Sleepless from overnight flights the next morning, I reached South Block for a series of meetings, trying my best to sidestep media stakeouts. To the amusement of my colleagues, I was thirty minutes late for my first meeting. I had forgotten to switch from Pakistani to Indian time.
In Delhi, after meeting with various agencies, I had revised some of my initial assessments. Pulwama was in all likelihood a small operation gone out of control, where the suicide bomber lucked out in getting an unprotected target in a convoy of vehicles. The general assessment of several security experts was that this was an operation that had become bigger than was originally planned: even Pakistan’s agencies had been caught flat-footed by the Pulwama action—some said, they were internally trying to blame the Jaish for overstepping the brief and not executing it professionally enough. Investigations would confirm a year later that it was a meticulously planned operation of the JeM that had met with unexpected success.
When I got to South Block, walking past a battery of cameras, I joined meetings discussing options. Particularly diplomatic options. The steps taken by the Cabinet Committee on Security had included withdrawal of the most favoured nation treatment, a customs duty of 200 percent on Pakistani goods (that would effectively end imports), and a halt to trade at the Wagah border. But this was just the beginning.
A host of other ideas were mooted, to scale down our engagement with Pakistan. Stop the Samjhauta Express, stop the Lahore bus service, defer the BSF border talks, defer the Kartarpur corridor talks. And then there were the familiar proposals being bandied about in policy debates and by pundits writing in the media. Stop issuing visas. Stop honouring SAARC visas. Cease cross-LoC trade. Disallow travel of Indians to Pakistan. Suspend f lights between the countries. How hard it was to build trust, I thought. And how easy to break it. All the confidence-building measures planned, negotiated, and implemented over years in this difficult relationship, could be slashed off on a yellow notepad in minutes.
South Block was in crisis management mode and I was part of the crisis team, trying to guess Pakistan’s next moves. I was in constant touch with my team in Islamabad that was led by Gaurav Ahluwalia who was reporting continuously on internal developments within Pakistan.
An intense phase of diplomacy began, for sharing India’s outrage with the world. Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale’s day included briefings for envoys of twenty-five countries—including the UN P5—the US, UK, China, Russia, and France—on 15 February, to talk of the role of the Jaish in the attack and on the use of terrorism as an instrument of Pakistan’s state policy. Apart from the P5, Gokhale met diplomats of key countries in Europe and Asia, such as Germany, South Korea, Japan, and Australia. Indian envoys were being asked to repeat these messages in global capitals. Countries from across the globe were condemning the incident and sharing India’s outrage.
Pakistan was soon reacting to this diplomatic offensive. The foreign office had summoned India’s acting high commissioner in Islamabad to reject ‘baseless allegations made by India’. Prime Minister Imran Khan waited a few days before reacting, using the army’s talking points of stout denial of any Pakistani involvement. In an address on 19 February, he claimed: ‘This is Naya Pakistan…. If you have any actionable intelligence that a Pakistani is involved, give it to us. I guarantee you that we will take action…’.
In South Block, we had drafted a comprehensive response, aimed at Pakistan, but also reminding the world that it was ‘a well-known fact that Jaish-e-Mohammad and its leader Masood Azhar are based in Pakistan’. Also, proof had been provided to Pakistan on the Mumbai attacks, but ‘the case has not progressed for the last more than 10 years’. The international community was well acquainted with the fact, India said, ‘that Pakistan is the nerve center of terrorism.’ The MEA statement also called out the insinuation that ‘India’s response to the terrorist attack is determined by the forthcoming General Election. India rejects this false allegation. India’s democracy is a model for the world which Pakistan would never understand.’
As the Saudi crown prince and prime minister MBS travelled from Pakistan to India on 21 February, PM Modi shared India’s anguish with him. He added publicly that punishing terrorists and their supporters was important and that Saudi Arabia and India ‘have shared views about this.’
India decided to prepare a dossier of evidence on how Pakistan and the JeM were complicit in the terrorist attack in Pulwama. UN diplomacy was activated, based on the dossier, through four of the UN Security Council members, i.e., the P5 minus China. France was prepared to propose a UN resolution to corner the JeM and Pakistan. Both the UN and the EU were being approached to designate Azhar a terrorist, already so designated by the US in 2001. Even Pakistan had in the past indicted Azhar when the pressure had become unbearable in the Musharraf years; Azhar had technically been detained for a year in 2002. India was now also advocating Financial Action Task Force (FATF)-like stiff anti-terror financing conditions on Pakistan at the IMF, where Imran Khan’s government was negotiating a critical loan to save its sinking economy.
India suggested to Japan that it might consider postponing the visit by Foreign Minister Qureshi, or if he did show up, highlighting the terrorism issue. Qureshi eventually had to cancel his Tokyo trip. The idea was to work towards calling out Pakistan globally as a terrorist sponsor, rather than just ‘isolating’ it, as was the initial rhetoric. Indian diplomats were suggesting to countries engaging with Pakistan to put the issue of terrorism on top of the agenda. On the Indus Water Treaty, while the familiar instinct was to abrogate it, the decision that was finally taken was that no data would be given to Pakistan beyond the treaty requirements. Forty-eight agreements were now being examined for possible suspension. Proposed confidence-building talks between the BSF and Coast Guard were called off.
Pakistan’s military establishment seemed jittery about the impending Indian action. They decided on some nominal moves against the JeM to fend off the pressure. They were worried Azhar would be picked up or targeted by an Indian or US agency. He had been moved from Bahawalpur to Islamabad, deeper into the protective embrace of the Pak ISI.
I continued my briefings of the CCS and called separately on each of its members, including the PM and the NSA; each seemed keen to hear my assessments at this time, particularly my perspectives on Pakistan’s internal conditions. I did share an assessment with the political leadership that the diplomatic space for manoeuvre was limited and that other options needed to be considered, particularly in the context of the surgical strikes of 2016. Pakistan was bracing itself for such action by India but did not know when and in what shape it would come. The PM asked me when I was scheduled to leave for Islamabad; I told him it would be in a week or so. He listened to me attentively, asked questions, but did not let on what India was contemplating by way of a response to the terror attack.
India’s security analysts had been pointing out that the Jaish had become the preferred ‘sword arm’ of the army, instead of the LeT, in the years following the 2008 Mumbai attacks. The degree of damage that the Pulwama operation had inflicted was unexpected for the Pakistan Army. An assessment I heard was that Bajwa may not have known about the specific operation, but it could have been cleared by the DG ISI.
India’s army chief General Bipin Rawat told me that the retaliatory attack that India was planning would be much bigger than the surgical strikes of 2016 and it was coming soon enough. I decided not to share this information in the other part of South Block, thinking it best that the diplomatic planning went ahead without specific knowledge of ‘kinetic’ operations. Rawat agreed with the assessment that his Pakistani counterpart, Bajwa, was broadly interested in peace with India, but often let the ISI set the broad directions of policy. He felt that the Pakistani corps commanders were not too happy with the Bajwa doctrine, since it seemed to be diluting traditional postures and that affected morale.
This excerpt from Ajay Basaria’s book ‘Anger Management: The Troubled Diplomatic Relationship between India and Pakistan’ has been published with permission from Rupa Publications.