Yesterday, India’s now-popular External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj stepped into the UN General Assembly podium and after a long session of praising her country for its supposed growth, she began to speak about Pakistan.
Swaraj sees a lot of bad things in the country she debates against and asks, “Why is it that today India is a recognised IT superpower in the world, and Pakistan is recognised only as the pre-eminent export factory for terror?” She wants to point out the history of terrorist organizations that have risen their heads from Pakistan. She wants to talk about Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Hijbul Mujahideen and Haqqani Network. She wants to say that over the years, India has produced doctors, engineers and scientists while Pakistan has only exported terrorism.
But she clearly sees too little.
It’s right that many of these cursed terrorist organisations have unfortunately been born in Pakistan, but India was never out of the game. I think if Swaraj wants to see the history of Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Taiba this closely, she should also recongize Bajrang Dal and Abhinav Bharat. And yes, Kashmir; definitely Kashmir. What about the daily massacre of Muslims in the Indian occupied Kashmir and Srinagar where, just two days ago, Indian army opened fire on the civilians of Tral town just after a blast. This is not state-sponsored terrorism in the mind of Swaraj, but terrorist organisations that have no link and nothing to do with the government somehow are.
Moreover, Swaraj wants to debate about the Kashmir matter being solved bilaterally, but she doesn’t (or doesn’t want to) see the continuous bloodshed, barbarism and molestation going on in Srinagar at the hands of the Indian army. She also wants to ignore India paying a deaf ear to the unanimous resolutions of the UN Security Council which mandate a UN-supervised plebiscite to enable the people of occupied Kashmir to freely decide their destiny. In all her efforts of blindly blaming Pakistan for exporting terrorism, she fails to see the efforts the country in question has made in order to get rid of it; for instance, operations like Rah-e-Nijat and Zarb-e-Azb, cleansing 96% of the terrorism from the North Waziristan area.
Swaraj needs to know that during the time her country has “marched ahead consistently without pause” and made “doctors and engineers”, Pakistan hasn’t just sat there and made parathas and chai.
In all these years, Pakistan has gifted Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, Dr Bashir A. Syed, Adeebul Hassan Rizvi, Abdul Sattar Edhi and countless others to the world.
But I won’t blame her for any of this. She just needs another pair of spectacles that enable her to see more clearly, because the existing ones aren’t good enough.
