Onus on Pak to reverse 'new normal'

Seventeen years after the Kargil conflict, the Uri terror attack of September last year and the subsequent surgical strikes conducted by India across the Line of Control in Pakistan occupied Kashmir have set up a new military threshold between India and Pakistan. Kargil was benchmark because Pakistan committed to military misadventure; India fought back with grit but sought to sort out the issue(s) diplomatically. The surgical strikes, in backdrop of Uri, conveyed that the crossing of the red line is going to be the new normal. This could happen again. If it happens again and again a war could be in the waiting. The onus of averting war is directly on Pakistan. As Prime Minister Modi said at the 'Raisina Dialogue' that Pakistan will have to walk away from terror to be able to talk to India, Islamabad must listen to this advice for reversing the post-Uri 'new normal'. It is nearly four months since New Delhi provided Islamabad concrete evidence of Pakistan's involvement in Uri attacks but a response has yet to come. India had on October 4 given Pakistan evidence of involvement of Pak-based terrorists in the Uri attack and demanded that it refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism directed against this country. Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar had summoned Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit and told him that latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active. Jaishankar provided Basit with the content of GPS recovered from the bodies of terrorists with coordinates that indicate the point and time of infiltration across the LoC and the subsequent route to the terror attack site and grenades with Pakistani markings as evidence of Pakistan's role in Uri attack in which 18 jawans were killed. "If the Government of Pakistan wishes to investigate these cross-border attacks, India is ready to provide fingerprints and DNA samples of terrorists killed in the Uri and Poonch incidents," he had told the Pakistan envoy. Asserting that the latest terrorist attack in Uri only underlines that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan remains active, Jaishankar demanded that Pakistan lives up to its public commitment to refrain from supporting and sponsoring terrorism against India. With this volume of irrefutable evidence, Islamabad is still living in denial mode. We have often argued that India can always help democratic institutions strengthen in Pakistan by deep engagements with elected governments. But onus is on Islamabad for providing New Delhi with an enabling environment for such engagements.