Do our security “leaders” watch too much cable TV? If they did, they would accept that the fright in “Scare Tactics” eventually fizzled out and all ended in a good laugh. Yet it is a different brand of humour that emerges when the bluff is “called”, and the joke is “on” those who tried to scare adversaries into submission ~ often it provokes even more hostility. Weeks back the Army chief warned that his soldiers would go “helter skelter” after Kashmiri youth threw stones to distract the troops on counter-militancy missions. It had as little impact as the much-hyped surgical strikes had on preventing terrorists from using “launch pads” in POK to disrupt normality in the Valley. Now the Director-General of the J&K Police has cautioned those “misguided” young persons that they would be “committing suicide” if they persisted with their harassment of the security forces: even coming up with the profound observation that “a bullet does not know whom it will hit”. Clearly “hurting”, the security forces at large have also made it apparent the they have yet to formulate a strategy that will nullify the “supporting-fire” being extended to militants/terrorists by highly-motivated, perhaps even radicalised, local folk who see themselves getting increasingly involved in the dubious bid for azadi.

The strategy-deficit is not limited to the uniformed community ~ the union home minister has only recently asserted in Parliament that “our security forces are responding the way they are expected to”. Apart from expressing confidence about who will emerge victorious (not mentioning at what cost that victory would be achieved), Mr Rajnath Singh echoed the forces’ charge that those backing the stone-pelters (from across the border?) had made a fine-art of using social media to mobilise the youth within minutes of an anti-militancy operation being initiated ~ another pointer to who held the “strategy trumps”.

There has been little dissipation in the unrest witnessed last June since the killing of Burhan Wani, and there are signs of a “hot summer” in the offing. The state government is truly out of its depths: time was when Mehboobi Mufti wielded some influence with the “azadi agitiators”, but that evaporated when the desire for the gaddi saw her link up with the BJP. And Raisina Hill is too “distant” from the Kashmir Valley to trigger a revised approach,  revive a policy along the lines of what had stamped Atal Bihari  Vajpayee distinct. It requires persons with large hearts to shed the baggage of the past and script a new history ~ not those obsessed with pellet-guns, and who live in a fool’s paradise when jingoistic TV channels slam as “anti-national” all those who recommend a non-military approach to restoring tranquility across the Pir Panjal.