Ever since the Mumbai Police Commissioner pinpointed Pakistan's role in the 7/11 bombings, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his colleagues have been reassuring a worried nation that India will "confront" Pakistan with the evidences gathered by Mumbai Police implicating the ISI. The Prime Minister is trying to assure the nation that there is no reason to panic even as Islamist terrorism spreads its tentacles all over the country. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, after all, assured him in Havana that any evidence of Pakistani origin of terrorism on Indian Territory will be inquired into!

There is hardly any other instance in history of such credulous behaviour displayed by the head of a state. This has been starkly evident right since the days of Partition in 1947. In 1948, when Jammu & Kashmir was invaded, Pakistan took the official position that it was Afghan tribals who had infiltrated into the Valley and the Pakistani Army had no truck with them. Subsequently, the truth that Pakistani Army was actively involved in the intrusion became public.

After the Pakistani Army got a bloody nose from India in 1965, Lal Bahadur Shastri was tricked into signing the Tashkent agreement by the Soviet Union that wanted to have a foothold in Pakistan in pursuance of its own Cold War strategy. However, soon after Pakistan generals got the Indian Army to withdraw, the promises made in Tashkent were forgotten and Pakistan was back in the old game of seeking to destroy India.

In 1971 there was another demonstration of Pakistan's perfidy. When Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto succeeded Gen Yahya Khan as the Prime Minister of Pakistan, he had at hand the problem of getting back the over 90,000 Pakistani soldiers who had surrendered to the Indian Army. So, Bhutto made all sorts of promises in Shimla; this included the agreement of treating Jammu & Kashmir as a bilateral issue, with no interference from others. Indira Gandhi should have learnt her lesson from the past, but unfortunately she too fell in the Pakistani trap.

At Shimla, Bhutto was reminded of his earlier declaration, when, as the Foreign Minister of Pakistan, he had resorted to declaring a thousand-year war with India at the UN General Assembly. Then, he brushed it aside and vowed to keep the Indo-Pakistan dialogue going. That was his smokescreen and he succeeded handsomely. Back to his constituency, his first response was to order the development of nuclear weapon technology "even if Pakistani's have to starve and eat grass", to quote his infamous words. The promised India-Pakistan dialogue and bilateralism on Kashmir were all forgotten. Pakistan was in the race to beat India to demonstrate its nuclear weapons status as early as possible.

In the context of North Korea recently testing a nuclear device, it is worthwhile to recall how Islamabad and Pyongyang colluded in the development of nuclear weapons and delivery capability. Both the countries have set up an extensive supply chain across the industrialised West, disguised as legitimate trading entities. This supply chain stole and shipped sensitive materials under many aliases. North Korea got help from China to develop long-range missiles under the pretext of its defence against the US.

On several occasions the Governments in the West broke through the smokescreen of the Pakistani supply chain and exposed export of sensitive material for developing nuclear capability. But the US Administration, in the interest of its own Cold War strategy, ignored such sensitive revelations. From the Uranium centrifuge that Pakistani scientist AQ Khan stole from Belgium to the Klystron switches for causing nuclear detonation, most materials for the so-called Islamic bomb were procured clandestinely while Saudi Arabia financed the whole plan stealthily.

Towards the end of the 1990s, there were regular surreptitious flights between Islamabad and Pyongyang, ferrying nuclear materials from Pakistan to North Korea and missile portions, in return, from Korea to Pakistan. Behind the firewall America had supposedly built around Pakistan, the two rogue regimes collaborated to develop their countries into being nuclear weapon states with high delivery capacities.

Finally, we have the evidence of the Pakistani role in the Kargil war that Gen Musharraf himself provides. In 1998, the Prime Minister of Pakistan was receiving his Indian counterpart with open arms and declaring the past hostility between the two nations as a closed chapter. If we are to believe the General, the Pakistan Government was simultaneously preparing for the Kargil war. It planned to infiltrate through the Kargil hills overlooking the supply routes to north Kashmir, choke the Indian Army's supplies and then get a quick surrender from India or any other diplomatic advantage that could be squeezed from a cornered India. The General not only had broadcast his role in this nefarious plan, but also blamed the then political establishment of Mr Nawaz Sharif for the Pakistan Army's withdrawal despite the plan "succeeding". Again, in January 2004, Gen Musharraf assured then

Mr Manmohan Singh has been defensive ever since the Havana accord. The Prime Minister and the entire UPA establishment were critical of Mumbai Police for what the critics described as "targeting" a community for the bombings. But the police were only following the leads it got. In the process, Pakistani links with the Indian Let sleeper cells across the country stretching from western Maharashtra to eastern Bihar have been exposed.

The UPA Government and its allies might like to overlook the long history of Pakistani terror tactics since 1948. The casual reaction of the Pakistani establishment to what Mumbai Police has unearthed is not surprising. It is in line with its considered stand to first ask for proof, promising to take action if evidence was available; then it would dismiss this evidence as not convincing. It seems history is destined to repeat itself in Indo-Pak relations.

Courtesy: www.dailypioneer.com, October 20,2006