6 days ago
- Politics
- New Indian Express
Pakistan's perfidy front and centre in foreign capitals
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.
