Pathankot attacks: China aid sought to get UN ban on JeM chief Masood Azhar

New Delhi: After the terror attack in Pathankot, the Narendra Modi government is all set to use diplomacy with China to get it to back India’s pitch for a UN Security Council ban on Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Maulana Masood Azhar, declaring him a global terrorist and placing him alongside most-wanted Lashkar-e-Tayyaba founder Hafiz Saeed , Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi and underworld fugitive don Dawood Ibrahim.

“The government is preparing to draw afresh China’s attention to the mounting evidence against Masood in the wake of the terror attack in Pathankot,” top government sources said. The MEA is likely to present the latest evidence and assessment on Maulana Masood Azhar on the Pathankot attack to China to urge it to drop its opposition to the UN declaring him a terrorist, intelligence sources said.

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India wants sanctions not only against Azhar but also Abdul Rehman Makki of Jamaat-ud Dawa and Azam Cheema of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. Besides, national security adviser Ajit Doval is also likely to take it up with his Chinese counterpart at an appropriate stage.

Union home minister Rajnath Singh said Tuesday that India had “no reason to distrust” Pakistan’s assurances that it will take effective action on the inputs given by India about the perpetrators of the Pathankot attack. “The Pakistan government has said it will take effective action. I think we should wait,” Mr Singh said. The foreign secretary-level talks with Pakistan that were due to be held from Friday are all set to be somewhat delayed.

The home minister told reporters that since the Pakistan government had given an assurance to India, “there is no reason to distrust (avishvaas) them (Pakistan) so early”.

China has so far, reportedly at Pakistan’s behest, been blocking India’s attempts for a ban on Masood Azhar. In 2010, India’s request to impose sanctions on Masood and the two others was put on “‘technical hold” by China, which sought “more information and evidence” that these three terrorists were actually “linked to Al Qaeda”.

Once New Delhi manages to convince Beijing, India may make a fresh move before the UN Security Council to get Maulana Masood Azhar declared a global terrorist. The Masood case is expected to put to the test the bonhomie between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and China’s President Xi Jingping during Mr Modi’s China visit. Masood Azhar was one of the three terrorists freed by India in December 1999 in exchange for the hostages of the Indian Airlines plane (Flight IC-814) hijacked to Kandahar, when the previous NDA government under Atal Behari Vajpayee was in power. It is reliably learnt that the Modi government wants to pull out all the stops to ensure a crackdown on the Jaish founder.

It may be recalled that the earlier UPA government had also been actively pursuing Masood’s case with China, seeking its support to proscribe the three Pakistan-based terrorists under UN Security Council resolutions 1267, 1373 and 1540, related to sanctions against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, but to no avail. Dawood was put on the UN sanctions list in 2003, Saeed in 2008 and Lakhvi in 2008.