Decoding Sushma Swaraj’s UN Speech: Like India, Pakistan too is an IT superpower
External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, while calling India an “IT superpower” in her address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, forgot to mention that Pakistan too is an “IT superpower”! The only difference is that in the context of India, “IT” stands for information technology, but in Pakistan's case, “IT” means international terrorism.
Swaraj, in her frontal assault on the country from the UN podium, took Pakistan's name and castigated it for the innumerable sins of omission and commission it had committed with the following verbal missiles:
1. We set up IITs, IIMs, AIIMS and ISRO. What did Pakistan make? They set up LeT, JeM, Haqqani network and Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist camps.
2. We gave birth to doctors and scientists, Pakistan gave birth to jihadis and terrorists. Your jihadis are not just killing Indians but also (those of) other nations.
3. I want to tell people of Pakistan the money you are spending on terrorism, you should spend it on your people.
What the external affairs minister's decisive takedown of Pakistan means
1. Forget India's presence at the South Asian Association Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit this year too, as our relations with Pakistan, the host country, continue to remain in the dog house at a time when the latter would be preparing to send formal invites to member countries;
2. India is in a poll mode and the Narendra Modi government has virtually slammed shut the door of peace talks on Pakistan as it wants to convey a tough image to the people and also because the Modi government may hold elections around or before the next UNGA meeting in September 2018 if the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wins Gujarat Assembly polls this year end. An important point made by Swaraj was her appeal to the international community to stop paying lip service to the cause of fighting terrorism by formally passing the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism (CCIT) in the ongoing session of UNGA.
The proposed treaty — which intends to criminalise all forms of international terrorism and deny terrorists, their financiers and supporters access to funds, arms, and safe havens — has been hanging fire for more than two decades.
Going by the current dynamics and complete polarisation among member states on the definition of terrorism, it is highly unlikely that Swaraj's wish would come true in the foreseeable future. This is because a terrorist for one country is a martyr for another. This has been so for centuries and shall remain so for the time to come.
However, the discussions on CCIT have yielded three separate protocols that aim to tackle terrorism: International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings, adopted on December 15, 1997; International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism, adopted on December 9, 1999; and International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism, adopted on April 13, 2005.
Sushma Swaraj’s repeated mocking of Pakistan and her unusual aggression isn’t going to change the India-Pakistan dynamics or Pakistan. On the contrary, the maximalist position taken by Swaraj is likely to trigger a maximalist response from Pakistan in an equal and opposite reaction.
The Pakistani response may manifest itself, most probably, in terms of unprovoked firing and shelling by its troops along the Line of Control (LoC). That’s because even the terrorists, long nurtured by Pakistan's state actors, have — in many ways — stopped listening to Islamabad and are pushing their own agenda.
This is evident by the fact that most acts of terrorism in India perpetrated by Pakistan-backed terrorists are of late confined only to Jammu and Kashmir.
Also read: What I learnt about my life, every time death took someone away from me