EDITORIAL: Pakistan has known for a long time that India would try to capture the world's attention by staging a false-flag operation and blaming it on us, and even warned everybody about it time and again, but the Indians stooped even lower the other day and made up a story about an alleged operation without even going through the trouble of acting it out for the world to see. Yet given that the Pakistani side held a detailed press conference just recently and exposed India's involvement in funding, training and arming terrorists active in Pakistan, and presented all the evidence to the United Nations (UN) and the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), some sort of reaction out of New Delhi was inevitable. However, in trying to even the score it has only scored what is called an 'own goal' since Islamabad made its accusations on the basis of "irrefutable evidence" instead of just relying on a sudden high-level tweet to influence the news cycle. That the Chinese were so quick to step in and speak for Pakistan was a very pleasant surprise, even if they have their own axe to grind with India at the moment.
It seems New Delhi is bent upon learning the hard way that its old narrative, which singularly equated Pakistan with all forms and manifestations of terrorism in the region especially in Kashmir, just won't wash anymore. It couldn't have asked for a better setting than the toxic environment of the war on terrorism since it was able to exploit American frustration to blame it all on Pakistan's alleged help to Taliban resistance forces. Yet now, as is evident from Pakistan's central role in getting all Afghan factions to talk and possibly end the war very soon, everybody especially America understands just who are the "spoilers" in this game that Pakistan has been warning about all along, and very rightly so. And India has itself to blame for the fact that the international community is now able to understand Pakistan's position better than before. There's a reason, after all, that even former US President Barrack Obama has been forced to admit in his new book, A Promised Land, that the quickest route to national unity in India is "expressing hostility towards Pakistan". Now, with the economy collapsing and the government's approval ratings dropping like a rock, the Modi administration is desperate to deflect attention away from such matters, hence the usual trash talk about Pakistan.
The pandemic has pushed the Indian economy into its worst recession since Partition. It contracted a horrifying 24 percent in the first quarter of 2020-21 and is on track to finish the year about ten-and-a-half percent in the red. Foreign direct as well as portfolio investment to the tune of $40-50 billion was beelining for the exit lounge even before the virus came and unemployment, even at the start of the year, had clocked in at the highest rate in about half a century. Yet Prime Minister Modi behaves as if appearing tough on Pakistan will make all his troubles go away. Or the world will continue to take his accusations, like the latest one, seriously while he has Ajit Doval as his national security advisor and others like him in positions of similar power and influence. When the internet is littered with Doval himself detailing his expertise in conducting false-flag operations, and the damage he intends to do to Pakistan through them, why would any responsible state then take New Delhi's claims simply at face value?
It also says a lot that it's not just Pakistan that has had it with India's overbearing attitude in this region. Practically, all of its neighbours are pretty unhappy with it. The Chinese, in fact, have made it very clear that they are not going to have any of it. That is a message to the United States as much as it is to India, since the latter is now the former's only credible ally in the region and also the bedrock of its Pivot to Asia policy. There is no surprise for Pakistan in any of the tactics India is employing, or the few it really has to choose from. New Delhi has now seen how quickly its propaganda can and will be exposed. Hopefully, it will not test the response capability of our hardware as well.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2020
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