India’s renewed tirade

India is clearly not prepared to soften its harshening stance towards Pakistan. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s strategy was rather clear at a speech he gave last week to a gathering of BJP workers. Modi decided to skip the step of showing any semblance of proof that Pakistan was involved in the Uri attack and move straight ahead to making both veiled and direct threats. During the speech, the Indian prime minister insisted that India would work to completely isolate Pakistan and cut it off from the rest of the world as a pariah state which ‘exported terror’. Needless to say, these increasingly wild accusations have not been backed with any credible evidence by New Delhi. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, in return, has suggested the incident in Indian-held Kashmir could be a response to the atrocities committed there by the Indian military. This seems very likely, but it is not something India appears willing to even consider as it stirs up hysteria. It is also apparent that, for all his unhinged bluster, Modi had a strategy behind his speech. He wants to change the topic. International outrage over the latest Indian atrocities in Kashmir was slowly gathering steam. Modi, tellingly, did not have much to say about Indian actions in Kashmir. He wants the focus to be on Pakistan by delving straight into the internal matters of the country and accusing Pakistan of being unable to manage Azad Kashmir or other parts of its own country.

This kind of uncontrolled rage released by India against Pakistan is deeply troubling and simply builds more hatred when what is needed is greater trust and a willingness to work together. There is obviously no readiness to do so in New Delhi. The ugly face of the BJP government and its anti-Pakistan policies is now out in the open. It is now the task of our diplomats to challenge the perception of Pakistan being projected to the world by India with increasing venom. We will need all our diplomatic skills to persuade world leaders to step in and attempt to calm down the language being used by the Indian leadership, which possibly comes as an effort to disguise the flaws in security which allowed the Uri attack to be carried out in the first place. Clearly, India is using Pakistan to detract internal attention from its own problems and as a result the entire region is being badly shaken.