A month after the Mumbai attack, India continues efforts to deepen international opinion to pressure Pakistan to act against terrorists operating from its territory. In the last month, diplomatic mobilisation has yielded diverse results. The UN Security Council, for instance, imposed sanctions on the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a front organisation of the Lashkar-e-Toiba, the group believed to be behind the Mumbai attacks; this compelled Pakistan to ban the JuD — the LeT was already banned — and at least show some moves against its leaders. Also, in the flurry of top-level visits to the subcontinent, leaders like British Prime Minister Gordon Brown underlined that it is not India alone that demands that Pakistan act against “non-state actors” plotting terrorist activities from its soil. Brown made the point that 75 per cent of terror plots have been traced back to Pakistan.Considering the inscrutable nature of civil-military ties in Pakistan, and given the nature of India-Pakistan relations, the use of international interlocutors has been a way of making New Delhi’s point to Islamabad: that while it seeks credible action against the terrorists behind the Mumbai attack and against those who could be plotting strikes, it does not close the door for meaningful engagement. This needs reiterating, given the war hysteria that is being fanned by the Pakistan army. Tension has been incrementally built up with news of troop movements, or the cancellation of leave to military personnel. As a report in this newspaper on Friday highlighted, this is believed to serve the interests of the Pakistan army. The threat of moving troops from Pakistan’s western border to the eastern sector is a message to the West that its army’s continued presence in the tribal areas, stronghold of the Taliban, cannot be presumed. And the emotive results of these exercises have restored to the army prestige lost in the last years of the Musharraf presidency. The prime minister correctly tried to calm the situation this week by iterating that war was in no way imminent. But it will take sustained diplomatic and rhetorical measures to keep the situation on a keel that permits India the luxury of options to meet its objectives. Whipping up war hysteria is Pakistan’s way of deflecting attention from its responsibility to act against the perpetrators of 26/11 or to address informed concerns that there may have been institutional support for the terrorists. India needs to be creative in keeping up the pressure on Pakistan to show movement on these basic issues.
