EDITORIAL: The statement seemed to have come straight out of the office of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi who rode to power claiming to teach Pakistan a lesson. Instead it was an important member of the PML-N, former National Assembly speaker Ayaz Sadiq, who used a 20-month-old event to denigrate the country standing on the floor of the assembly. He claimed that Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi came, accompanied by the Army chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, to brief parliamentary leaders on the standoff with India "with his legs trembling and sweat on the forehead" to beg "let him [captured Indian pilot Abhinandan] go back now or else India would attack at 9 pm", adding that "no attack was imminent, they only wanted to capitulate and send Abhinandan back." To say the least, it is sad he would so shamelessly misrepresent the facts to please his party's supreme leader Nawaz Sharif who has been launching verbal salvos with comparable content from the safety of his London refuge to deflect attention from the massive corruption cases he faces back home in Pakistan.
Anyone familiar with the events of February 2019 knows that when in the aftermath of the Pulwama incident India threatened to attack Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan had warned, "we won't think, we will retaliate." On February 26, Indian jets dropped bombs in a deserted Balakot area in KP claiming to have destroyed "the biggest training camp" of Jaish-e-Mohammad. (Independent observes, including foreign journalists who visited the scene reported no evidence of that claim.) As promised, retaliatory action was swift and severe. Pakistan Air Force planes bombed 3 targets across the Line of Control in broad daylight, downing in the process two Indian jets, one of which fell on Pakistani territory. Its pilot was taken into custody. That Pakistan emerged victorious from this episode was indirectly acknowledged by PM Modi when he averred that the entire nation is saying that if India had Rafale jets today, the outcome of the recent incidents (with Pakistan) would have been different. Clearly, Islamabad had acted from a position of strength when it decided to return the pilot to give peace a chance - a gesture widely appreciated. Had the government been in panic, as portrayed by the former speaker of National Assembly, it would not have gone for political consensus. In any event, the decision to take the parliamentary leaders into confidence in a time of crisis signified respect for Parliament. When it comes to issues pertaining to national security all sides are expected to act with a sense of responsibility rather than advancing enemy narrative as done by the Nawaz League leader. He has since been trying to backtrack, saying his statement was distorted by Indian media. No amount of explaining on his part can negate the truth contained in a video recording of his words.
Unsurprisingly, the quarters his statement actually was aimed at have reacted sharply. ISPR spokesman Maj Gen Babar Iftikhar called a hurried media conference on Thursday to put the record straight "after a statement" that, he said, "tried to distort history related to national security matters." He termed as "unfortunate and misleading" to link Abhinandan's release to anything other than "mature response" of a responsible state. In an obvious reference to Indian media having had a field day reporting Ayaz Sadiq's malicious assertions, he said, it was an attempt to make Pakistan's "clear and decisive victory controversial and diminish India's pain of defeat and humiliation". It is difficult to quarrel with his summation that such a narrative hurts national security, or that the fact remains that "we gave them a bloody nose and it is still hurting [them]." In separate statements, the Foreign Office and Federal Information Minister Shibli Faraz expressed similar sentiments. Ayaz Sadiq may have managed to please his party boss, but in so doing he has caused anger and dismay to all Pakistanis. The other parties in the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) now staging anti-government rallies would be wise to distance themselves from the PML-N narrative as it could hold undesirable consequences for the democratic project.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2020
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