Daily Times

In a telephonic conversation with President George W Bush, President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday said that the three countries would “cooperate with each other on the Mumbai attack investigation as well as on counter-terrorism in general”. President Zardari has reiterated Pakistan’s determination not to let “any non-state actors use its territory for launching attacks on other countries”.
By all accounts the moment of tension between India and Pakistan has abated. So it’s time now to get to the nitty-gritty of finding out what happened. The two sides have versions of the event that differ, with Pakistan demanding that evidence gathered by India be produced to allow it to act in its jurisdiction. This means there is no way the two positions can be reconciled except with the undertaking of a joint investigation. And this effort will succeed only if both governments show sympathy for each other’s position and take the probe forward in all sincerity.
The joint effort is all the more necessary because of a number of “unofficial” stories flying around. If investigators from India and Pakistan don’t get together in a joint commission and share information, these stories are going to dominate the scene and highlight the two irreconcilable assessments of a single event. This is how conflict is born and is nurtured by states at odds with each other. The Indian and Pakistani publics will be the consumers of these clashing narratives and this will damage the prospects of normalisation so essential in these economically difficult times.
A Wall Street Journal story yesterday “revealed” that a Pakistani investigative team had “unearthed substantive links between the gunmen who attacked Mumbai in November and the banned Lashkar-e-Tayba (LT) group”; and that an LT leader, Zarrar Shah, captured in a raid early this month in Azad Kashmir, “had confessed to the group’s involvement in the attack”. The rest of details tend to confirm the Indian version, while the spokesman of the prime minister of Pakistan has rejected the rumour that the prime minister had issued any statement about Zarrar Shah.
Unfortunately there are other stories contesting Indian and Pakistani versions. A London Observer investigation had revealed earlier in the month that the lone terrorist captured in Mumbai was indeed an inhabitant of a Punjab village, Faridkot. This story was followed by another investigation by a Pakistani TV channel which confirmed the findings; but since then other variants are emerging from Faridkot, with local inhabitants aggressively denying that Ajmal Kasab or his parents ever lived there. The official Pakistani version is that Ajmal Kasab was not on NADRA record and no ID card containing his particulars was ever issued. To muddy the waters further, there are dubious reports that an FBI team has reportedly gone to Faridkot and said that Ajmal Kasab was not connected to the village in any way. But no one including Islamabad seems to confirm or deny the FBI “finding”.
There are other worrisome factors that India and Pakistan should consider. Unless they get together on the job of investigation, stories based on historic Indo-Pak enmity will proliferate and confuse the issue. A lawyer in Pakistan has announced that Ajmal Kasab and his fellow terrorists were actually individuals picked up by India from Nepal and kept under wraps for some time before being used for Pakistan’s “entrapment” in a concocted attack in Mumbai. The Nepalese ambassador in Pakistan has denied the story which could be a part of the myth popularised in Pakistan that India itself had done the Mumbai attack.
The two sides have to come to the table with whatever evidence is available and then decide how to proceed further. The baseline of this joint effort will be the UN Security Council Sanctions Committee resolution following the Mumbai attack and Pakistan’s subsequent action of banning the Jama’at-ud Dawa charity organisation. The effort will succeed only if Islamabad and New Delhi make special efforts not to queer the pitch by being unfriendly with each other. Hostile statements must cease at the political level so that the two bureaucracies don’t read their instructions in them. Also, joint investigations would require that India do away with the “pause” in the dialogue framework.
The pressure of the two media fighting their own war should be ignored. The Indian media challenges the UPA government to “respond” to “Pakistan’s latest aggression”; the Pakistani media accuses the PPP government of being weak-kneed and “dysfunctional” and has “gone to the people” with the line that Pakistan should be ready for war with India “if that is what India wants”. The saddest aspect of this clash of the two media is that both are guilty of convincing their audiences that the projected war “can be won”. g

Fear of New Year ‘revelry’

Fear of revelry preceded the New Year’s Eve this year too. One Urdu newspaper published a “predictive” story of “merry-making”. In a hostile depiction of what might happen, reference was made to sharab-o-kabab (wine and kabab) because kabab becomes dangerous when associated with sharab. There was also the routine reference to titliyan (butterflies) which meant decorated women which the men will enjoy on New Year’s Eve. In the posh localities, “jaam (cup) will strike against jaam and much fun will be had”.
What actually happened was different. Some youngsters came out and danced harmlessly on the roads of Lahore while police worried about mishaps. In Karachi youngsters were not allowed on the beach. They complained to the TV channels that Pakistan paid no attention to the citizens’ rights to have a good time. But the police were probably right in thinking that revelry by the seaside might lead to accidents and crime. Some boys in Karachi from Chaman in Balochistan were unfortunately shot by the police as suspected terrorists.
People want to let their hair down on two occasions, Independence Day and New Year’s Eve, but because of a lack of culture of tolerance and because of terrorism, they are usually spoiled as festivals. Nor, unfortunately, are youngsters always disciplined enough to make these occasions collectively successful. *