[DAWN] IT was a startling assault, the first in over a decade, in Indian Punjab 1.) Little Orphan Annie's bodyguard
2.) A province of Pakistain ruled by one of the Sharif brothers
3.) A province of India. It is majority (60 percent) Sikh and Hindoo (37 percent), which means it has relatively few Moslem riots....
and in an area intrinsically linked to the bitterness of Partition and a more recent fraught communal history.
Yet, the terrorist attack in Gurdaspur -- just a short distance from the working boundary and the Line of Control -- almost immediately became about Pakistain and the ever-present tensions between the two countries.
There was no evidence offered; indeed, even the identity of the terrorists, one of whom is believed to have been captured alive, was not known by the time the Indian media and some -- though fortunately, only some -- Indian officials began to blame Pakistain and the ISI here.
Of course, if caution and common sense do not prevail often enough in India, neither do they in Pakistain.
As the Indian news cycle was dominated by coverage of the 12-hour-long stand-off in Gurdaspur and shrill accusations against Pakistain, the ISPR here chose to release footage recorded by an allegedly Indian drone -- really just a commercially available so-called quadcopter with a camera -- that had been shot down by the Pak border forces.
It was left to the Foreign Office to issue a condemnation of the Gurdaspur attack and to express sympathy for the victims and their families.
A familiar tale, then: India blames Pakistain for any terrorist attack on its soil, even before anyone on the ground could possibly know who was behind the attack and for what reason; the Pak state zeroes in on Indian military escalations along the Working Boundary and LoC to emphasise that the Indian state is not interested in peace.
I guess they pretend not to notice that the cross-border fire from Pakistain is followed anywhere from three to ten days later by a shootout with terrorists. To outsiders the sequence looks stupid and pointless but that's probably because we're not geniuses like the ISI masterminds.
Already, the prime ministerial meeting in Ufa, Russia, appears to have been eclipsed. The Ufa joint statement though zeroed in on the major -- and most immediate -- impediment to the eventual normalisation of ties: the terror threat in the region and the lack of coordination between Pakistain and India when it comes to identifying and eliminating the threats wherever they may be found.