From the President's Desk - Conspiracy to Destabilize India

Vijay Raina    

Dear community members,

Namaskar,

I want to wish you a happy New Year. May 2016 bring you peace, prosperity and happiness.

There was jubilation everywhere when the New Year dawned. But soon after came the Fidayeen attack on the Pathankot Air Force base, dampening spirits and confirming my apprehensions that Pakistan is determined to create instability not only in Kashmir but in the whole of India. Pathankot, as we know, is a vital land link between Jammu & Kashmir and the rest of the country and is therefore of great strategic importance. By striking there Pakistan made its diabolic designs more obvious than ever before. Kashmir, in fact, is just an excuse for our western neighbour. Its main aspiration is to destabilise our country from Leh to Kanyakumari.

Hardly a few days after PM Narendra Modi's sudden dash to Lahore, ostensibly to wish the Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Shariel a happy birthday and congratulate him on the wedding of his daughter, but actually a soft diplomatic move, the Fidayeeen struck. The bonhomie had created a flutter in the world, giving rise to a hope for peace in the sub-continent. The chain of events starting with the Bangkok talks between the NSAS of the two countries, Ajit Doval and Lt. Gen. Janjua and the External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj's visit to Pakistan leading to PM Modi's Lahore gambit obviously upset Pakistan's military establishment and terror network. Itching to do something spectacular that would attract wide attention and create a high visibility impact, they finally chose the Pathankot Air Force station for a terror strike of great magnitude with their proxies like Jaish-e-Mohammad coming handy as usual, India lost seven bravehearts in the dastardly attack but managed to save its valuable operational assets Six Pakistani terrorists were eliminated. How did the Fidayeen, guided and armed heavily by their Pakistani handlers succeed in crossing the LoC and sneak through into the high security air base despite red alerts and intelligence warnings? Why did the combing operations take so long to complete after their elimination? Were there any security lapses and who is responsible for them? These are questions that many people are asking today and different investigation agencies are now busy investigating. Soon after the Fidayeen strike on the Pathankot air base, our consulate in Mazhar-i Sharif, Afghanistan, too was attacked by the Taliban. Obviously they were instigated by the Pakistan ISI.

Modi had extended a hand of peace to Pakistan, but consumed by pathological hatred for India, Pakistan chose to stab India in the back. Evidently, the Pakistani Army and elements inimical to India do not want any peace between the two countries for that would leave them practically jobless. The positive atmosphere, that Modi's out of the box diplomacy had slowly started to build, was not to the liking of its military establishment. The Foreign Secretary level talks scheduled for the 16 of this month were seen as a danger by them. Consequently, they conspired to scuttle the talks and derail the dialogue process and the Pathankot attack was the result. The motive, as I perceive it, is that Pakistan has always resorted to perfidy and conspiracy to destabilise India. The desire to destabilise India, it seems, is embedded deep in the DNA of Pakistan. And while Pathankot was chosen this time to escalate the theatre of conflict, the actual target is, and has always been, Kashmir from the day Pakistan was established. So, leaving it to defence experts to analyse what happened exactly in Pathankot, or in Gurdaspur where a similar attack had been launched earlier, a look at Pakistan's history in playing dirty games of destabilisation in Kashmir which it always had its eye on, is bound to expose that country's inner contradictions.

When Pakistan came into existence after the partition of India, the leadership of All India Muslim League, which never played any role in the freedom struggle, felt unhappy over the manner in which the sub-continent was bifurcated as it could not have Kashmir. It nurtured the desire to cripple India and make Pakistan a more powerful nation. The founder of the new nation, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, loudly lamented that he had got a "moth-eaten" Pakistan. It was such a jingoistic mindset that gave birth to slogans like "Hans kar liya hai Pakistan, lad kar lenge Hindustan".

With that motive guiding its policy and actions, Pakistan tried to take Kashmir by force in 1947. It sent tribal raiders from its North-West Frontier Province (modern Pakhtoonwa) along with its regular soldiers to strike terror in the State, which led to the massacre of most of the Hindus and Sikhs living in Mirpur, Muzaffrabad and Baramulla. The rag-tag raiders were pushed back, but were able to take away a large chunk of the State's territory now called Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. In 1965, it again launched attacks on the border areas of Jammu and sent infiltrators to invite people to rise in revolt. This led to a full-fledged war in which it was badly mauled by India. It was under the impression that the gentle Indian Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, would not be able to withstand an armed onslaught, but Shastri proved to be made of a harder mettle He boldly ordered the Indian troops to cross the international border and they went right up to Lahore airport and occupied it for several days on while the Khemkaran sector was turned into a graveyard of Pakistan's Patton tanks, given by USA to it gratis. It were USA and Russia which finally extricated Pakistan from the difficult situation that it had created for itself.

Then came General Zia-ul-Haq with his policy of bleeding India through one thousand cuts, which Pakistan is still following in spite of a shameful defeat at the hands of the Indian Army in the 1971 Bangladesh war.

Yet the desire to destabilise India continued to remain the mainstay of the policy of political and military leadership towards India. Introducing gun-culture and sponsoring terrorism in Kashmir, trained and armed Kashmiri youth to rise in armed insurgency against India. In 1990s the Islamist terrorists launched genocidal attacks on Kashmiri Pandits and hounded them out of the Valley forcing them to become refugees in their own country. after the mass exodus of the Pandits, militants proxying for Pakistan, created murder and mayhem in the Jammu division. As a result, many Hindu families, living near the LoC, were forced to leave their native places as refugees.

We do not know what will happen to the peace talks in the situation created by Pakistani terror strike Pathankot. Whether these talks will be held or called off depends on what action Pakistan takes against the sponsors of terror and how promptly. What India needs, in my opinion, is to send a strong message this time around to Pakistan that it must give once for all its nefarious plans to destabilise India or else Pathankot could be the last in its coffin.

Email: vijayraina4681@yahoo.in

Vijay Raina

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Courtesy: Vijay Raina and January 2016 Koshur Samachar