Let me start on a deeply personal note. My father, the late V N Tewari, was a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha. A professor of comparative modern Indian literature, a poet and an author, he conceptualised and vigorously espoused the concept of Punjab, Punjabi and Punjabiyat—the syncretic ethos of Hindus and Sikhs living together in harmony.
This was a direct philosophical, ideological and conceptual challenge to Pakistan, that by the 1980s had made Punjab the first frontier in its strategy of bleeding India with a thousand cuts by trying to create communal discord between Hindus and Sikhs.
My father was assassinated on April 3, 1984 at our home in Chandigarh. My mother, a Jat Sikh, would have died with him that fateful morning as she grappled with his assassins, except for the fact that my father’s killers had run out of bullets. They had expended all of them on him. Faith-based executions such as his started in Punjab way back in the 1980s—from the standard playbook of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence.
Conceived on January 24, 1972 at the Multan Conference convened by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the strategy to bleed India with attrition was the modus vivendi Pakistan adopted to avenge the humiliation meted out by India to the West Pakistan Army in Bangladesh. Pakistan wanted nuclear weapons at any cost in order to use them as a shield while it operationalised the proxy war it had envisioned against India.
As a victim of Pakistan-sponsored terror, it was but a sequitur that I would step up and do my bit in exposing Pakistan-incubated, -resourced and -sponsored state terror on the global stage as a part of the parliamentary delegations that recently travelled to different parts of the world.
For the past three and a half decades, I have used every international platform available to understand, analyse and expose Pakistan’s perfidy to get it to change its noxious behaviour, so that an environment of peace, progress and prosperity could be created in South Asia to unleash the creative potential of the billions who call it home.
Like a jackal that can’t change its pelt, Pakistan seems incapable of changing its DNA of seeking retribution for the creation of Bangladesh by waging a low-intensity conflict against India even four and a half decades down the road. The cold-blooded executions carried out in Baisaran on April 22 was another portentous sequel in the long and bloody saga of Pakistan using terror as an instrument of state policy to undermine the social cohesion and civilisational ethos of India.
The fact that it came a week after General Asim Munir’s rant dredging up the aspiration of the discredited two-nation theory out of some dark closet of the army General Headquarters in Rawalpindi, giving it a fresh airing in a speech to Pakistani expatriates on April 16 in the presence of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, was no coincidence.
India’s response to these ‘faith-based’ executions, which followed during May 7-10, was warranted. How far it would prevent the next terror attack perhaps underscores the limitations of conventional power in proscribing asymmetric warfare. However, the message to Pakistan was clear—if it hits, India reprisals would follow; the next time they may not be as precise, calibrated and narrowly-targeted.
The objective of the parliamentary missions was threefold. First, to underscore that punitive payback against terror infrastructure in Pakistan would be the natural order of things every time there is a terror attack in India whose strings are traceable across India’s western border. Second, there is enough space beneath the nuclear overhang for a full-spectrum response by conventional means that would to be energised to the fullest. And third, the distinction between Pakistan, its deep state and the terror infrastructure it spawns is an artificial difference that would not be factored in while initialising punitive means.
Our delegation, which travelled to Qatar, South Africa, Ethiopia and Egypt, delivered the above message to our interlocutors purposefully and pointedly, albeit politely. We interacted with government ministers, parliamentarians, political parties, strategic experts, think tanks, academia, media and civil society leaders in most of these countries, depending upon the nature of the state and the form of government we were dealing with.
Given that in South Asia’s complex geopolitical theatre, few relationships have been as historically fraught or as internationally scrutinised as that between India and Pakistan, there was a keen interest among our interlocutors to understand from us the facts around the Pahalgam outrage and the imperatives of India’s response.
There was not even an iota of sympathy for Pakistan in any of the myriad interactions we had. On the contrary, our conversers themselves pointed out more than once the manifest chicanery of Pakistan that while it voraciously vacuumed up monies from the US and its allies, it was concurrently sheltering dreaded terrorists such as Osama bin Laden and others belonging to Al Qaeda and ISIS.
It was not lost on our discussants that even the Taliban leadership, which had been hosted by Pakistan in Quetta and other places after they left Afghanistan post Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001, had turned on their erstwhile hosts for their insidious attempts to undermine Afghanistan’s territorial sovereignty.
A lot of questions also centred on the missile exchange between Pakistan and Iran in January 2024. In essence, everyone understood that Pakistan was the epicentre of regional instability and terrorism.
One interesting conundrum that came up was that when some discussers counselled for negotiations between India and Pakistan to resolve ostensibly outstanding issues, it had to be pointed out that the export of terror by Pakistan was not because of any outstanding issues, but blind hatred among card-carrying members of its deep state.
While a nation-state can deal with the grievances of its neighbours, even if they are extreme, it is not possible to address institutional scars and sleights that drive the Pakistani deep state as a consequence of the perceived humiliation experienced by its armed forces when 91,000 of their soldiers and officers surrendered in East Pakistan.
Therefore, the missive delivered was clear—in the case of any future misadventure by Pakistan, India’s response would be even more blunt and straight.
Manish Tewari | Lawyer, third-term MP and former Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting
(Views are personal)
(manishtewari01@gmail.com)