India’s stand on the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack in 2008 indicting the role of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence stands vindicated. Ousted Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said in an interview to a Pakistani newspaper that he questioned the policy that allows “non-state actors” to cross the border and “kill” people (Indians). He may have said so from the compulsions arising from his own position as a PM displaced by exposure in the Panama Papers scandal on the back of a Supreme Court ruling. It’s not often that any top Pakistani leader would acknowledge that terrorist organisations are active in that country. What Mr Sharif may intend to do with this admission is to throw light on the Army being all-powerful in an avowed democracy which elects its Prime Ministers.
It’s perhaps well-known enough internationally that the Pakistan Army’s dirty tricks department ISI had orchestrated the Mumbai attack with the active connivance of mastermind Hafiz Saeed or the outfits Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Jaish-e-Mohammed that killed at least 166 people in Mumbai nearly 10 years ago. Besides helping convince any sceptical international outfits that Pakistan is indeed capable of using terror as state policy, this does little for the Indian cause. Not even the victims’ kin may get help to gain closure on the terrible days of the attack and the siege that followed. But this might help throw light on the nefarious intentions behind the conspiracy theories floated to suggest Indian spy organisations had colluded with Mossad and others to conduct the attack. India could do without perverse divisiveness in such serious matters as a nation coming under attack from a foreign power.
