Indian defence minister’s statement senseless: Sethi

LAHORE: Senior journalist Najam Sethi on Sunday described the statement of Indian defence minister about terrorism as senseless and said Pakistan’s strong reaction was justified.He said India had realised that Pakistan could use his assertions at international forums as Islamabad had already been saying that New Delhi was sponsoring terrorism on Pakistani soil.
Expressing his views in Geo News programme ‘Aapas ki Baat’, Sethi said any improvement in Pak-India relations seemed difficult in near future. The Modi government’s policy towards Pakistan had become clear, as he appointed his party’s hardliners as defence minister and national security adviser, Sethi added.
He said New Delhi was also perturbed over closer Paki-Afghanistan ties and trying top halt the agreement between the two countries to make the Ashraf Ghani government tilt towards India again.
Ghani was seemingly a little bit disappointed of Pakistan and India wanted to take advantage of that, Sethi added.Talking about the JIT report on the Model incident, the seasoned expert said no politician could ask the police to open fire. Sometimes the situation on the post could reach an alarming stage where anything was possible, he said, adding that anyone, who was armed, could open fire in self-defence.
According to Sethi, the Punjab government should not have used force to remove barriers from the outside Minhaj-ul-Quran’s centre. The earlier report prepared by a judge had said that Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif had neither ordered the police to open fire nor asked them to disengage, meaning that he wasn’t involved in the episode.
It also stated that Dr Tahirul Qadri’s workers were not the first to resort gunfire which was started by nine police officials. But the judge finalised the report on the basis of an earlier JIT whose members from the MI and ISI had raised some questions which remained unanswered. The objections of MI and ISI members were that the PAT workers had not been quizzed and their FIR should be quashed. That’s why a new JIT was from to address the shortcomings.
Neither the first nor the second JIT declared Shahbaz and Rana Sanaullah responsible for the incident. The second only added that the number of the involved police officials was 10, not nine, and confirmed the report of previous JIT.
The PAT’s stance that they do not accept the findings because they were not part of the investigation is not valid. The MI and ISI are neutral umpires and both Qadri and Imran Khan should avoid criticism.