price and pitfalls of war and its deadly consequences. I leave it there for you to take it or leave. Just be a little more civil in your responses, if you can!
