By sneaking 250 metres across the LoC in the the Poonch sector on Monday and beheading two Indian jawans, the Pakistan Army has not only escalated tension between India and Pakistan but also nipped in the bud any hope of the revival of the stalled dialogue any time soon.
The incident comes within days of steel magnate Sajjan Jindal meeting Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif at Murree, a hill resort near Islamabad, last week, triggering speculation that the Indian businessman’s mission to Pakistan might have been part of ‘Track II’ diplomacy.
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The Pakistani media went to town, saying Jindal had discussed the possibility of a meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Sharif in Kazakhstan on the margins of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in June. The Indian side, however, preferred to remain quiet, neither denying nor confirming these reports. Jindal, who has a close personal relationship with Sharif, was said to be instrumental in arranging Modi’s brief visit to Lahore in December 2015.
Pakistan observers in India said it is quite clear that the Sharif-led civlian government is not in command in Islamabad and it is Chief of the Army Staff, Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, who is calling the shots. Though Sharif got a breather in the ‘Panama leaks’ corruption case from the country’s Supreme Court recently, his position has only weakened further and he finds himself unable to stand up to the Army leadership on any issue of critical importance, especially in the context of India.
Sharif had cut a sorry figure on Saturday when he removed Syed Tariq Fatemi, his key aide on foreign affairs, in the wake of an inquiry committee report on the leak in the Dawn newspaper about what transpired at a high-level security meet convened by the Pakistani premier in October last year following the surgical strikes by India on terrorist launch pads in Jammu and Kashmir.
Soon after Sharif took action against Fatemi, the Army spokesman rejected it, saying it was incomplete. Observers said this clearly reflected the breakdown of communication between the civilian and the army leaderships, the two most critical arms of the Pakistani establishment.
‘’Can you ever expect the Army spokesman in India rejecting a decision of the Prime Minister and calling it incomplete? It can only happen in a State where the Army is more powerful than the civilian government,’’ an official here noted.
on Kulbhushan Jadhav, many in Indian official circles believe the civilian leadership was hardly in the know of the whereabouts or health of the former Indian Navy officer, who has been awarded death sentence by a Pakistan military court on concocted charges.
Incidentally, the latest incident of beheading of the Indian jawans came just a day after the Pakistan Army chief visited the LoC and said Pakistan would continue to support the ‘struggle’ of Kashmiris.
