First Blood
In Dec 13, 2001 six terrorists attacked the Indian Parliament in New Delhi, all except one who got away, were shot dead, but not before they started a chain of events that has brought Pakistan and India to the brink of war. Even before the live TV drama was over, the Indian Government had labelled the terrorists, who had no identification on them, as Pakistanis of Kashmiri origin belonging to Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish Mohammad, two Kashmiri organizations engaged in guerilla warfare against the Indian occupation forces within Indian Held Kashmir. Coincidentally, within the Indian Parliament on that day, the Indian Government was under internal siege on two issues, viz (1) POTO, the Anti-Terrorist Bill that was being opposed tooth and nail not only by the Opposition but some of the BJP’s coalition partners, enough for the government to declare a parliamentary “whip” for its partners, coincidentally during the same week, and (2) the matter of “over-payment” for 3000 coffins ordered from USA by George Fernandes for the Indian Kargil dead during his previous tenure as Defence Minister from which he was forced out because of another scandal, the “Tehelka” scam.
Whether the attackers were Pakistanis, Kashmiris or even Indian convicts, they were conveniently dead and as such could not be identified immediately as per the Indian claim. Among the possibilities, in a desperate bid to divert the issues bedevilling their governance, India requested the Northern Alliance for Pakistani Taliban prisoners to be brought by air by Qanooni as a “gift” from Kabul to New Delhi, and then contrived to have them to “escape” and carry out the attack. One may well ask why were they brought to India in the first place? That India blamed ISI was no surprise, the only things they have not blamed ISI in the last decade is for the rat plague in New Delhi in 1994 and for Rabri Devi being elected as CM of Bihar. India has a history of being quick on the gun to blame Pakistan for its own “dirty tricks”, “Ganga” being blown up in Lahore by Indian RAW in 1971 is once concrete example. A few weeks ago an Indian Airlines aircraft remained “hijacked” for 4 hours before it was discovered that the flight had no hijackers, they had probably missed the flight but no one told the cockpit or the cabin crew. The cockpit crew thought the “hijackers” were in the cabin, the cabin crew thought likewise they were in the cockpit. In the meantime senior Indian officials, including a junior minister, told the media that the hijackers were Pakistani since they had heard their “Urdu” conversation over radio. Of such stuff are “facts” created to scandalize Pakistan.
