Puppet Imran’s demands are laughable

Imran Khan would do well to realise that geopolitics is not quite the same thing as an exhibition match in Sharjah. The Pakistani prime minister  can’t be giving India know-it-all lectures without having any control over the wheels within the wheels in his own state, the deep shadow zones where the acts of the state and non-state actors get blurred. 

Pakistan simply does not possess ‘plausible deniability’. The Jaish-e-Mohammed and its diabolical terror guru Maulana Masood Azhar, sitting in Bahawalpur in Pakistan’s Punjab province, have owned up to a heinous suicide attack in India. That’s as clear as day. Just as Imran’s talk of retaliation sounds like the nervous harangue of a mohalla rogue, his demand for ‘actionable evidence’ is laughable; his ‘guarantees’ only evoke derision. Consecutive Indian governments have supplied Pakistan with more than actionable evidence, after 26/11, and after Pathankot, all in good faith.

The fact is, a nation that misuses religion for terror and employs shadowy jihadis to wage a war it cannot win in a straight fight should have no leg to stand on in the comity of nations. It does not behove the Pakistan premier to drop dark hints about the possibility of reducing Kashmir to Afghanistan—where the US, after 17 years of war, has been forced to sit for dialogue with the Taliban, Pakistan’s proxy. And earlier, the Soviet Union was brought to its extinction. The analogy does not wash. 

Imran must remember that India is not an invading force; Kashmir is part of an integral, continuous territory, with cultural and legal bonds. India is not fighting a long-distance war, but defending its home. If Pakistan wants to be taken seriously, Imran and his friends in the army must abjure those terror factories. Or the day won’t be far when its patrons, Saudi Arabia and China, learn from the US the folly of nurturing hired guns in an unstable territory.