Blaming Pakistan for stage-managed activities

By Waqar Ahmed

The Indian Navy, bristling with ill-advice, is carrying out stage-managed activities in the Indian Ocean to malign Pakistan and its armed forces. The instructions of the Modi government are clearly written on such amateurish plots.

The Indian media recently claimed that an Indian fisherman was killed after the Pakistan Navy opened fire on two Indian boats -- Premraj and Ramraj -- that had 5-6 fishermen on board off the Gujarat coast. It was claimed that unprovoked firing led to the death of one fisherman, who was later identified as Abdul Iqbal Bhatti, a native of Okha. It was also alleged that the Indian boats were in the international waters and had crossed into the Pakistani side of the maritime boundary. The Indian Coast Guards rushed two ships, Vijit and Meeraben, to investigate the incident and launch a search operation.
Unlike the Pakistani Coast Guards and Maritime Security Agency, the ship that fired on the Indian vessel had no markings and didn't fly a flag. It had about 40 people on board and was slightly bigger than the Indian fishing vessel concerned. It was speculated that it could have been armed fishermen who had fired at the Indian boat. 

Meanwhile, Pakistan's Maritime Security Agency (MSA) confirmed that while one of their corvettes was operating in the area at around 6:00am on 18th Sept 2015, it had not fired on any fishing boat which nevertheless were found to be 20 nautical miles inside Pakistan's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and were warned to leave the area immediately.
Earlier, the Indian authorities had sunk a boat off the coast of the western Indian state of Gujarat, claiming that it was coming from Pakistan with explosives on board. A senior official of the Indian Coast Guard had claimed that the four people on board the fishing vessel had ignored repeated warnings and had deliberately set the boat on fire. Without checking the authenticity of the report, a former Indian army general had gone to the media claiming that "undoubtedly it was a terrorist plot, had they been smugglers, they would have surrendered. Motivation to blow one up is only among terrorists." 

The fabricated terrorist plot was exposed when the Indian Coast Guard DIG BK Loshali contradicted the government's version of events in connection with the interception of the boat and said the Indian Navy had itself blown up the boat, which had not been exploded by the alleged suicide attackers. "Let me tell you. I hope you remember 31st December night. We blew off that Pakistan... We have blown them off. I was there at Gandhinagar and I told at night, blow the boat off. We don't want to serve them Biryani," Loshali had crowed in the video. Subsequently, he was removed as the Chief of Staff in Northwest region and attached to Indian Coast Guard's zonal headquarters. Loshali is now facing court martial proceedings after being indicted by a Board of Inquiry. Also, on July 27, 2015 three gunmen opened fire on a bus in the Indian Punjab and then stormed a police station in a town called Dinanagar. The attack led to the death of three civilians and four policemen and injured 15 others. Among the dead was a superintendent police besides the alleged three attackers. The shootout between the Indian armed forces and the attackers continued for about 12 hours. It was the first such attack in the Indian Punjab since the mid-1990s when an insurgency was running in the state for setting up the independent state of Khalistan. It was a wacky plot with no head and tail. Nevertheless, Indian authorities were quick to blame Pakistan.
It seems that stage-managed operations by the Indians are becoming a manipulated tactic to blame Pakistan. While such activities allow them to extract every morsel of propaganda, it is an investment that is amateurish and inevitably backfires sooner or later. It moreover shows that the Modi government has limited powers of comprehension and deduction. The Modi Sarkar is also rather slow to learn and adapt.