An attack on an airbase in the border town of Pathankot by Pakistan-based
terrorists poses a serious challenge to immediate engagement between New Delhi
and Islamabad. The siege, which continued for more than 72 hours, left seven
Indian soldiers dead and scores others injured. The January 15 foreign
secretary level talks seem to be in jeopardy. That National Security Advisor
Ajit Doval was forced to put off his scheduled meeting with his Chinese
interlocutor this week sums up the mood of Prime Minister Narendra Modi
government. For Modi, who had invested so much in Pakistan by making a surprise
and unscheduled meeting with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on the Christmas Day
last year, the attack is a personal loss of face.
Daggers would be out if the Modi government were to proceed with the
proposed talks given the hard line position that his administration had
maintained throughout last year before the unexpected somersault. Modi faces
opposition not only from rival parties but his main ally, the Hindu hardline
Shiv Sena, which has been scornful in its statements since he undertook the
impromptu visit to Lahore to mend ties with the estranged neighbour.
India should satisfy itself first about Pakistan’s response to the latest
attack. Condemnation is fine but it should be reciprocated with some visible concrete
action. Initial investigations point fingers at Jaish-e-Mohammed, which had
earlier carried out several terrorist attacks on India, including the deadly
December 13, 2001 attack on our parliament, which brought the two countries to
the brink of war. Its founder Maulana Masood Azhar, who formed Jaish-e-Mohammed
soon after his release in December 1999 from an Indian prison in exchange of
passengers of a hijacked Indian Airlines plane in Kandahar, continues to be a
free man despite the government banning his organization. Nowhere in the world
does it happen that a country, which bans a terrorist group, allows its leaders
to remain in the loose. Pakistan banned Jaish-e-Mohammed in 2002 after it was
designated as a terrorist organization by dozens of countries, including the
United States, but has fought shy of putting Azhar behind bars.
New Delhi has already shared some facts with Islamabad in the Pathankot
attack case. The sincerity of Nawaz Sharif will be tested in the coming days.
Whether his government acknowledges those evidences and takes some concrete
action will decide the future course of talks between the two countries. Sharif
can’t just afford to parrot the same old line that this is the handiwork of
non-state actors and that his government has no control over them. The fact
that these terrorists, in thousands, continue to enjoy the hospitality of
Pakistan is something which is known to the entire world. Pakistan can’t escape
the responsibility of their actions. It will have to demonstrate not only to
New Delhi but to the entire world what it proposes to do with them. Not taking
any military action against them would be seen as Pakistan’s complicity with
terror groups. Here in lies the problem with Sharif. His hands are tied. He is
incapable of taking an independent line against the wishes of his masters in
Pakistan army and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) who dictate the
country’s foreign policy.
Pakistan’s army and the ISI have invested decades in creating various
terrorist groups as assets, keeping the global community on the tenterhooks,
pocketing billions of dollars by switching off the tap of terrorism periodically
and unleashing them again to further their diabolic designs. And the
relationship between the two has deepened so much that it will not be that easy
for Pakistan to get rid of terrorists so easily. Any military action against
its guest terrorists is bound to have major implications for Pakistan which may
not come out unscathed.
As long as Pakistan’s two powerful institutions are not on board, there is
very little possibility of India-Pakistan talks making any meaningful headway.
One need not dig deep to understand this challenge. The then Prime Minister
Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s widely-appreciated 1998 “Lahore Yatra” on bus was met
with Kargil a few months later in 1999. India had to pay the heavy price by
losing its 530 soldiers during the Kargil war. Mr. Sharif, who was the prime
minister of Pakistan then, made a silly statement that he was not in the know
of the operation. Hard to digest!
Mr. Vajpayee again extended the hand of friendship to General Musharraf,
who had by then usurped power by overthrowing Sharif and packing him off to
Saudi Arabia, and hosted him in Agra in 2001. Pakistan’s response? There was a ghastly
attack on the assembly of Jammu and Kashmir in Srinagar to be followed with the
deadliest attack on Parliament. The attacks led to the massive military
standoff between the two countries resulting in the massing of troops on the
border and the line of control in Kashmir for about a year. India claimed that
the attacks were carried out by two Pakistan-based terror groups, the
Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, a charge that Pakistan denied. In
between, India was rocked by 2006 Mumbai trains blasts and the 26/11 terror
attacks in 2008 which led New Delhi to stop all diplomatic engagements with
Islamabad. And now we have Pathankot within a week of Modi’s trip to Lahore,
not to mention the attack on Dina Nagar police station in Gurdaspur district of
Punjab in July 2015 days after Modi and Sharif signed an agreement in the
Russian city of Ufa.
There is no doubt that there is a section within Pakistan establishment
which does not want better relationship between the two countries. India’s
experiments with both the civilian as well military leaderships have been frustrating.
There were high hopes when President Musharraf was at the helm. It was widely
expected that he had the unflinching support of the army and the ISI. But the
subsequent actions belied those expectations.
Therefore, Prime Minister Modi will have to tread with caution. The attack
is a major setback personally for Modi who took the audacious gamble of
re-engaging with Pakistan after a series of massive ceasefire violations on the
border and line of control, and a number of daring terrorist attacks last year.
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