Sushant Sareen: Asim Munir’s 'dump-truck' mindset is a direct threat to India’s 'Mercedes'

Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir once likened India to a shiny Mercedes and Pakistan to a dump truck full of gravel — and, according to Sushant Sareen, that metaphor says everything about the dangerous mindset now steering Islamabad’s military strategy.

Writing in India Today, Sareen describes Munir’s rhetoric as “maniacal mad-dogging” — nuclear threats, jihadist posturing, and boasts of targeting Indian dams and oil refineries — all delivered behind closed doors to friendly diaspora audiences. 

Munir, Sareen notes, was careful to ban recordings, but accounts from attendees reveal the “ravings and ranting of the world’s first openly jihadist general with a finger on the nuclear button.”

In Sareen’s telling, Munir’s Mercedes-versus-dump-truck comparison is no throwaway line. In his worldview, when a dump truck collides with a Mercedes, the real loss is the Mercedes — a grim reflection of a military elite convinced Pakistan has “nothing to lose” in a conflict with a more prosperous India.

This thinking, Sareen warns, is entrenched among Pakistani generals who have enriched themselves, secured comfortable lives for their families in the West, and left their own country impoverished. It underpins a readiness to embrace mutual destruction if it means inflicting damage on India.

Munir’s record, Sareen writes, is already blood-stained — serving as ISI chief during the 2019 Pulwama suicide bombing and the Pahalgam massacre of Hindu tourists. His public threats, Sareen argues, make a third major confrontation between India and Pakistan “almost a certainty.”

The Observer Research Foundation fellow cautions that Munir is a product of Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamisation of Pakistan’s armed forces, steeped in jihadist ideology and determined to position Pakistan as a divinely ordained global power. India’s defence planners, Sareen insists, must stop romanticising Pakistan through “apologists and advocates” and instead prepare to “visit ruination on India’s implacable enemy.”