Political suicide?
Pakistan has also taken defensive steps to meet any prospective aggression or surgical strikes by New Delhi. Taking strict notice of the hostile narrative, being planned by India in the pretext of the Uri base attack, Pakistan’s chief of army staff General Raheel Sharif made it clear on 19 September by saying, “Let me reiterate that our armed forces stand fully capable to defeat all sorts of external aggression”
Since the BJP came to power under Modi in India, various developments have shown that encouraged by fundamentalist rulers, Hindu extremist parties such as BJP, RSS VHP, Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena have been promoting religious and ethnic chauvinism against Pakistan.
As part of anti-Pakistan approach, New Delhi accelerated unprovoked firing at the LoC and Working Boundary across Pak-Indian border.
In this respect, India has deliberately intensified war-like situation with Pakistan since 18 September this year when militants stormed a base in Uri, close to the LoC with Pakistan, and killed 18 Indian soldiers.
Like the previous terror attacks, without any investigation, Indian civil and military high officials started accusing Pakistan for the Uri base terror attack.
In this regard, on the same day, a senior home ministry official and a spokesman of the Indian army allegedly said, “It is clearly a case of cross-border terror attack… the militants infiltrated across the Line of Control from Pakistan before attacking the base in Uri.”
Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh called Pakistan “a terrorist state” and army Lt Gen Ranbir Singh threatened that Indian troops were “ready to give a befitting response.”
Rejecting the allegations, Pakistan Foreign Office representative Nafees Zakaria stated on the same day, “India must probe the assault before pointing towards others…they immediately blame Pakistan before any investigation. We reject this.” He added, “Putting the blame on Pakistan was an old strategy of India.
It is notable that renowned thinkers, Hobbes, Machiavelli and Morgenthau opine that sometimes rulers act upon immoral activities like deceit, fraud and falsehood to fulfill their countries’ selfish aims. But such sinister politics was replaced by new trends such as fair dealing, reconciliation and economic development. Regrettably, India is still following politics of the past in the modern era.
AS Dulat, former chief of India’s spy agency RAW, wrote in the magazine The Wireon 27 August 2016 that “Pakistan’s role is not the only catalyst for the crisis, talks about the need for the Indian government to start talking to separatist leaders in the Hurriyat Conference, Pakistan, and other important political players.” Indicating as to how Vajpayee’s and Modi’s strategies on Kashmir are poles apart and elaborates on why Kashmiris warmed to Vajpayee, he stressed, “India should engage in principled dialogue with people in the Valley, instead of taking a naïve and aggressive line.” His condemnation of the Modi government for not talking to Hurriyat and for its high handedness in IOK is spot on. He rightly concludes that the Kashmiri uprising is 100percent indigenous.
And in response to the letter of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on 19 August this year, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon deplored the killings of the Kashmiris in Indian-held Kashmir, and urged India and Pakistan to settle Kashmir and other issues through dialogue by offering his “good offices”.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had pledged to emphatically highlight violence against the innocent Kashmiris in the IOK during the annual session of the UN General Assembly. While addressing the General Assembly on 21 September, Prime Minister Sharif said that Kashmiris had to face atrocities and barbarism from India, which made Burhan Wani the face of freedom movement. He added, “Pakistan fully supports the demand of the Kashmiri people for self-determination, as promised by several Security Council resolutions. Their struggle is a legitimate one for liberation from alien occupation.”
It is mentionable that a few days before the attack at the Uri base, Indian Army Chief Dalbir Singh Suhaag stated that India has to be prepared for “swift, short nature of future wars” because of frequent ceasefire violations by Pakistan and its “new methods” used to keep Jammu and Kashmir on the boil.
Nonetheless, it is due to these reasons that Indian security agencies likely arranged the terror assault at the Uri base to deflect the attention of international community from the war of liberation in the Indian controlled Kashmir. Islamabad denies any role in cross-border terrorism, and has called on the United Nations and to investigate atrocities it alleges have been committed by the security forces in Indian-ruled Kashmir.
As regards terrorism-related events of India, this could be judged from an incident, when on 6 April 2008 in a house of the fundamentalist outfit Bajrang Dal in Nanded, a bomb went off. Investigation proved that the militants were involved in bomb-making. Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) of the Maharashtra arrested a serving Lt Col Srikant Purohit along with other army officials, indicating that they were helping in training Hindu terrorists, providing them with the military-grade explosive RDX, used in terrorist attacks in various Indian cities. ATS further disclosed that Lt Col Purohit confessed that in 2007 he was involved in bombing of Samjhota express, which burnt alive 70 Pakistanis.
As regards the terror attack on of 2 January 2016, at the Indian Air Force Base in Pathankot, Indian media and top civil and military officials started claiming that the attackers had arrived from Pakistani Punjab’s Bahawalpur district, and had links with Jaish-e-Mohammad and ISI. But, despite Islamabad’s cooperation with India like formation of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) consisting of professionals to investigate the Pathankot attack, crackdown against the militant group Jaish-i-Mohammad — lodging of a First Information Report (FIR) in relation to the incident, New Delhi failed in providing any proof of Pakistan’s involvement in the Pathankot episode.
Indian authorities did not cooperate with Pakistan’s JIT which visited India to probe into Pathankot attack. The JIT members visited Pathankot Airbase on March 29, 2016.
Pakistani sources pointed out that the lights along the 24-km perimeter wall of the Pathankot airbase found to be faulty on the eve of the attack. The Pakistani investigators were allowed to enter the military airbase from the narrow adjacent routes instead of main entrance and their duration of the visit was just 55 minutes, enough to take a mere walk through the airbase. The JIT could not collect evidence in this limited time. The sources also said that the visiting team was only informed about the negligence of Boarder Security Force (BSF) and Indian forces. It was revealed that at the time of the assault, the BSF was sleeping, even though they had been alerted of a possible attack 48 hours earlier.
India’s orchestrated drama of the Pathankot incident could also be judged from the fact that earlier, Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar had stated in confusion that New Delhi would not allow access to the JIT into the base.
Now, latest reports suggest that India has started mobilisation of troops near the LoC to wage a limited war with Pakistan, while considering surgical strikes on Azad Kashmir.
Pakistan has also taken defensive steps to meet any prospective aggression or surgical strikes by New Delhi. Taking strict notice of the hostile narrative, being planned by India in the pretext of the Uri base attack, Pakistan’s chief of army staff General Raheel Sharif made it clear on 19 September by saying, “Let me reiterate that our armed forces stand fully capable to defeat all sorts of external aggression.”
We may conclude that BJP-led Modi government is badly mistaken if it overestimates India’s power and underestimates Pakistan’s. As Pakistan lacks conventional forces and weapons vis-à-vis India, so, in case of a prolonged conflict, Pakistan will have to use nuclear weapons and missiles which could destroy the whole of India, resulting into Indian political suicide.