As Expected: Pak JIT denies Pathankot Terrorists being Pakistani

This post featured in Blogadda's Tangy Tuesday Picks

NDTV has reported that Pakistan's Joint Investigating team, which came to India to collect evidence in the ongoing Pathankot Airbase Attack probe, has denied that the terrorists were pakistani. More from the Report:

"National Investigation Agency officials had briefed and accompanied the Pakistani team into the Pathankot air base on March 29. The team was also showed the route taken by the terrorists to enter the base.
Pakistani investigators said they could not collect evidence in this limited time, the news report said quoting sources.
The JIT returned yesterday after its five-day visit to India during which all evidence pertaining to the attack was shared with it. This included the DNA samples of four terrorists, their identities as well as call records showing involvement of Jaish-e-Mohammad or JeM terrorists."

What was Modi thinking?

Public opinion in India was overwhelmingly against allowing Pakistani JIT, comprising of officials from Pakistan's Inter services Intelligence (ISI) agency, to visit the attack site. The Indian National Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party, both reacted strongly to the development and termed the visit akin to ISI probing itself. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal blasted the move in the Delhi Assembly after the assembly had to be adjourned for half an hour due to massive protests by AAP legislators. Congress party volunteers protested outside the Pathankot Air force base against the visit. India has long held the position that it is Pakistani Intelligence, specifically the ISI, that has nurtured and bred Jehadis and terrorists through training camps spread all over their country in order to wage a proxy war against India. Despite the overwhelming negative feedback, the Prime Minister and the National Security Adviser, in a display of amateurish foreign policy bravado, decided to do the unthinkable and host the delegation in the country. As expected, Pakistan has once again played the time tested card of denying any involvement in the terrorist attacks, thus leaving egg on the government's face.

Backstabbing from the very start

Pakistani establishment had begun to show its true colors hours after the Pakistani JIT landed in India, when its officials claimed that they have catched a RAW spy in Baluchistan who was engaged in subversive activities. Inter Services Public Relations Agency (ISPR) made outrageous claims of the man being involved in harming the China Pakistan Economic Corridor with the Gwadar port as its target. The man later turned out to be an ex-navy official who no longer was associated with the Indian forces in any manner. Nevertheless, the relentless brandishing of the arrest as a major achievement by the Pakistani establishment even as the JIT was visiting India exposed the whole exercise as a mere pretence cloaked in a god cop bad cop script. 

Weakening of India's International Position

This blunder has gone beyond the diplomatic one-upmanship common in the bilateral relations of India and Pakistan and has weakened the position of India internationally with regards to the issue of terrorism emanating from Pakistan. Till now, India had refused to fall for the smoke screen of state versus non state actors put up by Pakistan to brush away responsibilities for the attacks. India had consistently maintained , especially after the attacks on mumbai in 2008, that the terrorists involved in attacks on India were sufficiently equipped, trained and provided necessary resources for carrying out the deadly operations by elements within the Pakistani state and that therefore the Pakistani government would have to own up responsibility for the same. 

By allowing Pakistani JIT to probe the attack site and then claim the obvious, the Prime Minister has foolishly allowed a precedent to be set where India impliedly seems to agree that non state actors totally divorced from any arm of the Pakistani state may be responsible for the attacks, therefore giving the Pakistani government, military and intelligence a clear chit. This is a blunder that can have wide ramifications in the future because Pakistan can bring up this disastrous decision again and again in the international fora to strongly claim that even the Indian government is unsure about the origins of terrorism wrecking its cities and military establishments.

Total Failure of the NSA

National Security Advisor Ajit doval, hailed as the superman of counter-intelligence in India, has so far monumentally failed to live upto the hype that his appointment had generated. Mr. Doval has so far engaged in empty theatrics when it has come to solving the Gurdaspur and Pathankot terror attacks, besides totally squandering the years of gains made under his able predecessors. His theory of "Offensive Defense", hailed in hawkish circles as the approach needed to tackle Pakistan, has so far remained a lame duck squatting on yellowing parchments in South Block rather than an actual policy implementable on the ground. Even during the pathankot attacks, he was heavily criticized for his decision to send in the NSG, instead of the regular forces better equipped with intelligence to handle the situation, which resulted in the tragic casualty of one brave commando. Of course, the Indian Army had to come to his defense.

Instead of utilizing the decade long diplomatic pressure built on Pakistan through hard work and international efforts, the NSA accompanied the Prime Minister on his cameo visit to Pakistan, thus breaking the draught of PM level visits imposed by India on Pakistan. MP Jyotiraditya scindia, while recently speaking in the Parliament, deplored the attitude of the Prime Minister regarding Foreign Policy which left most of the top level officials in the dark regarding the impromptu visit.

Modi should stop the PR, start being the PM

The Prime Minister's narcissism and vanity are not new found obsessions and have been well documented in the past. It seems that he is still in the election mode and is busy in managing his PR rather than manage affairs like foreign policy seriously as a PM. It seems that for him and his cabal, image building has become more important than nation building. This disastrous move has even silenced all the loud admirers of the PM into shame and has made them question the judgement and skill of their leader when it comes to important matters of diplomacy. It would serve the Prime Minister well if he stops acting like a know-it-all superman on matters galaxies beyond his questionable intelligence and tightens the leash on his National Security Adviser who acts like he is scouting for a role in the next James Bond movie. The Prime Minister should start listening to what his experienced and intelligent advisors advise him on matters of foreign policy rather than turning every bilateral meeting into a hug and selfie festival. If he does not start doing that soon, he may have plenty of followers on social media, but an even larger army of trolls in real life.      

Are Women 'Secondary Citizens'?

First Published in Youth Ki Awaaz

When a government fails to protect the honour and dignity of its women, it not only degrades them to the status of second class citizens, but in this process, it also reduces the constitutional provisions guaranteeing various rights and freedoms to all its citizens, to sorry figments of imagination.

In the last one month, over 19 different cases of rape have been recorded in the northern state of Haryana, which is infamous for having the lowest sex ratio among all the states in India. The rapists include teenagers, security personnel, neighbours or just random strangers. Like the rapists, the political opinion regarding these rapes has been varied and bizarre. Khap Panchayats, the rural kangaroo courts that seek to maintain the “honour” of the community even when it involves justifying “honour killings”, came out with the bizarre theory of lowering the age of marriage for girls to “protect” them from such incidents. Lending an intellectual bent to this ridiculous piece of “suggestion”, Om Prakash Chautala, the former Chief Minister and the head of the powerful opposition party INLD, explained:

“Look back at the past, the Mughal sultanate in this country used to misbehave with women and used to kidnap them. In order to prevent that people started getting their young girls married early so that no one does anything wrong to them… I have seen girls getting married at tender age; the same situation is back again.”

Another Congress leader, Dharamveer Goyal, eager to present his understanding of the whole scenario, suggested that 90 per cent of rapes were consensual:

“The girl gets into an affair with a boy and she goes with him without knowing that he is of criminal mindset. It’s not the state government which is responsible for rapes, in fact in most of the cases its consensual sex. In 90 per cent cases, the girls and women initially accompany boys on their own and are later trapped in gang rape by criminals” 

Apart from being sexist, horribly insidious and callously irresponsible, these comments are also a crude reminder of the mentality towards rape, molestation and other such crimes directed towards a female’s body in particular and the attitude towards women in general. To then expect a safe and secure environment where women have an equal right to opportunity to achieve their desired goals would be to expect too much.

Such mindsets and attitudes are not unique to the Indian polity. In fact, these are in sync with the phenomenon of global misogyny that the world has witnessed in recent days. Just day before yesterday, the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard thundered in the Australian House of Representatives against the Leader of Opposition Tony Abbott, who had ironically demanded the resignation of the Speaker of the house of representatives (after he was found to have sent sexist texts to a former staff member), when he himself had been going around passing loose remarks about the Prime Minister and the women in Australia as a whole. In the United States, amid the flurry of election campaign, Rep. Todd Akin, in a bid to endear himself to the voters, earned the wrath of the media when he suggested that “legitimate rape” rarely resulted in pregnancy. Rep. Roger Rivard wasted no time in jumping to Akin’s bandwagon when he opined in a newspaper that “some girls rape easy”.

The irony amid all this slur of misogyny being vomited by political representatives from all across the spectrum was that just days before, on October 11, the world had celebrated its first “International Day of the Girl Child”, which reaffirmed the global pledge to “end gender stereotypes, discrimination, violence, and economic disparities that disproportionately affect girls.” In the light of these remarks, the celebration seems like a bad satire on the state of women all over the world.

One of the victims of rape in Haryana was just 7 years old. In any other part of the world, even in Australia and the United States, this single incident would have been enough to shame a government to death. However, in our country, this is just another rape, just another flash of bulbs and we are back to normal. It is with profound shame that one admits that when a woman is raped, it is not only an assault on her body, but a sad commentary on the vulnerability of women in an unsecure and predatory society and the government’s inability and also collusion, in removing that sense of insecurity.

Sexual assault of any kind snatches away from a woman, her inalienable right to pursue her desired objectives in life, by traumatizing her psychologically and shaming her in the society. It reduces her chances of being treated with respect, with dignity, with equality and without any prejudice. A rape increases her chances of getting pregnant and burdened with the responsibility of motherhood, without fulfilling the pre requisite avenues in life which would ensure a better and secure childhood and future for her children. In effect, a rape also snatches away the rights of an individual who has not yet been born.

The National Crime Records Bureau statistics suggest that there is an incident of rape every 22 minutes in the country and that instances of rape have gone up by 873 per cent between 1971 and 2011. Seen as crude statistics, these mindboggling numbers only makes one feel helpless and incompetent. However, the sheer gravity of the situation demands no less than a sincere effort to beef up the law and order and increase awareness about the rights and liberties of the womenfolk. Such an effort would need to attack, first and foremost, the institutions and practices which subordinate women to men.

The sense of complacency and neglect with which issues of gender equality and gender rights are treated only signals a demise of gender sensitivity in Indian politics and call for drastic action. The prevailing state of affairs in the country can only be summed up in the words of Faiz who said:

“Nisar mein teri galiyon kay aye watan kay jahan

Chali hai rasm kay koi na sar utha kay chaley

jo koii chaahanewaalaa tawaaf ko nikale

nazar churaa ke chale, jism-o-jaan bachaa ke chale”

(My salutations to thy sacred streets, O beloved nation!

Where a tradition has been invented- that none shall walk with his head held high

If at all one takes a walk, a pilgrimage

One must walk, eyes lowered, the body crouched in fear)