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Highlighting India's case
INDIA'S COMPELLING CASE about a systematic terrorist threat to its national interest is being unnecessarily undermined by the unseemly and wholly avoidable controversy involving Pakistan over the question of supportive evidence. Pakistan has conspicuously taken some punitive action against the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), two groups that India blames for last month's terrorist assault on Parliament House in New Delhi. Yet, in a combative style, Islamabad has also been demanding that New Delhi produce credible evidence to prove its charges that terrorist offences have been committed on India's soil by the impugned groups and individuals that operate within Pakistan's territorial jurisdiction. Islamabad's diplomatic refrain is that it cannot be expected to go beyond what it has already done in the absence of any clinching evidence from India. The subtext is that Pakistan's President, Pervez Musharraf, has so far taken some proactive steps against the leaders and assets of the JeM and the LeT because such action is called for under Islamabad's domestic laws themselves. For any further crackdown, it is said, New Delhi must satisfy Pakistan about the existence of fine judicial-grade evidence against the groups and individuals accused of harming India's interests. It is in this context that the Vajpayee administration has only itself to blame for its halting responses to an ingenious diplomatic challenge that Pakistan has mounted.
India's best bet is to go on a prudent counter-offensive of the diplomatic kind. It will be a pity if the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, and his associates were to botch a persuasive case through some negative diplomacy. Not in doubt on the wider international stage is the reality that India is a victim of the barbaric tactics of some high-profile external terrorist groups. It is significant that it is in this context that the U.S. has come down heavily against the JeM and the LeT specifically on the basis of the evidence which, according to Washington, has been released by India itself to link these groups to last month's terrorist attack on its Parliament complex. Yet, if New Delhi still finds itself on the defensive as regards the ``evidence'' issue, the reason is that the Vajpayee administration is inexplicably resiling from a more productive course of action. New Delhi can and must place the facts before the United Nations Security Council in the context of its Resolution 1373 which mandates the member-states of the global organisation to combat all forms of terrorism, whatever be the motivations at work, and to cooperate with each other in meeting terrorist challenges.
For India, a truly creative diplomacy is to adopt a two-pronged approach to highlight its case as a victim of terror and seek remedies. In addition to internationalising the evidence about the involvement of Pakistan-based terrorist groups in the attack on India's Parliament House, New Delhi should engage Islamabad bilaterally to try and secure the extradition of the 20 identified fugitives. Any such bilateral engagement will obviously centre on such questions as the admissibility of extradition demands in the skewed India-Pakistan context besides the relevance of standard practices of international law in such cases. The list of 20 names that India has recently given Pakistan, apparently by citing the related evidence as provided over a period of time, is a compendium of terrorist offences and criminal activities spanning a decade. However, the terrorist outrage in New Delhi on December 13 is the first major cognisable crime in terms of the U.N. Security Council's Resolution 1373, which was passed to help the U.S. ride the shockwaves of last September's heinous acts of terror on its homeland. So, any attempt by New Delhi to invoke Resolution 1373 can conceivably enable it to overcome the pressure from Pakistan on the ``evidence'' issue and, more importantly, to capture an indisputable moral resonance.
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