Accusing Pakistan of being a “nursery of global terrorism”, India has asked Pakistan once again to stop all cross-border terrorism as promised and dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism still intact on its soil. While the fragile political fabric of states in India’s neighbourhood is a source of continuing anxiety to New Delhi, Pakistan remains a nursery of global terrorism, said visiting Indian Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee in a talk at Harvard University in Boston on Monday. “Post 9/11, Pakistan has reportedly helped the US to fight terrorism along its western border with Afghanistan. But it has done precious little to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism on its eastern border with India,” he said in his talk on ‘India’s Strategic Perspective’. India has repeatedly stated that, in order to proceed with the ongoing peace-process between the two countries, Pakistan must implement the solemn assurances it has given to stop all cross-border terrorism, and the Indian defence minister said that “this has not yet happened”. If Pakistan claims to be a frontline state in the global war against terrorism, then it must do much more to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism still intact on its soil, Mukherjee said welcoming the recent Havana accord between the two countries to set up an institutional mechanism to tackle cross-border terrorism.
The rise of religious fundamentalism and terrorism is today one of the gravest security challenges to states, economies, peoples and democratic polities, he said adding, “It has been starkly etched in our memory by the recent Mumbai blasts, the London, Madrid and Bali bombings, and of course, the traumatic terrorist attack on the US five years ago.” Putting terrorism at the top of India’s six principal security challenges, Mukherjee said India had suffered the most gruesome and repeated acts of terror since the late 1970s – first in Punjab, then in Jammu and Kashmir, and in recent years in many other parts of the country.
Mukherjee said that the Mumbai blasts of 1993 were the original act of mass terrorism. IndiaÂ’s places of worship, symbols of rapid economic growth, prestigious centres of learning, popular shopping complexes and symbols of vibrant democracy had all been systematically targeted, he added.
While in most parts of the world, terrorism is perpetrated by non-state actors, in India it is sponsored and supported by state agencies from a hostile neighbourhood, Mukherjee said obviously referring to Pakistan. The second challenge in his view was that India, which has had to fight three wars on its western borders and one in the north since independence, continues to face a proxy war from across its western border, he said in another obvious reference to Pakistan. “Its unresolved territorial and boundary issues with neighbours persist” he noted.