Dangerous designs

Pakistan’s attempt to link India to terror acts is unlikely to attract the attention of Biden administration

First, an unprovoked heavy shelling at multiple points across the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir on the Diwali eve, resulting in the death of nine people. Then, a preposterous claim that India was engineering terrorist attacks on Pakistani soil. There is a clear pattern behind Islamabad’s devious tactics. It is to deflect global attention from its consistent failure to rein in the anti-India terror outfits mentored by its own military establishment. It was highly deplorable that Pakistan chose a festive occasion to disrupt peace in the region and perpetrate violence in the Kashmir valley through coordinated firing along the LoC using heavy weapons on innocent civilians. The Pakistan army has been making desperate attempts to push in infiltrators before harsh winter sets in. The ceasefire violations are carried out to help infiltrators. The shelling was reported from all the important sectors stretching from Uri to Gurez. There has been a significant rise in ceasefire violations by Pakistan this year with 4,052 incidents being reported in the current year so far as against 3,233 in 2019. Pakistan’s latest attempt to link India to terror acts on its soil is clearly aimed at attracting the attention of the Joe Biden administration in the United States. However, such cheap tactics are bound to boomerang because the international community is well aware of the geopolitical realities of the region and Islamabad’s track record in creating and nurturing the terrorist organisations to foment trouble in India.

It was quite audacious on the part of Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) director general Maj Gen Babar Iftikhar to present a so-called dossier of evidence against India at a press conference. They spoke about India’s alleged role in terror attacks, ranging from Balochistan to Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan in Pak-occupied Kashmir. Soon after the press conference, the allegations – essentially a mix of unverifiable assertions interspersed with three audio recordings of unknown provenance and screenshots of alleged bank transactions – were amplified by Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan who chose to describe them as “irrefutable evidence” of India’s state-sponsored terrorism. The timing of this baseless propaganda cannot go unnoticed. Pakistan is under intense pressure to take credible measures to control the activities of terrorist organisations operating on its soil. It must be pointed out that Islamabad narrowly escaped recently from being blacklisted by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). The Paris-based terror financing watchdog kept the country on the ‘grey list’ at its meeting last month. The plenary, the FATF’s highest decision-making body, will meet in February and has given Islamabad time until then to meet all the 27 parameters, especially those that pertain to imposing sanctions on terrorist outfits.

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