Washington, Oct 19 (Inditop.com) India sees no change in Pakistan’s attitude towards jihadists, noting that Islamabad was yet to take credible action either to bring the perpetrators of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks to justice or to dismantle the “infrastructure of terror”.
“Now, this sort of thing does worry us. We want to see some really clear and firm action,” said India’s Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” programme.
India asked for two things “after the massacres of Mumbai in 26.11, as we call it in India,” he said when asked if the Pakistani government has changed in the last three or four months with the rise of a civilian, democratic government.
“We asked for credible action to bring the perpetrators of that horror to justice. And we asked for credible action to dismantle the infrastructure of terror from which attacks had repeatedly been launched in India over the last couple of decades,” Tharoor said.
“Now, frankly, we haven’t seen enough action on either,” he said noting, “The Pakistanis are “saying the right things…But it’s what they do that matters.”
“What we want now is something new, something clear-something that shows within Pakistan that it’s a clean break from the condoning, at the very least, if not the actual leading, of terrorist actions against India,” Tharoor said.
India certainly hoped that recent militant attacks on the Pakistani state would make Islamabad take on the fight against jihad, he said.
But “one of the concerns we’ve had in recent years is that there appears to have been a tendency in some parts of the Pakistani establishment to think there are good terrorists and bad terrorists.”
“The good terrorists are the guys who go off and bomb Indians, and kill Indians in India. And the bad terrorists are the ones who attack Pakistani interests, whether in Afghanistan or inside Pakistan,” Tharoor said.
“So, in other words, you blow up the Taj Mahal Hotel, you’re a good guy. You blow up the Marriott in Islamabad, you’re a bad guy.”
“Now, that sort of distinction-which I’m not saying is held at the highest levels of government, but certainly has been held in some elements on that side of the border-that distinction must disappear,” Tharoor demanded.
“And if what we’re seeing now with the assault on Pakistani military headquarters clinches the argument once and for all, then it will be a case, we believe, of Dr. Frankenstein really deciding he has to execute his own monster,” he said.
Tharoor regretted that Pakistan is “actually using jihadi militants as an instrument of destabilisation in both Afghanistan and India. And we think that’s wrong.”
India actually had a vision of a peaceful subcontinent, Tharoor said asserting, “India is not interested in being a threat to Pakistan or any other country.”
Answering former Pakistan president General Pervez Musharraf on why India was keeping 400,000 troops on the Pakistani border, Tharoor noted, “.Any attacks that have occurred in India have occurred from that border…And therefore, for us not to have a defensive capacity would be irresponsible.”
Noting that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh “has repeatedly said to Pakistan, you take one step, we will meet you more than half-way,” he said: “It takes a lot of political courage to do that when you’re talking about a country from which assaults like the Mumbai massacre have been launched against us.”
“All we’re asking is for Pakistan to show us enough good faith, and it will be reciprocated with generosity and conviction on the Indian side.”
