JOIN USWe are at a stage where we do not need further evidence of the involvement of official Pakistani agencies, specifically the ISI, in terrorist activities in India. India has conveyed such evidence to Pakistan, and has drawn the world’s attention to it but Pakistan has always ignored or denied it. More evidence has now come in the testimony of terror operative David Coleman Headley in a Chicago court which indicts the ISI for the Mumbai terrorist attack of 2008. Headley is the star government witness in the trial of Tahavvur Rana in the Mumbai attack case and he has plea bargained for a lighter sentence. His revelations under oath carry credibility and they confirm all the charges made by India and present more details in their support.
Headley has stated that he reported to a serving ISI officer called Major Iqbal before the attack and a Pakistani navy frogman had helped in taking the terrorists by sea to Mumbai. His diary which contains the phone numbers of Pakistani army officers and his communications with ISI and Lashkar-e-Toiba operatives have been produced in the court as evidence. What emerges is that the LeT worked as an adjunct of the ISI, whose people planned and executed the Mumbai attack. Headley also scouted the Shiv Sena headquarters in Mumbai and has disclosed a plot to assassinate Sena supremo Bal Thackeray. If the plan had succeeded it would have created major communal violence in India. The role that the ISI had in the Mumbai attack takes the case to a new plane.
Pakistan’s claim that non-state actors and floating terrorists were responsible for the attack and it cannot be blamed for their actions has again proved to be false.
The network of deceptions and duplicity that Pakistan has built up over terrorism and anti-India activities is being increasingly exposed. The killing of Osama bin Laden in a US raid in Abbottabad had graphically made this clear. The fact that Pakistan is itself a major target of the frankenstein it created has not made it wiser. It is still in denial mode about Headley’s testimony, dismissing him as a double agent whose revelations can not be believed. If the Pakistani establishment has not come to its senses with so much of internal mayhem and outside pressure, when will it do so? The answer is important not just for that country, but for India and the world.