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| Look across the border | | | G Parthasarthy
It is clear now that the terrorist outrages across Mumbai, which commenced on November 26, were the handiwork of the Lashkar-e-Taiba which is headquartered in Muridhke near Lahore.
Its leader Hafiz Mohammed Syed never minces his words. He has proclaimed that “Christians, Jews and Hindus are enemies of Islam”, adding that it was the aim of the Lashkar to “unfurl the green flag of Islam in Washington, Tel Aviv and New Delhi”.
On January 13, 2001, armed Lashkar cadres entered the Red Fort in Delhi and pulled down the Indian flag. Shortly, thereafter, Syed proclaimed to a gathering of leaders of religious parties in Pakistan that he had unfurled Pakistan’s flag in the capital of the country’s past Muslim rulers.
Unlike other Pakistani groups, Syed does not confine his territorial ambitions to Jammu and Kashmir. He proclaims that “Hyderabad Deccan” and Junagadh are also parts of Pakistan and that his aim is to “liberate” the Muslims of India from “Hindu oppression”.
Given his description of Hyderabad as “Hyderabad Deccan,” it is not surprising that his cadres operating in India call themselves the “Deccan Mujahideen”.
Syed is very well-funded, runs Islamic educational institutions and has cadres in Arab Gulf countries. Politically he has been close to the family of former Paksitan prime minister Nawaz Sharif.
Following American pressure, the Lashkar was declared an international terrorist organisation by the United Nations, requiring its assets to be seized and its cadres forbidden from foreign travel. General Musharraf and the ISI responded by getting the Lashkar to function under the name of its parent organisation, the Jamat-ud-Dawa.
Subsequent American efforts to get the Jamat also declared an international terrorist organisation failed in the face of Chinese and Pakistani opposition. It would be naive to assume that Pakistan will accept any evidence India provides to act against the Lashkar. It, therefore, defies comprehension, what Manmohan Singh wishes to achieve by inviting the director general of the ISI to give him evidence of Lashkar’s involvement.
The ISI chief will promise to look into the facts and then return to Pakistan and change the situation on the ground enabling him to refute Indian evidence and stall progress. The proper course would have been to publicise and make the evidence available to countries whose citizens have been targeted and killed in the Mumbai carnage.
This would compel powerful countries like the US, UK and Italy to demand action by Pakistan.
In these circumstances, the strategy adopted by Manmohan Singh will only result in the Mumbai terrorist outrage being forgotten, like past instances of terrorist violence perpetrated by Pakistan’s ISI. Those brave men, who laid down their lives defending our country during the operations against the terrorists, would have died in vain, because of the diplomatic ineptitude and naiveté of our rulers. Sadly, the prime minister has shown a remarkable lack of realism in dealing with Pakistan-sponsored terrorism.
Rather than expose ISI links with terrorist groups operating against India, Manmohan Singh let Pakistan off the hook asserting that Pakistan, like India, is a “victim of terrorism”. By equating India and Pakistan, Manmohan Singh appeared to forget that terrorism in India was perpetrated by groups from Pakistan, whereas terrorism in Pakistan was the product of differences between the ISI and government on the one hand and jihadi groups used by the ISI against India and Afghanistan in the past.
The terrorist carnage in Mumbai has exposed deficiencies in both the Coast Guard and Customs, whose officials need to be hauled up for inefficiency. While it is all too easy to blame the Intelligence agencies, the fact remains that their efficiency has been impaired by political interference or inaction.
It is no secret that the intelligence bureau spends a huge amount of resources collecting information on opposition parties and leaders to ingratiate its officers with the ruling dispensation. Every government in India has misused the Intelligence bureau for internal political snooping.
The RAW, responsible for external intelligence, has been effectively defanged by successive prime ministers with illusions that they will go down in history and get a Nobel Prize for making friends with Pakistan.
The net result of entertaining such illusions and delusions of grandeur is that New Delhi’s covert capabilities to inflict “costs” on errant neighbours, through covert action, is virtually non-existent. Finally, our ill-paid and ill-equipped police forces have inevitably been affected by the corruption, criminalisation and communalisation that have afflicted our body politic. We can successfully thwart terrorist plots like the US or UK only when these issues are addressed.
The writer is former Indian ambassador to Pakistan |
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