While the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, L K Advani, took the lead in the show of unity in the lower house, the Rajya Sabha saw his party colleague Arun Shourie picking holes in the Government’s response to the terror attacks and taking a stand suggesting that New Delhi should make Islamabad realise the cost of perpetrating terror against India.

The CPI(M) joined the game of political one-upmanship with its senior leader Sitaram Yechury linking the terror attacks with the Indo-US nuclear deal. He said the Government had failed to take into account the fact that aligning itself with the US would expose India to new types of security threats. The perception that India was an ally of the US will invite new threats, he said.

Adding his bit was the BSP’s Satish Chandra Mishra who took on the Centre for not aiding Uttar Pradesh in its fight against terror and indulging in scoring points.

Kickstarting the debate, Shourie criticised the manner in which the Government engaged Pakistan in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, especially the Prime Minister’s request to Pakistan to send the ISI chief to New Delhi to share the evidence of the attacks, and the way the Government kept speaking about the possibility of terrorists taking the sea route without doing anything.

He said it was meaningless to ask Pakistan to nail the masterminds and such a move did not make any sense. Shourie wanted the Government to pause the peace process, prepare the country for the next form of attack and stop taking the statements by Pakistan seriously.

Referring to former Pakistan president Zia-ul-Haq’s strategy to bleed India through proxy war, Shourie said, “No war can be won with a strategy of permanent defence. You must make those who control and orchestrate such a war to pay. If you cannot, make them pay individually.”

Rejecting the theory of using minimal force, he said the eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth argument is completely wrong. “For an eye, both eyes! For a tooth, the whole jaw! Unless India has that determination and that clarity, we will continue to bleed like this all the time,” he said.

He said New Delhi will have to get its act together as pinning hopes on the US was not going to help much. “Please stop running to mummy. Please stop putting faith in others to do our work thinking that Condoleezza Rice will come and Obama would issue a statement,” he said.

Shourie said the time to send large armies across the borders has gone and there are no training camps to bomb.

“But Pakistan gives us the clue what we should be doing to make them register a cause, that is, look at the violence in Kashmir in the last year-and-a-half. It has gone down because Pakistan has been preoccupied with its own problems. So, keep it preoccupied with problems in Baluchistan, in Gilgit Baltistan, in PoK,” he said.

Yechury’s energy was concentrated more on the previous NDA Government than the current UPA regime. Referring to some suggestions made by Shourie to revamp the internal security apparatus, he wanted to know why these were not implemented during the NDA government.