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The Hindu
09-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
books to read post pahalgam
In the aftermath of the Pahalgam terror attacks, New Delhi has unleashed a raft of measures against Pakistan, both diplomatic and economic. It has followed it up with military strikes on the terrorist infrastructure of groups based in Pakistan, to act as a deterrent against future attacks. For an informed and grounded view on how to deal with Pakistan and the scourge of terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir in the longer term, there are a number of books that give a view of policy-making with the added advantage of personal experience, archival documents and research. Diplomatic archiving At 90 plus, Avtar Singh Bhasin is a one-man institution on diplomatic archiving. He has compiled official documents into volumes on India's relations with a number of countries, including India's neighbours like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, China and Pakistan. His latest work, Negotiating India's Landmark Agreements, stands out as a treasure trove of nuggets. According to his list, the five most important agreements India has signed are the following: the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement between India and China; Indo-Soviet Treaty, 1971; the Simla Pact, 1972; India-Sri Lanka Accord, 1987; and the India-U.S. Civil Nuclear Energy Agreement, 2008. Those focused on the current situation between India and Pakistan would learn much from Bhasin's painstaking research into how the Simla Accord came about, including the role of the Soviet Union. In a previous book, India and Pakistan: Neighbours at Odds, Bhasin analysed the Indus Waters Treaty at length. Pakistan has threatened to suspend the Simla Pact in response to India's suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty. The Kashmir angle Amarjit Singh Dulat, a former Intelligence Bureau officer and adviser to Farooq Abdullah when he was chief minister of J&K, presents a bird's eye view of the policy-making in Delhi and Srinagar during the worst of the Kashmir insurgency in the 1990s and 2000s. The Chief Minister and the Spy: An Unlikely Friendship takes on more importance after the Pahalgam attack, which may portend a new, more brutal turn in the Kashmir insurgency. Unlike a previous work on the same subject, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years, written with Aditya Sinha, which restricts itself to a few years, the new book goes from Sheikh Abdullah's struggle pre-Partition and stretches to Omar Abdullah's election victory in 2024. Dulat attempts to explain events that moulded Dr. Abdullah's personality and his politics that aligned him closely to the idea of a secular India. What also comes through is Dr. Abdullah's hardline position on militant demands, including a detailed account of the kidnapping of the then Home Minister and later Chief Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's daughter, Rubaiyya Sayeed in 1989. He also writes about the hostage-taking aboard IC-814 in 1999. Dulat recounts Dr. Abdullah's strong opposition to New Delhi's decision to release terrorists in exchange for hostages in both cases. History has proved him correct on this as both decisions gave militancy in J&K a fillip. A controversy Ironically, the book that is clearly 'The Spy's' almost-hagiographic tribute to 'The Chief Minister' has led to a controversy for showing Dr. Abdullah in a poor light over his response to the amendments to Article 370. A closer read indicates an unnecessary storm over a few lines, although it does raise questions about the veracity of other quotes in the book, and whether Dulat simply recreated conversations from memory without recourse to more detailed note-taking. Both Dulat and Bhasin's books remind us that there are very few people left in office with first-hand knowledge of dealing with militancy in Kashmir in the 1990s, and dealing with Pakistan when Delhi and Islamabad still conducted bilateral dialogue. One such person is National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, the man at the centre of today's strategic planning post-Pahalgam. A number of superbly written accounts from the ground have been penned by diplomats once posted in Islamabad, including Ajay Bisaria's Anger Management with a play-by-play account of the 2019 Pulwama attacks and Balakot strikes. Another good book is Sharat Sabharwal's India's Pakistan Conundrum that deals with the dividends of bringing international pressure on Pakistan post the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Ruchi Ghanashyam's An Indian Woman in Islamabad: 1997-2000 goes into the details of how the 1999 IC-814 crisis was managed with Pakistan. General Musharraf had only just taken over in a military coup. The book also includes a riveting first-person account from her husband and fellow diplomat R. Ghanashyam, the first Indian diplomat on the Kandahar tarmac during the crisis.
NDTV
30-04-2025
- Business
- NDTV
There Is A 'Third' Player In The India-Pakistan Conflict
This is perhaps one of those moments when a single decision by a single person will determine the future course of India, perhaps even the world. That decision is Prime Minister Narendra Modi's alone: how to respond to the terrorist attack on tourists in Pahalgam. The Prime Minister has asserted that the terrorists and conspirators will be punished "beyond their imagination". He has also vowed a decisive fight against terrorism. The immediate response - keeping the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) in abeyance and paring down relations - has been measured and, to use a phrase often deployed by defence experts, non-kinetic. Suspending the 1960 treaty, which has survived multiple conflicts between the two countries, including the 1971 war, is using a heavy hand. The seriousness of the diplomatic offensive can be gauged from the fact that Pakistan immediately termed it as an act of war and threatened to suspend the 1972 Simla Pact. Bigger Than Balakot? Expectation is, however, building that the Prime Minister would order a spectacular military operation that would surpass the special forces' "surgical strike" and the missile rain on terror camps in Balakot inside Pakistan in 2016 and 2019, respectively. Those responses were a significant departure from previous military actions, which were effective but quietly accomplished. The much-publicised nature of the latter strikes reduces the surprise element and effectiveness of a repeat operation. Moreover, India not taking the bait to fight a full-scale, economically debilitating war has ensured its rise to become the fifth largest economy in the world with a GDP of nearly $4.5 trillion, which is 12 times larger than that of Pakistan. It has so far been victorious in the war of attrition with diplomacy and economic strength. A crucial diplomatic success was India getting Pakistan grey-listed by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Now, PM Modi has the unenviable task of responding with force enough to be seen as proportionate, yet without the scope of escalation. That is tough, because Pakistan does not need a reason to escalate. Or, the Prime Minister could play the waiting game. That would require relying on his political equity to keep the nationalists assuaged. His predecessors, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, managed it, quietly but surely uprooting the multiple terror networks that had entrenched themselves in the country and cutting off their air supply from abroad. The Modi government built on that, developing close diplomatic and intelligence ties with West Asian countries once friendly to Pakistan, choking off avenues of financial and material help. Today it is heavily dependent on China. Changing The Rules In an interview with Karan Thapar on April 28, former Friday Times editor and part-time politician Najam Sethi said that the issue was no more about Pakistan and India. There is a third player, China, which is deeply invested in Pakistan and will go to great lengths to protect its interests. Sethi was talking about the $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is a key part of China's global Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Sethi hinted that China will support Pakistan militarily in the event of an attack by India. About 43 projects worth about $25 billion in the CPEC are complete, yet it is besieged by unrest in Balochistan, where separatists attacks have crippled economic activity. The CPEC showpiece, the Gwadar Port, was expected to be China and Pakistan's trade gateway to West and Central Asia. The port, which was also supposed to reduce China's reliance on the Malacca Straits, is currently a white elephant. The CPEC, however, has stalled due to local protests and separatist attacks. The attacks had become increasingly frequent, deadly and audacious. The most audacious attack came on March 11, when the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) hijacked Jaffar Express, a passenger train with more than 400 passengers on board. Although security forces took back the train after multiple raids, scores of people died. Lieutenant-General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, the director-general of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) public relations, said the hijack "changed the rules of the game". Addressing a press conference after the rescue operation, Chaudhry squarely blamed India for the incident. He said India was using Afghanistan-based groups to sponsor terrorist attacks in Pakistan. In an interview with Samaa TV soon after Chaudhry's comment, former editor Sethi said that India changed the rules of the game after the Mumbai attacks. It carried out attacks across the border. Pakistan would do the same thing. "It means taking the war to Afghanistan," Sethi said. He said Pakistan would target BLA and Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) camps in Afghanistan. It would also exercise strategic options, as India did after the 2008 attacks. The most obvious option was to "open the tap [of terror] in Kashmir", he said, and added that Pakistan should take a leaf out of India's playbook and go on "offensive defence", a term from national security advisor Ajit Doval's lexicon. Read with Pakistan army chief Asim Munir's jingoistic speech two weeks ago, the Pahalgam attack appears to be the first twist of the tap. Why China Is Backing Pakistan Unsurprisingly, China has strongly backed Pakistan. "China has always supported Pakistan in its resolute anti-terrorism actions. As a staunch friend and all-weather strategic partner, China fully understands Pakistan's reasonable security concerns and supports Pakistan in safeguarding its sovereignty and security interests," the Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi was quoted as saying. The Chinese foreign ministry also said that China backs an "impartial investigation" into the incident. Pakistan has sought an international investigation into the Pahalgam attack, which effectively means internationalisation of the Kashmir issue and rolling back India's diplomatic gains since 1971. One element of the Simla Pact is the understanding that Pakistan cannot internationalise any issues with India. The agreement forces both countries to deal with any dispute bilaterally. By threatening to suspend it, Pakistan is trying to pry open a door to the internationalisation of Kashmir. It also changes the status of the international border, known as the Line of Control (LoC). Internal strife in Pakistan is something China is wary of. It knows that an impoverished, densely populated country controlled by the army is a recipe for disaster. The CPEC will never take off unless the unrest in the country abates. Pakistan has now allowed China to deploy private security in the region after resisting for a long time its demand to put boots on the ground to protect its assets and people. The IWT Suspension The suspension of the IWT will likely fuel ongoing protests in Sindh. An ambitious, army-backed $3.3 billion project to build six canals to carry water from the Indus to irrigate dry areas has resulted in widespread protests, as the people of Sindh believe it will exacerbate water shortages in their province. The project revived provincial rivalry between Sindh and Punjab, and protests have brought the country to a standstill. The government has said it would temporarily halt the project. One of the key elements of the IWT is that India is obligated to share hydrological data of the Indus and allow visits by Pakistani experts to inspect river projects on the Indian side. Suspending the IWT would starve Pakistani engineers of crucial data that might be required to design and develop the canals. Yet, none of that would be considered sufficient. Indications are that the government is looking to carry out a military or intelligence operation. Pakistan is expecting and preparing for it, too. India is perhaps looking to lean on its diplomatic strength to manage the fallout of its action. In any case, it doesn't appear to be far away.
India.com
25-04-2025
- Politics
- India.com
Simla Agreement 1972: সিমলা চুক্তি কী? নিয়ন্ত্রণ রেখা নিয়ে কী রয়েছে তাতে?
Videos Simla Agreement 1972: সিমলা চুক্তি কী? নিয়ন্ত্রণ রেখা নিয়ে কী রয়েছে তাতে? | Zee 24 Ghanta Simla Agreement 1972: What Is the Simla Pact? What Does It Say About the Line of Control? Simla Agreement 1972: What Is the Simla Pact? What Does It Say About the Line of Control? | Updated: Apr 25, 2025, 10:15 PM IST Advertisement Simla Agreement 1972: What Is the Simla Pact? What Does It Say About the Line of Control?
Time of India
25-04-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
'India backs terror, persecutes minorities, and exploits Pahalgam-like attacks,' Pakistan's punch goes beyond Simla with severe allegations
India–Pakistan ties nosedived after the Pahalgam terror attack, with Delhi scrapping the Indus Water Treaty and Pakistan suspending the Simla Pact. But Islamabad's response didn't end there—it accused India of exporting terrorism, persecuting minorities, manipulating Kashmir, and staging incidents like Pahalgam to fuel tensions and push its domestic political agenda. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Pakistan statement raises Kashmir, blasts Delhi for 'state oppression' Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads 'Minorities persecuted in India': Pakistan slams Waqf Act India cannot hide its record in Pakistan, says Islamabad Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Was Munir's 'jugular vein' speech a trigger for Pahalgam? India–Pakistan ties are in freefall after the bloodshed in Pahalgam, with both nations locking horns in a high-stakes showdown. Two Kashmiri operatives, allegedly trained across the border, carried out the attack—prompting India to hit back with muscle: suspending the 1960 Indus Water Treaty and sealing off the Integrated Check Post at Attari with immediate Pakistan didn't stay silent. On Thursday, it fired back with a full-blown diplomatic and strategic counterattack—suspending the 1972 Simla Agreement , shutting down its airspace to Indian flights, slamming shut the Wagah border crossing, halting all trade, and warning that any attempt by India to reroute water under the Indus Treaty would be treated as an Act of measures followed an emergency huddle chaired by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, where Pakistan's top brass mapped out a hardline response to India's the boldest punches weren't just the ones making headlines. After the National Security Committee's (NSC) high-level meeting, Pakistan's Prime Minister's Office released a press statement that didn't mince words, laying bare a string of provocative claims and warning shots aimed squarely at National Security Committee, according to Pakistan's Dawn that published the full text of the pres release, said that Kashmir remains an unresolved issue between Pakistan and India, as recognised in several United Nations resolutions. It said Pakistan continues to back the Kashmiri people's right to self-determination. The committee claimed that ongoing Indian state oppression, the scrapping of Kashmir's special status, and political and demographic manipulation have led to a natural backlash from the people of Jammu and Kashmir, fuelling repeated cycles of it also said, "India's systemic persecution of minorities, particularly Muslims, has become more pervasive. Attempts at forced passage of Waqf Bill is the latest effort to marginalize Muslims across India."The press release also said, "India must resist the temptation to exploit such tragic incidents to its advantage and take full responsibility for its failure to provide security to the people."Pakistan said in the release that it strongly condemns terrorism in every form. It said it has been on the front line in the global fight against terrorism and has suffered huge human and economic losses because of it. According to Pakistan, India is trying to create tension along the eastern border to divert attention from Pakistan's efforts to fight terrorism. It also said that without a proper investigation or solid proof, linking Pakistan to the Pahalgam attack is baseless, unreasonable, and makes no sense."India's worn-out narrative of victimhood cannot obfuscate its own culpability in fomenting terrorism on Pakistan's soil, nor can it distract attention from its systematic and state sponsored oppression and human rights violations," the release said it holds undeniable evidence of terrorism backed by India, despite India's claims to the contrary. This includes the confession of Commander Kulbhushan Jadhav, an active officer in the Indian Navy, who, according to Pakistan, stands as proof of India's involvement in state-sponsored in the release, also raised concerns about what it called India's state-sponsored killings or assassination attempts beyond its borders, urging the international community to stay alert to such actions."These heinous acts were carried out in blatant violation of international law as recently exposed by Pakistan along-with various other states with undeniable evidence. Pakistan will pursue all those responsible, planners and perpetrators alike and ensure that justice is served. Any threat to Pakistan's sovereignty and to the security of its people will be met with firm reciprocal measures in all domains," the statement the statement, Pakistan said India should refrain from its habitual "blame game" and what it described as the "cynical staged managed exploitation of incidents like Pahalgam" to advance a narrow political agenda. Pakistan added that such actions only "inflame" tensions and hinder efforts toward peace and stability in the comments come not only as cross-border tensions are intensifying but also at a time when India's passage of Waqf law had stirred unrest in some parts of the country and Pakistan's army chief General Asim Munir's made pollarising comments on religion and a speech loaded with historical grievance and nationalistic fervour, Pakistan's army chief General Asim Munir on Thursday urged overseas Pakistanis to instil in their children a sense of national identity shaped by the country's founding had reported citing a source who suggested the timing of the remarks, coinciding with India's Waqf Act, might be aimed at provoking Indian Muslims and emboldening Pakistan-based terrorist outfits to regroup and destabilise the Indian intelligence officials are examining whether a recent speech by Pakistan's Army chief General Asim Munir served as a catalyst for the deadly terrorist attack in Pahalgam. In that address, Munir had described Kashmir as Pakistan's 'jugular vein,' a statement now being scrutinised for its possible influence on the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) proxy group, The Resistance Front (TRF), which has claimed responsibility for the strike.
Time of India
25-04-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
India Simulates Precision Strikes With Rafales Amid Tensions With Pak Over Kashmir Terror Attack
ACT OF WAR To Hold Back Indus Water: Pakistan Responds To India's Diplomatic Slap, Pauses Simla Pact In a significant escalation following the Pahalgam terror attack, Pakistan's National Security Committee convened to deliberate on India's retaliatory measures. In a tit-for-tat response, Pakistan announced the suspension of all bilateral agreements with India, including the historic Simla Agreement, and the immediate closure of the Wagah border for all cross-border transit. Additionally, Pakistan imposed a ban on all Indian-owned or operated airlines from its airspace and halted all trade activities with India, including via third countries. The SAARC Visa Exemption Scheme for Indian nationals was also suspended, and Indian military diplomats were declared persona non grata. Pakistan further reduced the number of Indian diplomats in Islamabad to 30 and mandated that all Indian nationals, except Sikh pilgrims, leave Pakistan within 48 hours. Pakistan's response underscores the heightened tensions between the two nations, with both sides taking stringent measures in the wake of the deadly attack.#TOIBharat #PahalgamAttack #JKTerrorAttack #India #Pakistan #TerrorResponse #PahalgamRevenge #PahalgamAttack #Pakistan #IndoPakWar #ActOfWar #PakistanResponds #IndusWatersTreaty #SimlaAgreement #PakistanNationalSecurityCommittee #IndoPakRelations2025 #WagahBorderClosure #IndusWatersTreatySuspension #SAARCVisaExemptionSuspended #PakistanAirspaceClosure #IndianDiplomatsExpelled #PakistanTradeSuspensionIndia #KashmirTourismImpact2025 54.8K views | 14 hours ago
