Nearly thirty years ago, William Lind, one of the finest minds in the arena of military and warfare strategy jointly authored a seminal paper titled The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation. Ever since, the phrase, “Fourth Generation War” gained wide currency. Here’s an excerpt:
[There]is a goal of collapsing the enemy internally rather than physically destroying him. Targets will include such things as the population's support for the war and the enemy's culture. Correct identification of enemy strategic centers of gravity will be highly important….fourth generation warfare seems likely to be widely dispersed and largely undefined; the distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. It will be nonlinear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction between "civilian" and "military" may disappear. Actions will occur concurrently throughout all participants' depth, including their society as a cultural, not just a physical, entity. […] The growth of robotics…and artificial intelligence may offer a potential for radically altered tactics. […] Psychological operations may become the dominant operational and strategic weapon in the form of media/information intervention… Fourth generation adversaries will be adept at manipulating the media to alter domestic and world opinion to the point where skillful use of psychological operations will sometimes preclude the commitment of combat forces… Television news may become a more powerful operational weapon than armored divisions. […] Terrorists use a free society's freedom and openness, its greatest strengths, against it. They can move freely within our society while actively working to subvert it. They use our democratic rights not only to penetrate but also to defend themselves. If we treat them within our laws, they gain many protections; if we simply shoot them down, the television news can easily make them appear to be the victims. Terrorists can effectively wage their form of warfare while being protected by the society they are attacking. If we are forced to set aside our own system of legal protections to deal with terrorists, the terrorists win another sort of victory.
The numerous instances of manufactured unrests, violence, etc from 2014 up to the present time offer the greatest real-life, ongoing proof of Lind’s prognosis.
Let’s look at a couple of random examples.
Does anyone remember the notorious Cambridge Analytica now? It’s barely three years and unless someone brings up its name explicitly, the name is as good as non-existent. Cambridge Analytica was hired by the Congress party to stage disruptions and violence within the Indian political, societal and legal system and thereby somehow try to win the 2019 general elections. This doesn’t fit any definition of fighting elections through traditionally recognized democratic means. It is war.
Remember Chief Justice Dipak Misra? More accurately, remember how the Congress party top guns effortlessly incited Dipak Misra’s fellow judges to a sort of judicial rebellion against him? This, when the Congress was out of power. If this isn’t war against the Indian state, we fail to find a suitable term to describe it.
It’s in this light that we need to view both the magnitude and the civilisational significance of Narendra Modi’s consecutive victories in 2014 and 2019. But for that fortunate electoral summer of 2014, the Congress-legacy system would’ve returned and noiselessly persisted with their wreckage of India till it reached the brink. In fact, India was already on the brink, its vitals eaten away at a ferocious pace from 2004-14.
But to give due credit, the nation owes an enormous, non-repayable debt of gratitude to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh for frontally combating this multi-headed menace for nearly a century often at enormous cost including the political murders of hundreds of its Swayamsevaks. Any other country faced with similar threat would’ve imploded in a matter of a few years. It is a tragedy that a comprehensive history of the RSS’s civilisational resistance against breaking India forces is still waiting to be written.
Without getting too deep into the history of Naxalism, we can examine a relatively recent quote:
Like forests provide safe hideouts to Naxalites in tribal areas, the cities also provide them cover. Taking advantage of this, they plan to target major installations in cities.
Shocking as it may sound, these words were uttered by former Home Minister, Shivraj Patil on the floor of the Lok Sabha on 5 December 2006. Remember him?
The significance of his statement becomes clear when we also recall that that was the era when the first innings of the UPA government was supported by the Communists. It was the same era when Shivraj Patil did nothing even after repeated Jihadi attacks on Indian soil until 26/11 war against India happened. The underlying message from his numerous silences on all such occasions is simply this: the ministers in a Government remote-controlled by Sonia Gandhi had been thoroughly muffled into slavery. That was the period of an undeclared emergency in the truest sense.
The current NSA, Sri Ajit Doval, in a brilliant but chilling paper written in 2010 had given us some contours of the gradual takeover of India by breaking India forces. His paper specifically talks about the deadly spread of the Maoist tentacles but his paper is equally valid for all manner of breaking India forces. Not surprisingly, Sri Doval quotes and regards William Lind as a Guru of Fourth Generation Warfare.
the area under Naxal influence has nearly doubled extending to nearly 203 districts in fourteen states. The strength of armed guerrillas has swelled from less than 7,000 then to somewhere around 13,500 now. Left extremists, today, have many more and much sophisticated weapons; (estimated to be nearly 14000 as against 5500 in 2004) and have upgraded their tactics, field craft and skills in handling weapons and explosives manifold. They raise funds nearly to the tune of Rs. 1,200 Crore a year, which in an impoverished area of their dominance is a huge amount to create instability and enables them to pay regular monthly salaries to their armed cadres… Left Wing extremism is pure and simple terrorism… they are prepared to make a common cause with all those who are inclined to give expression to their dissent through violence. They support everything that negates Indian nationhood… They stand against India’s sovereignty, unity, democratic polity and civilisational values…
The explosive growth of armed Naxal-Maoist power, spread, influence, and terror during this period was a direct outcome of the Communist support to UPA 1.0. It is also no coincidence that the world’s only Hindu state of Nepal turned communist in the same period. The chief ideologue of the Nepal's Communist party, Baburam Bhattarai is an alumnus of JNU, and has waged violent war against the state of Nepal.
As we observed elsewhere, the Communists benefitted disproportionately in the UPA 1.0 coalition. They got an almost carte blanche power to subvert the Indian state from within using the very apparatus of the government machinery.
But the real story of the real subversion begins with their exit from the UPA in 2008 citing a phoney moralist reason opposing the Indo-US nuclear deal.
With the re-emergence of the UPA in 2009, something far more sinister occurred. The mothership Congress elatedly stripped off its upper garment and sat down topless for a five year-long banana-leaf full meals of plundering India. On the parallel track, influential sections of Naxals had directly occupied the corridors of power—both overtly and covertly thanks to Sonia Gandhi’s unconstitutional body named the National Advisory Council (NAC), an acronym of subterfuge for a vast cabal of anti-national NGOs. One only needs to read the two-part biography of the late Outlook editor Vinod Mehta who nonchalantly and in vivid detail mentions the nature of the activism by eminences like Aruna Roy, Arundhati Roy, Arvind Kejriwal and Harsh Mander who regularly visited his office and outlined their breaking India plots to him.
The summary: jungle Naxalism had systematically, but surely and securely moved into the cities. Official proof for this fact emerged in 2013 in the form of a report by the Ministry of Home Affairs.
In Nov, 2013 MHA filed an affidavit before the Supreme Court acknowledging that ‘The ‘frontal’ organisations of CPI (Maoist), operating under the garb of human rights NGOs, have kept the Maoist movement alive and are more dangerous than armed cadres. These ‘mass organisations’ (‘frontal’) are generally manned by ideologues, who include academicians and activists, fully committed to the party line. Such organisations ostensibly pursue human rights related issues and are also adept at using the legal processes of the Indian state to undermine and emasculate enforcement action by the security forces . They also attempt to malign the state institutions through propaganda and disinformation to further the cause of their ‘revolution’. The state governments are required to initiate legal action against the Maoist front organisations in towns and cities….However, initiating legal proceedings against them has often resulted in negative publicity for the enforcement agencies due to the effective propaganda machinery of the CPI (Maoist).’
The 2013 report actually comes a little late. Sometime in early 2007, a CPI (Maoist) forest conclave held in the border of Jharkhand-Orissa took an unanimous decision: to extend their armed struggle to “urban and mobile warfare.” One way to do this was to have Maoist professors and lecturers pour the poisoned lead of Leftist ideology into the ears of their unsuspecting students. The task was made easier thanks to an “education” system which seeds anti-India treachery right from the KG level.
And so, today, if a mob numbering thousands can be whipped up at will to “protest” against say, the CAA, and urban warfare can be launched at Shaheen Bagh, remember that decades of sustained and patient planning have gone behind them. A reasonable case can be made for the fact that the number of Muslim mobs that participated in the Shaheen Bagh war against India is almost equal to the number of Incurables who lent them their supportive shoulders. One understands the religion-fuelled motivation of Muslims but ask any Incurable why they were protesting: you get only abuse.
Another equally deadly but overlooked weapon in the Leftist arsenal is the so-called “surrender” of armed Naxal leaders. These terrorists are given relatively light sentences and once they rejoin the mainstream society, they are seamlessly rehabilitated by the party apparatus by creating jobs for them in the academia, media, think tanks, etc and they resume their task: of waging war against the Indian state and Hindu society.
It is this well-oiled and highly-networked apparatus that whips up violence, revives an old rape like in the case of Kathua, anoints posthumous sainthood upon a terrorist non-entity like Gauri Lankesh, cashes a fixed deposit like Prakash Raj, etc. It’s worth recalling William Lind’s words again:
…[in the fourth generation] warfare, the enemy is invisible and the battle is for the control of civil society – through coercion, controlling the hearts and minds of the people…the distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point.
How does one even fight this?
To be continued
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