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Why is India so mindful of protocols?

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Why is India so mindful of protocols?
Kapil Komireddi
September 17, 2014


Abdul Basit, Pakistan’s high commissioner to Delhi, deserves the gratitude of India. Ever since Mumbai was besieged by Pakistani agents of terror in 2008, India has been consoling itself with lies. We told ourselves that Pakistan was capable of atonement. We made ourselves reliant on the very establishment that spawned and sponsored the Mumbai attackers to hold them accountable for their crimes. On Monday, Basit shattered the comforting illusions India has cultivated about Pakistan when he defended the unrestricted movement of Hafiz Saeed. “Hafiz Saeed is a Pakistan national, so he is free to roam around”, Basit asserted, before asking: “So what is the problem?”



The problem is that Saeed is much more than an ordinary citizen of Pakistan. He is the chief of the Lashkar-e-Tayeba, an army of the faithful created by Pakistan’s military-intelligence camorra and consecrated to the destruction of India. There’s a $10 million US State Department bounty on Saeed’s head. He is named in the United Nations’ sanctions list as an al Qaeda affiliate. Evidence of his culpability in the Mumbai massacres is detailed vividly in the multiple dossiers India has handed in good faith to Pakistan since 2008. Yet, half a decade later, what does India have to show for its patience?

India’s dogmatic adherence to “uninterruptible dialogue” with Pakistan has yielded only uninterrupted insults. In clarifying Pakistan’s position on Saeed, Basit has effectively put a lid on India’s quest for justice. India executed Ajmal Kasab in a pitiful attempt to appear tough. But none of the handlers who recruited, trained and dispatched Kasab & Co to Mumbai – and who continue to suffuse young Pakistani minds with hatred of India – has been punished. They have all along been, to borrow Basit’s phrase, “free to roam around” in Pakistan.

In 2009, I interviewed one of Saeed’s deputies in Lahore. The international spotlight was still on Pakistan and Saeed, in what could only be described as a placatory performance for Islamabad’s paymasters in the West, was being paraded through the courts. Lashkar’s heavily fortified compound, in the middle of Lahore, was rebranded as a charity. Saeed’s man, Yahya Mujahid, arrived in a chauffeured car with an armed guard to meet me in a Subway restaurant on Mall Road. He asked to share a salad: he was diabetic, watching his weight. His grievances ranged widely – Kashmir, Chechnya, Palestine. But although seemingly alert to the suffering of ordinary people and practised in the use of borrowed words – “imperialism”, “occupation”, “colonialism” – he was incapable of empathising with the victims of the assault on Mumbai. The operations “have gone somewhat cold”, he admitted. But he spoke assuredly and strode confidently.

Three weeks later his boss, Hafiz Saeed, was freed. Among the reasons cited by the Lahore High Court in ordering Saeed’s release was this: “The security laws and anti-terrorism laws of Pakistan are silent on al-Qaeda being a terrorist organisation." In other words, Saeed could not be penalised for his association with al Qaeda not because there was no evidence of such a nexus, but because the court was not satisfied that al Qaeda had been explicitly designated as a terrorist outfit by the government of Pakistan. This is the system on which India depended for justice.

Near the end of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the novel’s self-pitying narrator, Changez, complains to the American visitor in Lahore that, after 9/11, Americans “retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums”. India, following the Mumbai attacks, did not so much as mobilise its troops. Despite the scale of the horror, its conduct toward Pakistan was exceedingly polite, pedantically mindful of “protocols” and full of deference for diplomatic conventions.

Such niceties have earned India only the contempt of Pakistan. Yet the self-wounding belief that India can soften with dialogue the forces that religiously seek India’s destruction remains pervasive. We are repeatedly exhorted by Pakistan to “move on”, to “engage” with its ramshackle government, and to make “progress” on other issues. Far from an acknowledgement of India’s wounds, five years on from the Mumbai attacks even the simplest demands of justice for the victims engender scornful accusations of hawkishness from Pakistan. A moral equivalence has successfully been established between the victim and the aggressor.

Basit’s spectacular insensitivity has afforded India the opportunity to redeem itself. Even those of us who rejected Narendra Modi’s domestic politics welcomed his swift shelving of foreign secretary-level talks with Pakistan in retaliation for Basit’s meeting last month, in spite of strenuous Indian objections, with Kashmiri separatists. The consequences of exculpating the masterminds behind the crimes of Mumbai must be even more severe. Basit must first be invited to admit unequivocally that the attack on Mumbai was conceived in, and orchestrated from, Pakistan. If he rejects this reasonable request, he should, with compliments, be declared persona non grata and told to leave India. Predictably, there will be those who will denounce such a move as excessive – but it is they who must then do the hard work of explaining what the proportionate response to the massacre of 138 Indian citizens is. After all, there’s something much worse than a strong reaction to mass murder, and that is being a wilful accomplice in your own humiliation.


Why is India so mindful of protocols? - Hindustan Times
 
Lol, this Basit chap is a motor mouth. Un becoming of a emissary and too loud as a diplomat ambassador. I hope Islamabad takes notice and replaces him with a proper diplomat.
 
Even I think all these talks and deplomacy with Pakistan is futile, and only gives Pakistan some legitimacy as a responsible benign state, this way they can carry on their cross-border terrorist activities while showing the world that they want peace through dialogue. We should stop this farce and concentrate our focus on securing our borders.
 
Lol, this Basit chap is a motor mouth. Un becoming of a emissary and too loud as a diplomat ambassador. I hope Islamabad takes notice and replaces him with a proper diplomat.
Do they have any? :woot:

Seriously, do what you may, General Hafiz Saeed and his ilk will keep roaming the streets of Pakistan with impunity. No one in Pakistan has the guts to put him in the cooler without the Army's permission.
 
Do they have any? :woot:

Seriously, do what you may, General Hafiz Saeed and his ilk will keep roaming the streets of Pakistan with impunity. No one in Pakistan has the guts to put him in the cooler without the Army's permission.
Isnt that actually good for India? Pakistan gets a bad name, they will literally be wasting millions of rupees for their security. Look at that dawood. Millions are being spent on him for security etc in karachi. What good is he now? After 1990 blasts, he has been more of a liability than use.
 
Do they have any? :woot:

Seriously, do what you may, General Hafiz Saeed and his ilk will keep roaming the streets of Pakistan with impunity. No one in Pakistan has the guts to put him in the cooler without the Army's permission.

About this diplomat a and the stunts he pulls about meeting seperatists or running his mouth...better if Islamabad pulls him back or one day he might be sent back by India.
 
We are under masterful illusions if we assume Pakistan is a normal country, one that will act according to tenets of International concepts of co-existence.

It must be replied in the same coin that it uses, that is the sole way to convey any message to Pakistan.
 
Isnt that actually good for India? Pakistan gets a bad name, they will literally be wasting millions of rupees for their security. Look at that dawood. Millions are being spent on him for security etc in karachi. What good is he now? After 1990 blasts, he has been more of a liability than use.
Dawood ain't a liability. He's the goose that lays the golden eggs, funding the LeT and other ant-India terror organizations from drug money and extortion.

But his days are numbered and his Dubai jaunts are passé . He knows that the day he steps out of Pakistan, its curtains. The poor sod is up shit creek without a paddle!
 
Dawood ain't a liability. He's the goose that lays the golden eggs, funding the LeT and other ant-India terror organizations from drug money and extortion.

But his days are numbered and his Dubai jaunts are passé . He knows that the day he steps out of Pakistan, its curtains. The poor sod is up shit creek without a paddle!
Gone are the days brother when the likes of sanjay dutt used to give him a bl0wjob. His hawalas and dhandas have diminished
and it's just a matter of time when ISI dumps him and we hear the news of chotta rajan gang taking him out.
 
There’s a $10 million US State Department bounty on Saeed’s head.

Big pac of lies- Bullsh!t-
The article based on this point is worthless to even read-

The bounty is on
"The reward is for "information leading to the arrest and conviction" of Hafiz Mohammad Saeed.

Produce those evidences and we will convict him- until then keep on whining and moaning-
Hafiz Saeed will roam free-

It must be replied in the same coin that it uses, that is the sole way to convey any message to Pakistan.

you do no have the capacity or capability- even if you do so you will lose all credibility of crying like a baby to uncle amrika whenever there is mention of Sri Hafiz Saeed-
 
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