The latest incident of mutilation of two Indian soldiers on Monday is yet another instance of the Pakistan Army’s plans to keep the pot boiling in Jammu & Kashmir and derailing any possibility of talks between the two countries. The dastardly act came days after Indian industrialist Sajjan Jindal met Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in Islamabad reportedly to pave the way for initiation of talks between the two neighbours.
Not willing to allow the civil Government to gain ascendancy in running the country and improve relations with India, the Pakistan Army resorted to such tactics soon after Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on Nawaz Sharif in lahore in December 2015, by attacking the Pathankot Airbase on January 2, 2016.
Similarly, the Kargil War took place in May 1999, just a few months after then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee went to lahore as part of peace overtures and Sharif was at the helm, officials in the security establishment said here on Tuesday.
Elaborating upon this crucial aspect, they said the Pakistan Army has always maintained that it will be part of any policy initiative by the political leadership and plays a key role whenever a dialogue takes place with India.
It is well known that the Pakistan Army calls the shots on the Kashmir policy and adopts a hardline approach posing problems for the democratically-elected Government there, they said. Giving the latest example, they said Jindal met Sharif in Pakistan last week in a reported effort by the two countries to pave the
way for stalled talks through back channels.
Jindal, who shares an excellent rapport with Sharif, arrived in Rawalpindi from Kabul in a private aircraft with a small delegation and was received by Sharif’s son Hussain Nawaz and Raheel Munir, husband of Sharif’s granddaughter Mehr-un-Nisa. The Indian delegation then went to the Prime Minister’s House in Islamabad for the meeting, reports said.
Though there was no official confirmation from both the countries about the meeting, reports in the Pakistani media hinted that Jindal carried a message pertaining to Kulbhushan Jadhav, a former Indian Navy officer, sentenced to death by a Pakistan military court on charges of spying.
Calling the shots in strategic and foreign affairs of Pakistan, the Army and ISI, which is also part of the military establishment, carried out this attack to put a spoke in any bid to bring down temperatures in the Indian subcontinent.
Officials admitted that given the dastardly nature of the attack, already strained relations between India and Pakistan are not going to improve in the next few months due to domestic pressure and the mood within both the nations. Their assessment comes in the backdrop of a possible meeting between the two Prime Ministers on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan in June.