It is hard to believe that Pakistan fed us the information about the terrorists sneaking into India which, in turn, led to at least three of them being neutralised by the Indian security forces.
Given that Pakistan funds, trains and exports terrorists to this country, news reports that its National Security Adviser Naseer Khan Janjua told his Indian security counterpart, Ajit Doval, about the intrusion of ten terrorists through the sea route sounded incredible. It seems Janjua also told Doval that the terrorists had the Somnath Temple in their sights.
Attacks in Gujarat during the Maha Shivratri celebrations were planned before the terrorists had set out from Pakistan. It was not clear whether the terrorists belonged to the Lashkar-e-Taiba or the Jaish- e-Mohammed.
Suspicion about their entry via sea was further strengthened when five fishing boats were found abandoned in Harami Nullah, a channel along the India-Pakistan border. Indian security authorities, however, did not rule out that some of the boats could have well belonged to drug traffickers.
The Gujarat Police and the National Security Guard immediately fortified security around sensitive places, including the Somnath Temple. On Tuesday, a senior security officer of the Government of India told newsmen in New Delhi that three of the ten terrorists had been killed ‘somewhere in western India’ which means that seven are still at large and might have ventured out of Gujarat into other parts of the country.
Indeed, there was speculation that a couple of terrorists involved in the attack on the Pathankot airbase in early January might have actually escaped. Four terrorists were killed at the airbase after a prolonged gunfight. The other two were said to have escaped. Whether they had slipped back into Pakistan or were lying low with their Indian collaborators was a question that has left the security forces baffled.
With the Pakistan NSA informing about the intrusion of ten terrorists and the Indian security forces only managing to locate and kill three, effectively what we know is at least nine terrorists are on the loose somewhere in the country.
However, the million-dollar question is as to why Pakistan would take the trouble to warn us about these intrusions. Does it mark a break from the past when the Pakistani State overtly and covertly aided and abetted the infiltration of the jihadis into India?
Has Pakistan finally turned a new leaf and no longer wants to be seen patronising extremist elements who kill and maim in the name of Islam?
If the answer to any one of the above questions is in the affirmative then how does one explain that Hafiz Saeed and other terror-masters are still roaming free, spewing venom and hatred against India?
Or is it that after the Pathankot attack when India virtually shut the door on talks about the resumption of the formal talk process, a beleaguered Pakistani army-civilian leadership now seeks to mollycoddle this country into softening its stand?
Even though the most urgent priority of the authorities will be to account for the missing terrorists, surely the questions raised above too will engage the attention of our diplomats and security experts.
Unless Pakistan fears that the Indian security forces may have already captured some of the unaccounted terrorists, and that their interrogation had yielded incriminating evidence of its own complicity in exporting terror to this country, its forewarning India about the intruders is wholly uncharacteristic.
Whatever be the mystery behind the unprecedented gesture by the Pakistani NSA, India will be wrong to take it on its face value.
A leopard does not, cannot, change its spots. India lowering its guard is not advisable. Pakistan cannot be trusted. That is the bottom-line on the Indo-Pak relations.
