By IANS,
New Delhi : Terming the organisers of the Mumbai and Kabul attacks as clients and creations of the ISI, India Thursday condemned the “licence” that banned terrorist outfits like Jamaat-ud-Dawa continue to enjoy in Pakistan.
“We have seen reports that representatives of terrorist groups Jaish-e-Muhammad, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Jamat-ud-Dawa participated in a public meeting yesterday at Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir,” external affairs ministry spokesperson Vishnu Prakash said here in response to a question.
“No effort was made by the authorities to curb the activities of these groups,” he said. “We strongly condemn the license that banned terrorist organisations continue to enjoy in territory under Pakistan’s control,” the spokesperson stressed.
New Delhi’s pointed condemnation of Pakistan’s insincerity in curbing anti-India militant outfits came amid media reports that Pakistan’s internal probe was trying to pin the blame for the Mumbai mayhem on a Bangladesh-based radical Islamist outfit and other Islamic groups active in the region.
India also underscored its mounting anger at the lack of response from Pakistan to the 26/11 dossier it presented a month ago. Home Minister P. Chidamabaram said there was no reply from Islamabad as yet.
However, Foreign Secretary Shivshanakr Menon sought to expose Pakistan’s diversionary tactics by asserting that the bombings on the Indian mission in Kabul and the Mumbai strikes were planned and launched from Pakistan and underlined that the organisers were “creations of the ISI”.
Nearly a month after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Pakistan’s official agencies were “complicit” in the Mumbai attacks, Menon pointed a finger at the ISI’s involvement in the attacks.
“In each case, the perpetrators planned, trained and launched their attacks from Pakistan, and the organisers were – and remain – clients and creations of the ISI,” he said while alluding to the bombing of the Indian mission in Kabul and the Mumbai attacks.
Seeking to intensify international pressure on Pakistan over the Mumbai terror strikes, Menon also urged the world to discontinue arms sale to Pakistan which is unrelated to anti-terror operations and underlined that any such aid is like “giving whiskey to an alcoholic”.
“For India, a stable Pakistan at peace with itself is a desirable goal. We need a peaceful periphery in our own interest, and will work with all those in Pakistan and the international community who further that goal,” Menon told Institut Francais des Relations Internationales (IFRI), a leading French think tank, in Paris Wednesday.
“Given the fragile and unfinished nature of the polity beside us, there is much that the international community can do to help,” Menon said while underscoring that “the epicentre of international terrorism” lay in Pakistan.
“For instance, arms sales to Pakistan totally unrelated to the fight against terrorism or extremism are like whiskey to an alcoholic, a drug reinforcing an addiction, skewing the internal political balance, and making the consolidation of democracy more difficult,” he stressed.
Menon is in Paris for annual Foreign Office consultations between the two countries, official sources said here. Menon held talks with diplomatic adviser to the French President Jean-David Levitte and senior French diplomats on a host of bilateral and global issues.
He also reiterated that there was no response from Pakistan to 26/11 dossier presented by India a month ago, a point reinforced in New Delhi by Home Minister P. Chidamabaram Thursday.
“Two months after the Mumbai attacks, and one month after we presented a dossier of evidence linking the attacks to elements in Pakistan, we still await a response from the Pakistani authorities, and prevarication continues,” Menon said.
He also drew the attention of the French to interlinked problems of “terrorism, clandestine nuclear proliferation, extremism and radicalism” that had their source in Pakistan.
“We, in India, are next to the epicentre of international terrorism in Pakistan,” he said. India has “directly suffered the consequences of linkages and relationships among terrorist organisations, their support structures, official sponsors and funding mechanisms, which transcend national borders but operate within them,” he said without naming Pakistan.
“Any compromise with such forces, howsoever pragmatic or opportune it might appear momentarily, only encourages them,” Menon said.
He also linked the instability and violence in Afghanistan to “the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan”.