Greenhorn Bhutto’s Modi slur and India’s sharp counterattack

At one level, Pakistan foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto’s canard in New York blaming Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the Gujarat riots indicated he was a greenhorn. In the high art of diplomacy, punches are freely traded without making them personal unless the situation warrants it.

A furious India quickly pointed out that Bhutto’s name-calling was at a new low, even by Pakistan’s standards. In one stroke, it extinguished even the remotest of chances of a thaw in the frigid bilateral ties despite the pragmatic Nawaz Sharif getting active and preparing to return from exile to Islamabad. Bhutto’s statement drew further loose talk from his party colleague Shazia Marri who warned India of a nuclear conflagration.

It’s hard to make sense of such rabble-rousing as it may not even fetch Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party any leverage ahead of national elections next year, as verbal diarrhoea against India is part of Pakistan’s daily discourse. At another level, Bhutto’s remark indicated his country’s frustration over India’s successful campaign across all fora to paint Pakistan as the epicentre of global terror.

While India’s economy has become the fifth largest in the world, Pakistan became a terror sanctuary by choice and reduced itself to a basket case. Pakistan can at least learn from Bangladesh, which was carved out of it after the 1971 war, as the latter’s economy is fairly robust, and its war on terror is total.

India’s pushback was swift and incisive. It called out the Made-in-Pakistan terror and labelled Bhutto’s ‘uncivilised’ outburst as the outcome of his country’s increasing inability to use militants and their proxies. It attacked the neighbour for glorifying global terrorists like Osama bin Laden as martyrs. Scholarly foreign minister S Jaishankar recalled the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s words of wisdom for Pakistan: If you have snakes in your backyard, you can’t expect them to bite only your neighbours. Eventually, they will bite the people who keep them in the backyard.

The 2002 Gujarat riots that saw mass murders during Modi’s watch as the chief minister were a blot on the country’s secular fabric. But a special task force constituted by the Supreme Court to look into the conspiracy angle of the riots gave Modi a clean chit in its report in 2012, saying there was no prosecutable evidence against him. That is where the matter ought to rest.