Write-up: Pakistan has consistently insisted that the deadly bombing on an Indian security forces convoy in February 2019, which resulted in the deaths of 44 soldiers, was a false flag operation.
The BJP-appointed governor of the illegally Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJ&K), Satya Pal Malik, was questioned by Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Congress party, at a recent, exceptional event. This action officially validated the party’s position and brought the two nuclear-armed neighbors to the verge of war.
The two men concluded their conversation with the assertion that the incident had been used by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for domestic political purposes.
Gandhi said he saw a cynical event in which Modi was being photographed with hardly any consideration for the solemn moment when the soldiers’ bodies arrived at the Delhi airport and he went there to pay his respects to the fallen men.
In response to a question about why the Pulwama incident occurred, Malik said that the soldiers were sitting ducks since, per protocol, they were not given aircraft to move them. The soldiers were forced to take the known hazardous route after their application for an airlift was denied by the home ministry after four months of delays.
A persistent question is also, given that the Modi government held Pakistan accountable for it: how, with Indian security forces swarming IIOJ&K, did an explosives-laden truck manage to arrive at the Jammu-Srinagar highway undetected? “It was not our [his office’s] fault, but was asked not to say this anywhere,” Malik had claimed to two TV networks. At the time, he had held back, fearing it might affect the investigation, but the investigation never happened.
PM Modi used it politically in his speech on the third day,” Malik remarked. He had earlier stated that he had “realised that all the onus of the attack will be put on Pakistan” in order to gain political advantages in an interview with The Wire, an Indian news website. And sure enough, in the run-up to the elections, Modi consistently did that to bolster his rhetoric against Pakistan and won a sizable majority in power again.
His airstrike on a supposedly “terrorist training camp” inside Pakistan, which local and foreign journalists who visited the site discovered to be nothing more than a few burned trees from bombing, was intended to incite further public hysteria. Pakistan shot down two Indian warplanes and took one of the pilots hostage as a fitting retort.
After the head of a significant political party and the person in charge of the location during the Pulwama bombing exposed Modi’s erroneous and nationalistic story, what comes next? It had been a wishful expectation, indeed, that the international community would hold India responsible for the actions that jeopardized regional peace following the Pulwama attack when Malik had made the same revelations in his previous interview from the Foreign Office in Islamabad.
Still, one can only hope that the Indian people will make Narendra Modi and his party answer for the suspicious lies he has been feeding them in the upcoming elections.
Copyright Ar News Blink, 2023