India might be in danger of repeating the same old futile exercise which had followed the 26/11 Mumbai atrocity if it expects Pakistan to cooperate on locating and punishing the masterminds of the Pathankot attack.
Prime Minister Modi should not invest too much faith in the bland assurances his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, gave him in the course of a 15-minute conversation over the phone on Tuesday afternoon. Such assurances carry no value. Similar assurances were given by the highest political authorities in Islamabad soon after the Mumbai attack but to no avail. To this day Pakistan has strung India along without doing anything concrete to penalise the chief plotter of the attack. Hafiz Saeed, the Lashkar-e-Taiba chief, roams free, holding rallies at which he spews vicious venom against this country.
Therefore, Modi should insist on a concrete and time-bound response from Sharif. The leaders of the Jaish-e-Mohammed, who masterminded the Pathankot attack, ideally should be arrested and tried in a fast-track court so that the world at large is assured that the Sharif Government has the will and the requisite power to clamp down on the Terror Inc. operating under his very nose.
Otherwise, India will be right to conclude that Sharif is seeking to hoodwink India. It is of little concern whether Sharif has the power to go after the perpetrators of the terror attack or he is himself a captive of the Pakistani Army-ISI. As the elected leader of his country, India is constrained to deal with him alone. If the all-powerful Rawalpindi GHQ conducts Pakistan’s relations with India, to the exclusion of the civilian government in Islamabad, the challenge for India is to devise ways to deal with the former in its currency.
Admittedly, given the deep-seated democracy and the nature of the Indian society, with its strong mix of religious minorities, does not make the task of a tit-for-tat response any the easier. Anti-Indianism is the lifeblood of Pakistan; Indians are not obsessed with Pakistan. India does not have what in the parlance of the spy thrillers is called human assets within Pakistan.
Pakistan can rely on a huge pool of such assets from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, thanks to its propensity to mix religion with statecraft. Besides, a few years ago, a stop-gap Indian prime minister driven by a Lahore-centric worldview had officially ordered the discarding of the few such assets that we might have had in Pakistan. The point is that the ISI is able to locate a number of human assets in India while RAW is neither allowed to by the political executive nor can it locate any should it have the requisite authorisation.
Yet, India cannot sit idly by even as Pakistan at regular intervals inflicts terrorist atrocities against it. Unless we can get our act together, upgrade our policing and security systems, and inflict commensurate costs on Pakistan, there is little or no chance of an early respite from such terror attacks. It is no coincidence that almost simultaneously with the Pathankot attack four terrorists had sought to overrun our consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan.
Mercifully, they were engaged by the Afghan police and eliminated after a long gun-battle. The ISI hand was clearly writ in both these attacks. Given the US anxiety to pull out of Afghanistan, the ISI-patronised Afghan Taliban has stepped up its attacks on Indian targets in Afghanistan despite the fact that ordinary Afghans are not only keen to renew closer ties with this country but immensely appreciate the humanitarian work and infrastructural projects undertaken by this country.
Only last month Modi opened a brand-new India-built Parliament complex in Kabul. But all this is an eyesore, nay, an affront to Pakistan. It is determined to drive out India from Afghanistan and use the Afghan soil for stepping up terror attacks against this country. It is, therefore, of utmost importance that Modi does not allow his Pakistani counterpart off-the-hook on Pathankot. He must insist on a time-bound action against the leadership of the Jaish-e-Mohammed.
Otherwise the humiliating cycle of terror attacks followed by empty promises from Islamabad will keep on repeating itself without a seeming end. India has had enough of these do-nothing assurances. Concrete action must precede the visit of the Indian Foreign Secretary to Islamabad for the resumption of the yield-nothing dialogue process. Yes, we lose nothing by talking to them. But care should be taken that India’s decision to talk in no way diminishes its effort to see the masterminds of the Pathankot attack punished. That is the least that is expected of Prime Minister Sharif.
