Instead of moving forward to bring peace between the nuclear-armed neighbours, India on Wednesday said abundant patience and perseverance were required in dealing with Pakistan where many elements were using terror as an instrument of achieving certain objectives.
India has not only increased its tirade against Pakistan but also has started pressurizing it with one ploy or another. While its foreign minister is advocating patience, its home minister has just upped the ante against Pakistan with new accusations of its involvement at the state level in the Mumbai 2008 attacks.
India’s Foreign Minister SM Krishna said, “While dealing with Pakistan, we need to be cautious. We need to have abundance of patience and perseverance.” He said India had the “anxiety” of improving relations with Pakistan and there should be a sincere reciprocation from the other side which continued to have a “selective” approach towards tackling terrorism. He observed that there were many elements in Pakistan who used terrorism as an “instrument to achieve short-term and long-term objectives” and it was too early to judge whether the “trust deficit” had been reduced, an aspect required to be monitored on continuous basis.
Pakistani state role in Mumbai attacks: Though SM Krishna sounded a little hopeful, he also seemed to follow India’s
decades-old one-step-forward-two-steps-backward approach with Pakistan that has left the task of improving relations between the two countries impossible.In such a backward-step move that could see tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours of South Asia rise to newer heights, India’s home minister on Wednesday said a key suspect in the 2008 Mumbai attacks had provided information confirming Pakistani “state support” for the deadly assault. Abu Hamza Jundal, also known as Sayed Zabiuddin, an Indian-born member of the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, was detained at Delhi international airport on June 21 when he arrived from the Middle East. Going back to their routine blame game, Chidambaram said without naming Pakistan:
“There was state support or state actors’ support for 26/11 massacre. His (Jundal’s) confession proves that there was support of state actors for 26/11 massacre.” On its part, Pakistan has always said that the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008 were carried out by “non-state actors”.
Going into details, Chidambaram said four to five suspects were still in Pakistan, but added that the Indian security agencies would catch all the perpetrators of 26/11 strikes. He called on Pakistan to provide voice samples of all the accused.
While stating that India has been asking Pakistan for Jundal’s voice samples, he added that he was on the radar of Indian intelligence agencies for over a year.
Indian police believe he was one of the handlers based in the Pakistani city Karachi, who issued orders by telephone to 10 Islamist gunmen as they stormed two luxury hotels, a Jewish centre, a restaurant and a train station in Mumbai. The November 2008 attacks, which India has blamed on Lashkar-e-Taiba, left 166 people dead and more than 300 wounded. “When I say, state actors, at the moment, I am not pointing my finger at any particular agency. But clearly there was state support or state actors’ support for the 26/11 massacre,” the home minister said. Chidambaram also sought to nail Islamabad on supporting anti-India elements, saying “underworld don Dawood Ibrahim is in Pakistan”. The home minister meanwhile confirmed that Jundal was in the Karachi control room from where Mumbai attack terrorists were guided. Jundal has disclosed that JuD chief Hafiz Saeed was also present in the control room during the attacks.