To compel Islamabad to end its sub-conventional war against India, New Delhi needs to make the sponsorship of terrorism too expensive for Pakistan to persist with
Given all that has been written and said about the terrorist attack in Dinanagar town in Punjab's Gurdaspur district, there is no need to argue here that it bears the clear imprimatur of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, its principal spawn, the lashkar-e-Tayyeba, and a Punjab terrorist group, mostly likely the Babbar Khalsa International. The questions are, what message does this send and how should India respond.
The message is that Pakistan is going to escalate its unconventional war against India through the sponsorship of insurgencies and cross-border terrorism. India must base its response on this fact and the harsh reality that Islamabad will not voluntary end this policy which it has pursued since 1948 when it began aiding Naga rebels of North-Eastern India. Also, the policy is central to Pakistan's strategic doctrine which has India's fragmentation as its objective.
This, in turn, is clear from the book, India: A Study in Profile, by lieutenant-Colonel (later lieutenant-General) Javed Hassan which states that India “has a historical inability to exist as a unified state” and identifies Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir, Tamil Nadu and six North-Eastern States (there are, in fact, seven) as being completely alienated from mainstream India. lieutenant-Colonel Hassan felt that with some minor encouragement, these could become centres of insurgency which would, “at best [!]” dismember India and at the least, weaken this country's ability to seek regional dominance for years to come.
lieutenant-Colonel Hassan's book represented a study conducted for the Pakistan Army's Faculty of Research and Doctrinal Studies at Staff College, Quetta. It was published and distributed by the Services Book Club, Rawalpindi. All this could not have happened without official sanction from the very top, which, in turn, indicates that it articulated, or was at least in harmony with, official policy.
India's response has to be at two levels. First, it must continue what it has been doing — preventing terrorist strikes by improving intelligence collection and the security infrastructure on the ground. The obvious first thing here is to bolster both departments in Punjab. The very fact that the outrage occurred despite a central intelligence warning about an impending terrorist strike, underlines the pressing importance of this. Action must come immediately. An important reason why terrorism in Punjab assumed the proportions it did between 1979 and 1998, was that it was not nipped in the bud but treated with inadequate resolve until things threatened to go completely out of hand and Operation Blue Star followed. A repeat of this must not happen.
Second, New Delhi has to compel Islamabad to abandon its unconventional war against this country by making the sponsorship of terrorism too expensive to persist with. For a long time, Pakistan has been accusing India of helping rebels in Balochistan and elsewhere. It is time it considered lending some truth to these charges and giving Pakistan a taste of its own medicine.
One will doubtless be told that this might destabilise Pakistan which is already hard put to combat internal terrorism in its north-western tribal areas and elsewhere, and a destabilised Pakistan may sharply escalate terrorist attacks against India or even launch a full-fledged war to unite the country behind the Government fighting its traditional enemy. The contention lacks validity. First, Pakistan is a failed state and may not require an external push to get destabilised. Second, it has continued its unconventional war because it clearly believes that India will never hit across the border. If anything changes its mind, it will be the realisation that India has begun striking back. Anyway, India must be ready for another war with Pakistan and move quickly to ensure that its military has the wherewithal needed — which it did not get during the UPA regime.