Prof Javed Mughal
To trust Pakistan despite testing his trans-national diplomatic standard time and again is nothing but a fertile hallucination of the futile mind. It should not be bypassed that Pakistan’s birth from the womb of revolt against India, separation of Bengladesh in 1971 and then captivity of more than 93000 Pak Army by India-all these factors combined together don’t let Pakistan sit comfortably. Repeated defeat of Pakistan by India at all levels, compels him to keep on committing infra-dignitary acts to nonplus the situation in India. The recent scenario of Pakistan is extremely disgusting. The main problem faced by this crippled nation at the moment is the absence of coordination among three main wings of the Govt. i.e. the Army, the Judiciary and the Political Executive. All these wings are groping for their own safety in the darkness of chaos and confusion. Nobody knows what to do, when to do and how to do. Pronouncements of political mechanism do not hold good; the decisions of the judiciary are not obeyed and the Army is not trusted. The emergence of the recent situation in Pakistan is the off-shoot of the displeasure of the Army Chief Mr Kiyani who could not get extension of tenure in the office. He can be doubted to have given rise to the disturbance in Pakistan and the barbaric act happened on Mendhar-border can very easily be attributed to his vicious planning. Obviously he is doing all this to get his importance realized and to make his service-extension possible. Whatever is the reason does not matter. What is important for us is to understand and to be taken seriously is that Pakistan has not stopped playing the old nasty game against India even though its own house is burning today. There is substantial increase in the internal conflicts in Pakistan and incidents of death and destruction have become west and style of the day. As a nation there has never been order in Pakistan. Instability, sectarian conflict and the hide and seek game of the civil and military power-mongers have been its identity since it inception as a nation and nationality failed to unite the country. Pakistan never speaks in one voice except one; its anti-India propaganda and the sinister design to translate it through military escalation, proxy war and helping the anti-India radical element to enter into India and execute its operation in the name of religion or other dissident affiliations. The intrusion by the Pakistan Army into the Mendhar sector of Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday and the killing of two Indian soldiers proves once again that Pakistan is not interested in normalization of relations with India. A particularly barbaric act was the beheading of one of the victims, something that goes against all norms of civilized conduct and against the Geneva Convention as well. It was a premeditated and deliberate act of provocation on the part of Pakistan. What Pakistan wants to gain out of such cowardly acts is difficult to guess unless it is taken to be one of the ‘thousand cuts’ with which Pakistan wants to keep India bleeding all the time. Pakistan has also taken the same recalcitrant attitude in bringing to book those responsible for the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008. Pakistan has routinely rejected the mass of incontrovertible evidence India has provided about the conspiracy having been hatched in Pakistan and executed with the help of the ISI. Some of the terrorists like Hafeez Sayeed are moving about freely in that country because Pakistan pretends that there is not enough evidence to book them. Friendship is a two-way street. If one side keeps its hand of friendship extended and the other side bites it at every tick of clock, there can be no normalization. Recent US reports say that Pakistan has built a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and is augmenting it. Some of these reports suggest that Pakistan may be having more ‘nukes’ than India has. Unlike India, Pakistan’s defence is India-specific. It has no other ‘enemy’. We have think along certain nefarious designs of Pakistan, if at all, we aspire to save the skin of this nation from being bruised any more.
First , it has always denied the existence of terror groups in its territory, whose chief business is to terrorize India by crook. Secondly, it says it has nothing to do with the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) founder, Hafiz Saeed, now chief of a so-called charity organization called Jamaat-ud-Dawaa (JuD), while it is the Pakistan Army’s rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) that happens to be the classic host of the likes of Sayed. Thirdly, Pakistan has also denied its role in the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai, which was an open war against India, while the fact remains that the ISI-LeT-groomed terrorists had landed in Mumbai from Karachi; and given the revelations by David Headley, arrested in the US for his role in the attacks. It is crystal clear that Pakistan, in those attacks, had used terrorism as an instrument of state policy, as usual, to terrorize India by hitting this country’s financial capital. Fourthly, Pakistan has all along denied the supremacy of its armed forces, especially the ISI, over everything civilian, while the reality is that in Pakistan no civilian leader can last long unless safeguarded by the Pakistan Army; which means it is the Pakistan Army that calls the real shots in that country while the likes of Asif Ali Zardari are in the business of perpetuating charade. And lastly, the Pakistani system has become so corrupt that the Supreme Court of that country has now been forced to order the arrest of its Prime Minister, Raja Pervez Ashraf, (no matter if it is honoured) while its civilian leaders, as also the military establishment, are bent on proving that all is hunky-dory in that country. This pretence and falsity is, nonetheless, before the whole world now. Keeping these facts in mind, New Delhi should evolve a long-range policy towards Pakistan which it should follow steadfastly ignoring pressure from the US to bend over backwards to placate Pakistan for the sake of helping the US in its global war on terrorism. India must keep reminding Pakistan of the latter’s 1971 ignominy and of the fact that all the prisoners of war of that country were given due respect at that time; not a single Pakistani solider was humiliated, unlike in the case of Pakistan that seems to derive great sadistic pleasure by beheading our brave soldiers after capturing them by crook. India must also tell Pakistan in explicit terms that there is a saturation point of tolerance that, if crossed, will result in retaliation at this country’s military best. We congratulate the Indian Army chief, Gen Bikram Singh, for having made things as clear, as also Lt Gen Parnaik for having made it very categorical that the Indian Army has a ”lot of options”. Indeed so. These options now need a political take, beyond the routine and failed courtesy. At the same time, the committee, set up to look into the Kargil War lapsing, needs a proper response from the ruling political class. Many of its suggestions – very pragmatic and Pakistan-specific – are yet to be heeded, and one wonders why. There is no gainsaying that it is high time India told Pakistan that its ethical turpitude and trans-border violations will not be tolerated and that we are completely capable of dealing with all mischievous acts from across any of our borders.
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