What the Pakistani Think

Anatomy of the Indian case

Why is the Indian government employing coercive diplomacy to achieve its objectives when it can easily sort out contentious issues through a joint investigation? The answer to this question is that a joint investigation, bilateral or multilateral, simply does not suit India

In the wake of the Mumbai mayhem, the Indian government has been making one demand after another. It started when, without producing any evidence, it asked the latter to accept the Pakistani nationality of Ajmal Kasab. The matter had hardly been sorted out when it came out with more demands. It now wants the Pakistani government to accept that the remaining nine terrorists are also Pakistanis, and to extradite their handlers to India for prosecution.

India has also upped the ante by accusing Pakistan’s intelligence agencies of being behind the Mumbai incident, and the Pakistan government of employing terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy. The Pakistani government on its part has asked for hard proof before it acts or has rejected the demands. More importantly, it has suggested joint investigation but India is not at all amenable to the idea.

Are the latest Indian demands and charges justified? What are the Indian motives in acting this way?

As far as the Indian demand that Pakistan should accept the Pakistani nationality of the remaining nine terrorists is concerned, it is reportedly based on the discovery of items like toothpaste, shaving cream, T-shirts, etc. with “Made in Pakistan” labels. This is no evidence at all as any court worth its name would throw it out.

Similarly, the argument that the American FBI has authenticated the Indian claim cannot be accepted for two reasons. First, the Americans have a vested interest in supporting India because they always wanted Pakistan to do more in the war against terror, and the present incident provides them with a golden opportunity to put pressure on it to do so. Second, the American agencies are not trustworthy as testified by the fact that the CIA (along with British intelligence) got it absolutely wrong on the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which provided a pretext to the Bush Administration for the 2003 invasion.

Incidentally, if the Indian government is wrong in demanding without hard evidence, the Pakistan government too is wrong in hiding behind India’s failure to provide the necessary evidence. It gives the impression as if the latter wants to run away from its obligations. This was the fallout of the Kasab case. Whether or not the Indian government provided it with hard evidence on Kasab’s nationality, it should have promptly investigated the matter on its own.

GEO TV and Dawn separately conducted investigations and discovered that Kasab was indeed a Pakistani. And they did so almost a month before the Pakistani government. Had the Pakistan government done so on its own and promptly, it would have earned global appreciation for its commitment to the fight against terrorism and would have also denied the Indian government the victory that it is now claiming in the matter. The best thing for the Pakistani government in the present situation is to conduct its own investigation into the nationality of the remaining terrorists rather than wait for hard evidence to emerge.

As far as the demand for extradition of the terrorists’ handlers is concerned, both international and regional laws tend to favour Pakistan. For example, extradition in international law normally takes place on the basis of a treaty, reciprocity or courtesy, which are absent in the present situation. Besides, the question of whether or not the individual for whose extradition request has been made is an “extraditable person” is also important because the individual to be extradited should be the national of the requesting state or of a third state but not that of the state to which the request is made. Since the terrorists’ handlers are supposedly Pakistanis, they are not “extraditable persons”. Hence Pakistan is not bound to extradite them.

At the regional level, the SAARC Terrorism Convention (1987) is not of much help to India either, because in the absence of an extradition treaty between the parties it leaves the question of extradition to the discretion of the requested state. That means that Pakistan will not accede to the Indian demand. If international and regional laws do not bind the Pakistan government to extradite terrorists’ handlers, it does not mean that it can let them go unpunished. It is under obligation to prosecute them under its own relevant national laws.

Regarding the Indian allegation of the involvement of Pakistani intelligence agencies, India justifies it on the ground that, “given the sophistication and military precision of the attack it must have had the support of some official agencies in Pakistan”. There are two problems with this line of argument.

First, it presumes Pakistan guilty and puts the onus on it to prove its innocence whereas the basic principle of law is the opposite. The Indian charge puts the law upside down. Second, the presumption on which the Indian line of argument is based, namely that non-state actors are incapable of mounting very sophisticated and precise operations is not valid. Consider 9/11 or some of the recent terrorist attacks in Pakistan, which were highly sophisticated and precise, and which were mounted by non-state actors. No wonder that the American ambassador to India has rebuked the Indian government on this count and advised it, “to be very very careful in making those kinds of allegations unless [there is] very concrete evidence to that degree of specificity”.

It is obvious from the above that the Indian demands are unreasonable and the Indian charge of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies’ involvement outrageous. To make Pakistan toe the Indian line, the Indian government has placed its troops close to Pakistan’s border (on the pretext of routine winter exercises) and its air force on forward bases. Besides, the Indian defence minister is mostly busy hurling threats of war by repeating the mantra of “all options on the table”. (It is amusing that after all this, Mr Mukherjee claims that Pakistan is whipping up war hysteria).

Why is the Indian government employing coercive diplomacy to achieve its objectives when it can easily sort out contentious issues through a joint investigation? The answer to this question is that a joint investigation, bilateral or multilateral, simply does not suit India, as among other things it would reveal the extent of local involvement in the terrorist attack. Consider the following.

It is amazing that a handful of terrorists kept the whole city hostage for sixty-two hours and struck at different places at will in addition to killing about two hundred people. This raises some serious questions.

If the terrorists came by sea, as India claims, how did they cover more than six hundred nautical miles undetected, particularly at a time when the Indian navy (and a blue navy at that) was engaged in exercises? Did they bring all the weaponry (which must be considerable) with them, and if so, how did they do it? How did they get these weapons inside the Taj without being detected?

These and a host of other questions lead to the conclusion that there must be a strong autochthon involvement in the Mumbai terrorist attack. If this is so, a joint investigation obviously does not suit the Indian government. That possibly explains why the Indian government is so keen on coercive diplomacy rather than a joint investigation.

The writer is a former dean of social sciences at the Quaid-i-Azam University.