Pathankot will end the way 26/11 did

Apart from soothing words from Pakistan leader Nawaz Sharif following the Pakistani terrorist attack on the Pathankot Air Force base last January, there was little to suggest that Islamabad even accepted that the attackers were from Pakistan, leave alone accept the specific Indian charge that they were from Jaish-e-Mohammed, an anti-India jihadi group created by the ISI.

The Pakistanis said flat out that their own investigations showed that the mobile numbers of dead terrorists handed over to them by the Indians were not registered in Pakistan. The implied suggestion was that the attackers were not from Pakistan.

But India remained solicitous of Pakistan and unmindful of its reservation, and accepted Islamabad’s optics of taking JeM chief Masood Azhar into custody for a few days (without charging him). New Delhi gave the country to understand that Islamabad was cooperating and was serious about investigating the Pathankot case.

It was in this spirit that New Delhi decided at the highest level to allow a joint investigation team from Pakistan to come over, discuss the nature of the Indian investigation with the National Investigation Agency (NIA), and even visit Pathankot, the scene of the crime, including the airbase, on Tuesday.

Defence minister Manohar Parrikar and Union home minister Rajnath Singh indicated that they were not in on the move. But it was evident that soon after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s sudden fly-in into Lahore on Christmas Day to greet his counterpart on his birthday, India would do anything to keep up appearances of a friendly mood towards India coming over Pakistan.

This came under serious question on Tuesday with Pakistan media issuing government-inspired stories that India was not cooperating with the visiting JIT team from Pakistan. A leading television station and a prominent English newspaper asked why the service record details, bank account numbers, and phone numbers of the families of the Pathankot SP Salwinder Singh and others, were not shared with the Pakistani investigators.

The direction in which all this is going is clear enough. A time will come, sooner or later, that Islamabad will suggest that since it received insufficient cooperation at the scene of the crime, it will be hard put to take a properly investigated case before its judiciary. We are once again moving along coordinates similar to the ones in the Pakistani probe in the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, which ended up nowhere.

Many here have criticised the Modi government for permitting an ISI man in the JIT to visit Pathankot, since it is the ISI that runs the proxy wars against India. We hope the government will agree to resume the foreign secretary talks with Pakistan after seeing how the JIT visit has gone. Islamabad’s official stance must be subjected to careful scrutiny.