Many puzzling things have been said about our relations with Pakistan since the Sharm el-Sheikh engagement. Our Finance Minister told the Lok Sabha that India’s foreign policy “is embedded in our 5,000-year-old civilisation”. So mysterious is this remark that it defies analysis. Official Congress Party spokesmen are easier to understand. They have said petulantly on national television that any criticism of the joint statement amounts to violating the “62-year-old consensus on foreign policy”. Why should there be a consensus? And, why should something that was valid 62 years ago still be relevant? But, for me, the most puzzling remark of all came from the Prime Minister when he told the Lok Sabha that the choice was between dialogue and war. “Let me say that in the affairs of two neighbours we should recall what President Reagan once said—trust but verify. There is no other way unless we go to war.”

What puzzles me is why he has not noticed that we are already at war. The attack on Mumbai was an act of war. The men who were guiding the operation from Pakistan make this absolutely clear. In the cell phone conversations between them and the ten jihadi killers in Mumbai they say two things that our intelligence agencies must have told the Prime Minister about. They order their men to “kill as many people as you can so that an atmosphere of fear lingers long afterwards”. And, they say “this is only a trailer, the film has yet to begin”. Did the Prime Minister ask Yousuf Raza Gilani what this means? Did he ask him if the controllers who guided the attack on Mumbai included a ‘General Sahib’? Ajmal Kasab has spoken of meeting such a person. Did he ask him if it were not true that the reason why Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed could not be arrested was because as the founder of the Lashkar-e-Toiba he would have been acting on the instructions of the Pakistani army when he put together his appalling army? On the day that the Prime Minister defended engagement with Pakistan, did he notice that the Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations described Sayeed as ‘an humanitarian’.

... contd.