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Put an end to Pak’s mischief

Young Bites. Dated: 9/26/2017 12:08:00 PM

India has a whole range of options available to bring Pakistan to heel, including diplomatic and economic measures, as well as using military force, covert or overt. Our response has to be both diplomatic and military but we should weigh each option carefully and not get caught in Pakistan’s trap. Perhaps the most feasible option is to make a strike across the LoC, the likely international reaction to which is expected to be muted. The battle for moral ascendancy is a continuous struggle along the severely contested 700 km LoC, where the Indian and Pakistani armies eyeball each other. The Modi government could employ such strikes to prove a point that it will make Pakistan pay for its adventurism, as well as to assuage domestic anger. But it is not going to put an end to Pakistan’s capability of doing mischief.Our response to Pakistan is consistent. Abandon your futile quest. The state of Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India and will remain so. No amount of “misuse” of international platforms by Pakistan will change that reality. Claims by Pakistan, a global epicentre of terrorism, on Kashmir find no resonance amongst the international community, with Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif raising the Kashmir issue in his General Assembly address also finding no support. Inaction to come up with concrete policies and measures to deal with the growing scourge of terrorism is highly unfortunate. World’s public consciousness is being ravaged daily by incessant acts of terrorism targeting innocent people, civilization heritage as well as the socio- economic infrastructure of societies, especially in vulnerable developing countries. Yet, on the issue of terrorism the UN is yet to come up with a coherent policy let alone take the lead on one of the biggest threats to global peace and security. As many as 31 entities within the United Nations deal with some aspect of countering terrorism, this is a classic example of “too many cooks spoil the broth. This is clearly the case as coherence and coordination is missing. It is near impossible to argue the case of relevance of the UN on the issue of terrorism where even adoption of an international norm to ‘prosecute or extradite’ terrorists evades us despite 20 years of talk.The world’s most developed countries have suffered a dramatic increase in deaths as a result of terrorism in the last year, according to the new Global Terrorism Index, despite a drop in the global number of terrorism-related deaths. As Modi confronts his defining moment as prime minister, just like his predecessors did - Atal Behari Vajpayee during the 1999 Kargil intrusions and 2001 Parliament attack, and Manmohan Singh during the 2008 Mumbai attacks - he would be wise to heed such sagacious advice and learn from history.The course Modi decides to take in the coming weeks and months will not only decide whether the prime minister emerges as the statesman he so wishes to be seen as, but will also affect 1.4 billion Indians, if not the world. Seen in the light of cold logic, Uri 2016 is not the kind of threat to the nation that Kargil or the Parliament assault or the Mumbai attacks were. In Kargil, India’s territorial integrity was directly challenged. In the Parliament terror strike, the country’s political power centre was under dire threat. And the Mumbai mayhem had paralysed the commercial capital of the country.