UPA regime eats its words, names Pakistan
Had it not been for the outrage in Parliament and across the country, the Congress-led UPA Government would not have named and shamed Pakistan’s Army for the recent killing of five Indian soldiers along the line of Control. On Thursday, Mr Antony finally acknowledged in Parliament that the August 6 ambush of an Indian patrol in Jammu & Kashmir's Poonch district was indeed carried out by “specialist troops” of the Pakistani Army, and also demanded, for good measure, that Islamabad punish those who blatantly violated the ceasefire agreement. The Minister could have said the truth on Wednesday and avoided the brouhaha. But Mr Antony had then hurriedly issued a clean chit to Pakistan when he announced that the ambush was carried out by “approximately 20 heavily-armed terrorists along with persons dressed in Pakistan Army uniform”, who were not Army regulars. This was in stark contrast to the official statement that was issued by a Ministry of Defence spokesperson in Jammu who said that the Indian Army patrol was “ambushed by a Pakistan Border Action Team”. later, the ministry issued another statement expressing regret and clarifying that it was also referring to “persons dressed in Pakistani Army uniform” — in keeping with the Defence Minister's version in Parliament. But as Mr Antony came under fire from the Opposition for toeing the Pakistani line, his party colleagues came to his defence with yet another version — that it was a combination team of Pakistani regulars and irregulars that had attacked the Indian patrol, as Congress spokesperson PC Chacko said on Wednesday. But by Thursday, even this narrative had been discarded as Mr Antony finally and categorically identified the Pakistani Army for the killing of Indian jawans. The Defence Minister has attributed the series of flip-flops to the supposedly ever-changing information that he had access to. On Thursday, he also framed his statement in Parliament with the caveat that his latest update was based on the Army chief's investigation into the matter, following the latter's visit to Poonch on Wednesday. But Mr Antony's argument holds no water, since, 48 hours before he named the Pakistani Army, his own ministry had done so in its first statement — a statement which was clearly based on information from the same Army sources that the Defence Minister claims had guided his contrary utterances.
Consequently, in the two days that the Defence Minister and the Government spent struggling over whom to blame for the August 6 incident, the House came across as fractured when it should have presented a united front. The attack was a breach of the country's territorial integrity, and the UPA’s leaders should have joined the Opposition in castigating Islamabad. Parliament could have adopted a resolution condemning Pakistan's action. (It’s not late to do that even now.) Instead, Mr Antony and his colleagues continued to defend the indefensible, inside and outside the House, because they have a deep and abiding, and misplaced, faith in Islamabad’s commitment to peaceful and friendly relations with New Delhi. Now that the UPA regime has accepted the reality, it must re-think on the forthcoming meeting between the Prime Ministers of the two countries.