Indian Premier Narendra Modi is one politician who is renowned for his unparalleled brand of theatrics-driven politics. The man who captured power, by an overwhelming margin that nobody imagined was possible in today’s India, has been promising “good times” to all and sundry ever since he was chosen as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) prime ministerial candidate. But his cheery “good times ahead” slogan seems to be haunting him now.

Modi is indeed faced with a “promises-dilemma” presently. Everybody knows that election is nothing but a game of commitments that politicians give and inevitably fails to honor after attaining power. But, very rarely any sensible political personality will dare to play with the sentiments of the nation’s armed forces personnel, that too when they actually hastened his or her elevation to power with a thumping majority. Unfortunately, Modi has treaded this forlorn path of perfidy as he betrayed the serving and retired soldiers’ trust on the issues of pecuniary benefits and knocking at the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) door to seek redress of grievances concerning war crimes committed by the Pakistani Army.

Indian military veterans had confirmed that the ex-servicemen community acted as loyal foot soldiers of Modi and facilitated BJP’s victory at the hustings by disseminating Modi’s pre-poll propaganda faithfully. In fact, a senior party source acknowledges that Modi was given a detailed briefing about the complexity of such issues immediately after he was named the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. “But then, Modi was confident that he could manage the soldiers’ resentment, using charm offensive and insisted on including the interminably detailed promises, that is almost impossible to deliver, in the party’s election manifesto” asserted the source who went on to add “regrettably, Modi tied himself up in knots by presuming that the military veterans are aware of the fact that everything promised on the eve of elections are not for practical implementation and that the government will be judged on its intent on such tricky issues.”

Every politician knows that the key to winning elections is to make tall promises, whether deliverable or not. But Modi made the blunder of believing that ex-servicemen are eternal optimists like the ordinary masses who keep on trusting the politicians for improving their living conditions. And after messing up with the military pension issue — additional resources being the bone of contention for a fiscally profligate government — Modi, according to a party insider, “has fallen into a trap of his own making” on the question of taking Pakistan to ICJ for the unethical killing of a young Indian Army officer Capt. Saurabh Kalia during the 1999 Kargil conflict in Indian-administered Kashmir. Kalia was captured alive and kept in captivity for three weeks in the initial stage of the conflict.

During detention, as the postmortem report is said to have indicated, the young officer was tortured brutally before being shot in the head fatally. Pakistan returned Kalia’s lifeless body, denying all claims of maltreatment and claimed that inclement weather conditions could have been the cause of casualty. In a sudden turn of event earlier this month, Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj declared, reportedly at Modi’s behest, that New Delhi was willing to review its position in the case because of “exceptional circumstance” after the martyr’s father accused the Modi-government of “not taking concrete steps” to provide justice to his late son. Sadly, nobody — including Modi, hailing from an economically disadvantaged background — spared a thought for the five other soldiers, all from underprivileged rural families, who accompanied Kalia as forward observers and perished with him. Are their lives not equally important to Modi because their families do not have the capacity to attract media and public attention?

And Modi relied on deception once again to wriggle out of an inconvenient situation by shrewdly putting the onus, of going to the ICJ, on India’s Supreme Court. This despite the fact that Modi’s government had itself admitted in an affidavit that any decision to approach the international court falls within the executive mandate of the government. Besides, India’s own law, ratified by Parliament, does not give the ICJ any jurisdiction over issues that fall within the ambit of Indo-Pakistan bilateral discourse. So, was it proper for Modi to raise the expectations of Kalia’s shattered parents, whose life has halted since 1999 and remains unaltered till date?

Did Modi not know that India cannot win this legal battle as Vajpayee’s government had argued against ICJ interference in bilateral issues when a Pakistani Naval aircraft was shot down in an act of revenge a month after the Kargil conflict? Above all, it is an open secret that the conduct of neither the Indian nor Pakistani military personnel was in consonance with the Geneva Conventions clauses during the skirmish as both parties indulged in extreme savagery. Indian troops did acknowledge to journalists nonchalantly that they butchered captured Pakistani intruders and dragged down the bodies, tied with rope, from the mountain heights because “there was enough load to carry.” Now that Modi is in search of an escape route, government sources say, honoring Kalia with a gallantry award, which he was denied in 1999, posthumously is the only available face-saver. So, when a gung-ho Modi — who took potshots at his predecessor Manmohan Singh for neglecting the country’s military community — meets the services veterans next time around, he needs to be reminded of American businessman Anthony Hitt’s famous quote — “keep every promise you make and only make promises you can keep.”