Pakistan is not serious on swift end to 26/11 trial
While India has done the right thing diplomatically in protesting to Pakistan against yet another adjournment in the trial of the Mumbai 26/11 attack case, New Delhi's displeasure has been treated by Islamabad like water on a duck's back. It has told India that the judiciary is independent in Pakistan and cannot be cajoled into taking swift action against the perpetrators of the violence, and that India must patiently wait for the judicial process to take its course and arrive at a conclusion. Pakistan also added that the Government had no role to play in the adjournments. All this is difficult to digest, given that Pakistani authorities have shown scant interest in expediting the process at their end. In fact, they do not even believe that Pakistani elements whom India accuses were ever involved in the attack on Mumbai in 2008. All the evidence that India has directed to them in these six years has been treated as waste, with one official at a point of time calling it “literature”. Therefore, Pakistan's ‘commitment' to bring the accused to justice at the earliest is hollow, just as the Union Government's summoning of the Pakistani envoy in India and lodging a protest with the Pakistani authorities in Islamabad over the delay in trial, will prove to be fruitless. The trial was recently adjourned for the seventh time in a row, and every adjournment has come on largely flimsy pretexts. The next hearing is slated for September 1. In an attempt to counter New Delhi's accusation that the trial was being deliberately adjourned, Pakistan has played the Samjhauta Express incident card, demanding to know why the trial in that case is being delayed in an Indian court. The Samjhauta train bombing case is an intricate one, with one section of the investigation agencies (including from the US) blaming the lashkar-e-Tayyeba, and another section accusing fringe Right-wing elements in India for the incident which took place in early 2007.
In any case, trial in the Samjhauta case is proceeding without any intended delay on the part of either the Government or the probe agencies. This is known to the world, and Pakistan cannot discredit the process, much as it wants to. By comparison, the 26/11 incident is an open-and-shut case. There is a mountain of evidence — and Pakistan has it from India and other sources but denies it — that not only the killers were from Pakistan and had crossed over to India from there, but that their handlers and planners such as Hafiz Saeed were (and still are) based in Pakistan and protected by state authorities. India is not protecting any of the accused in the Samjhauta incident. It appears that Islamabad has linked the two cases in a bid to deflect attention from its deliberate insincerity and the culpability of a section of its state actors in the 26/11 killings. The tactic allows it to score points back home and use it as an argument when international attention is directed at it over its role in the Mumbai massacre.