It’s not often this column gets a mailbox full of letters that agree with the views of your humble columnist. This happened last week. The gist of the letters was that India’s national interest was undermined by the Prime Minister when he allowed his Pakistani counterpart to bully him into that reference to Balochistan in the joint statement from Sharm-el-Sheikh. Proof of this came in last week’s ‘dossier’ of charges strategically leaked to The Dawn newspaper. The Government of India is now charged with being behind the terrorist attacks on the Sri Lankan cricket team and that police academy near Lahore.

When I read the charges listed in this so-called dossier I have to admit that my first reaction was...if only. If only Inder Kumar Gujral as Prime Minister had not wound down RAW’s subversive activities in foreign lands. If only the government of Atal Behari Vajpayee had revived them after the Kargil war. If only Dr Manmohan Singh’s first government had realised after the attacks began on Indian cities culminating in the horror of Mumbai that the only war that is going to be fought between us and our old Islamic foe is a subversive one. If there was the slightest possibility of another conventional war it would have happened after India’s Parliament was attacked and it would most certainly have happened after the attack on Mumbai.

It has to be said that Pakistan’s leaders have been quicker to understand this than our own. When Pervez Musharraf’s Kargil misadventure failed miserably, it took him no more than a few months to change his tactics. By the summer of 2001, when he came to Agra for those sham peace talks, he had already enlisted the services of men like Maulana Azhar Masood and Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed. These were his new Generals in the war against India and if you listen to their interviews and speeches on YouTube you will find that they are refreshingly frank about their hatred of India.

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