You have a point. At a certain level of examination, you have a valid point. It breaks down, however, on closer examination.
There is no denying that when the due process of law is taken into account, and the rules of evidence are taken into account, it is difficult (not impossible) to prove that
- The Bombay killings were done by an organised Pakistani gang;
- The gang was managed by an individual who can be, and has been identified;
- The individual belongs to the LeT, and the head of the successor organisation of the LeT is still active and preaching the same hate message;
- The LeT has received logistic, communications and training support from apparently military sources of some kind, although it cannot be established that the military entities are actually part of the ISI.
Sure, when these two apply, due process of law and the rules of evidence, it is difficult to prove any of this. Is this really the extent of your argument? I think not, unless I have grossly misunderstood your stand. But let us take it in the limited sense first, and assume that this is the extent of your argument.
In my humble opinion, this is comparing apples with oranges, to compare what happened with a normal law and order incident, or with a violent crime of any sort. It was not through the due process of law that the authorities in Pakistan acted on other occasions, occasions for which we have Pakistani testimony in bushelfuls. And it was not through the rules of evidence that these actions were established and proved. Now we have two ways of proceeding in matters like this: we can assume that everything, past, present and future, is one intermingled skein of thread, and treat it like that, everything is connected, so everything can be cited. Or we can decide that each incident is to be taken independent of any other incident, occurring before it or after, and seek to find the roots of every single matter independently.
I believe you have already made a choice, and put our discussion on well-worn tram-lines, by raising the question of 1971.
If that is correct, that leaves me free to point out that collusion by the Pakistani state with non-state actors started in 1947, not in 2008. It was repeated in 1965, six years before 1971. There was NO action by the Indian state of a similar nature, aimed at Pakistan or its people or its territory. Not unless you count the arguments over the placement of border outposts in the Rann of Kutch as equivalent to either Akbar Khan being commissioned to lead raiders armed by the Pakistani Army into the Kashmir Valley as what has been called kabalis, or to the Pakistani Army's landing of commandos in Kashmir in 1965 who were tasked to act as members of the public and carry out acts of violence against Indian institutions posing as natives of Kashmir.
It was never about the due processes of law on the Pakistani side. It was not due to the rules of evidence that her role was brought into the open, but the frank writings and publications of authorised persons and key players in these incidents, people who were uniformly loyal and patriotic Pakistanis.
So why, in this case, which, by the rules of the discussion that you yourself have set, is connected to earlier cases, and may be connected to later cases, should you insist on the due process of law and the rules of evidence? Unless it is to prove that using these, nothing can be established?
Of course you are right. Nothing can be established, at the moment, on the four points enumerated above. But I submit that you are already on very thin ice, and I submit that it is not a well-thought through position that you have taken.
At the time that the raid on Kashmir took place, all important sources of information and opinion in Pakistan were at pains to say that nothing had been done with the collusion of state entities, or at the instigation of the political leadership at the highest levels. It was only later that with the publications of Akbar Khan's book, or Major R. G. Brown's memoirs, or Tariq Ali's Clash of Fundamentalisms, that these incidents, to some extent already admitted by Pakistan by her actions during the meeting of the UN Commission on the Plebiscite, were authenticated, and that we came to know that these were carefully organised acts of military intervention, not spontaneous uprisings of citizens.
The decision to send in commandos was not admitted at the time of the 65 conflict by Pakistan, and it was only with subsequent publications and testimonials by prominent Pakistanis that we came to know what had transpired internally.
In 1999, things happened on the northern sector, which at first were blandly denied by Pakistan as being populist violent reactions to Indian institutions in Kashmir. Your Army chief, and later the head of your state, denied it so many times that when he finally admitted something like the truth, it seemed incongruous. It was only later that we got to know from Pakistani sources that these were soldiers of the Northern Light Infantry. Only later, but we did get to know, thanks to the frankness and honesty of Pakistanis themselves.
Are you entirely sure that your confident assertions will not be demolished by an authoritative source from Pakistan, a source even more convincing than the arrested terrorist, or the spy who identified topographic features while in the role of a US agent, or the voice recordings that have been supplied to the Pakistani authorities, or the statements of your own GEO TV team that traced the assassin back to his village of origin?
