Desperate act

Let there be no doubt. The multiple terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir are the handiwork of Pakistan’s “state actors,” timed and aimed at thwarting the ongoing Assembly polls. The neighbour will do everything to cause damage to make its point with its own people and with the world community to damn Indian democracy exercise. That the United States and Germany, among others, have condemned these attacks is not going to thwart more such attacks. And they will come during and even after the outcome of the key elections.

This time, the Pakistani government has not resorted to the usual alibi of bland, pro-forma denials, nor of possibility of “non-state actors” staging the attacks. Significantly, the mainstream Pakistani media, too, is silent on the issue, not talking of what is happening in the “Indian-held Kashmir.” This silence, at the behest of Islamabad, is vocal.

The Pakistani hand is clear from the tell-tale evidence of food packets, medicines and ammunition recovered from the militants killed in encounter. The indication, clearly, is that the attacks were planned long before the election process got underway in Jammu and Kashmir. The Pakistani media, then, had talked of Indian ‘conspiracy,’ so a “counter-conspiracy” was being hatched all through the last many weeks. We have the result, still far from complete, in which 11 Indian uniformed personnel have been killed.

The target of the militants from Pakistan is the Indian civilians to create a scare among the voters, after the astounding 70 per cent-plus voters’ turnout, as rightly pointed out by the top Indian Army officer in Jammu & Kashmir, Lt General Subrata Saha.

The third phase of polling takes place on Tuesday and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s poll rally in Srinagar is making the militants and their mentors desperate.

The General has pointed to the sequence in which the events have been happening, and to the levels of training that went in to prepare these people.

For Pakistan, promoting militancy in Jammu and Kashmir has been a zero-sum game for long, especially since the 1990s when militancy received its fillip from the returnees of the anti-Moscow war in Afghanistan. Islamabad needed to keep them engaged and divert them, lest they create trouble at home. Jammu and Kashmir was the best place for this.

But the hand that feeds often gets bitten, as the saying goes. And this is precisely what is happening as the militants – Pakistani and foreign, extremist Sunnis and Pashtun tribals – have formed the Tehrik Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The “zarb-e-Arb” military operation launched by the Pakistan Army has done little to keep the militancy going on the borders with India and Afghanistan, and what is happening in J&K is the proof of it. The people of the State are bound to give a resounding reply to these provocations.