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Friday March 29, 2024

Gurdaspur attack: A bizarre plot

On July 27, three gunmen opened fire on a bus in the Indian Punjab and then stormed a police station in a town called Dinanagar. The attack led to the death of three civilians and four policemen and injured 15 others. Among the dead was a superintendent of police besides

By Waqar Ahmed
August 03, 2015
On July 27, three gunmen opened fire on a bus in the Indian Punjab and then stormed a police station in a town called Dinanagar. The attack led to the death of three civilians and four policemen and injured 15 others. Among the dead was a superintendent of police besides the three attackers. The shootout between the Indian armed forces and the attackers continued for 12 hours.
According to reports, it was the first such attack in the Indian Punjab since the mid-1990s when an insurgency was running in the state for setting up the independent Khalistan.
The Indian Union Home Minister, Rajnath Singh, held Pakistan responsible for the Dinanagar terror attack. He said, “Any strike by enemies will meet an effective and forceful response from Indian security forces.” Making a formal statement in the Rajya Sabha, the minister boasted that the central government was committed to rooting out terrorism from the country. There was not anything surprising in the statement; had the Indian minister not put the responsibility of the attack on Islamabad that would have been surely surprising, if not earth shattering. It is a foregone conclusion that any terrorist strike in India would be invariably blamed on Pakistan and its intelligence services.
If that was not enough, one Indian television channel went to the extent of claiming that terrorists who had attacked the Dinanagar town in East Punjab were allegedly trained on the Myanmar-Thailand border by Pak intelligence agencies. The channel had all the details about the terrorists, almost certainly fabricated on some dilapidated writing table in a stinking room in New Delhi. It further claimed that there were six terrorists in all, trained by the ISI for 10 days. Two were killed in Pakistan and one was nabbed while the remaining three attacked the Indian police station. Why of the six terrorists two were killed in Pakistan and one nabbed if they were allegedly trained by the Pakistani intelligence agencies? The Indian channel has no answer to this; perhaps it is waiting for further instructions from some Baboo.
It was also alleged that the Global Positioning System (GPS) was recovered from the dead terrorists. The preliminary analysis of GPS indicated that the gunmen had infiltrated from Pakistan through the area near Tash in Gurdaspur district where the Ravi River enters Pakistan. Brilliant! The Ravi is in flood for the past several days and the terrorists were flowing against the current in a boat that will perhaps soon be recovered containing important maps of targets. Everybody on Pakistan’s eastern border knows where India is, even goats and belching cows. Nobody would need a GPS for India, not even crows and pigeons, one of whom was recently arrested by the same Indian police on charges of spying. Nothing incriminating was recovered from the bird, which was x-rayed. Nevertheless, should we soon read reports that the bird was on a reconnaissance mission for the dead gunmen and both were linked should not come as a surprise to anybody in Pakistan.
Another twist to the story was the revelation that some IEDs were also allegedly recovered from railway tracks. These were obviously defused.
While the whole story has many question marks over it and Islamabad has strongly condemned the attack, it nonetheless shows that with the Indian blame-game making Pakistan and its intelligence agencies responsible for all the violence in India for the past several decades, the relations between the two countries cannot be improved. The mindset across the border has to be changed for any good news to filter in with regard to the bilateral relations.