The acknowledged complicity of Pakistan in some of the most recent terror attacks such as the one in Mumbai on 26 November 2008 had begun to blunt the efficacy of these tools. But Pakistan still reposes faith in them, this time hoping that America’s renewed interest in its ‘frontline’ status will help transfer world sympathy from India to Pakistan, frequently referred by US leaders as the epicentre of terror.

After it became evident that the world absolutely refuses to believe that it is innocent of exporting terror to India, Pakistan has stepped up ‘propaganda’ about its India fables, this time complete with ‘evidence’ that India is behind all the trouble in Balochistan and everywhere else in the land of pure, including the hilly Taliban-infested tribal areas. Intriguingly, the Pakistani foreign office has been reluctant to confirm the story its own officials had obviously planted in the country’s pro-establishment paper about the ‘Indian hand’ in a swathe of acts of ‘terror’ in Pakistan. Maybe, the minions there are concocting a more potent brew!

In any old-fashioned patriotic Indian heart the first reaction to the Pakistani charges should not be one of anger or despair, but one of incredulity. Could it be that the much maligned Research and Analysis Wing, believed by many Indians to be the most bumbling ‘spy’ agency in the world, is so efficient that it has managed to penetrate deeply into the most challenging territory, Pakistan? This is something that even the Americans, who have pumped in billions of dollars into Pakistan, have been unable to do.

It is unbelievable that a land where every citizen thinks that he can take on 1.25 lakh Indians single-handedly has been shaken so severely by a blundering, squabbling Indian ‘agency’. All these years, the lament in India has been that this ‘agency’, unlike its counterpart in Pakistan, has not been able to build worthwhile ‘assets’ in unfriendly countries in the neighbourhood. Given the hostile ground conditions in these countries RAW would require much more of what it apparently lacks, enterprise and purpose, backed by firm political backing, to achieve that goal.

It is possible that, thanks to the Pakistani ‘dossier’ allegedly handed over to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh by his Pakistani counterpart during the NAM summit in Sharm El-Shaikh, RAW is now in a position to cock a snook at its critics. The daring acts attributed to RAW in the Pakistani ‘dossier’ are ‘impressive’ by the standard of acts of terrorism that the Pakistanis carry out regularly in India. Building and nurturing unrest in Balochistan that covers more than half of Pakistan, running a terrorist ‘training camp’ in Kandahar, building ‘safe houses’ in Afghanistan, funding terrorism in Pakistan, providing arms to terrorists, attacking police academy near Lahore and attacking the Sri Lanka cricket team on way to the Test ground in Lahore.

The Pakistani paper that broke the story of the ‘dossier’ given to Manmohan Singh did not give details of the nature of ‘evidence’ that will substantiate the Pakistani charges. Except one photograph that is supposed to show Indians sitting with Baloch ‘terrorists’ or whoever they may be! Obviously, neither the Pak daily nor its official deep throats in Islamabad did not expect Richard Holbrooke, the US Special Envoy (for Pak-Afghanistan) to puncture the story in front of world media at the State Department. One can only sympathise with their discomfiture.

For Pakistan a photograph may be a clinching evidence of Indian complicity, but the Pakistanis might like to explain the nature of their relationship with Kashmiri separatists with whom they have regular interaction in India. These separatist leaders make no bones that their loyalties are with Pakistan. They consider it their duty to grace functions at the Pakistani high commission in Delhi. There have been occasions when Pakistani embassy officials have been caught handing over money to these separatist leaders.

Is it the Pakistani case that Indian diplomats, or anyone else from India for that matter, should never be talking to politicians and persons the establishment in Islamabad does not approve of? How has Pakistan assumed the exclusive right to extend ‘diplomatic, moral and political’ support to separatists in India? The Balochs have been groaning under the Pakistani yoke for over 60 years and they have every right to be heard by the rest of the world. Despite claiming that India has been ‘interfering’ in Pakistani affairs and fishing in troubled waters there for a long time, Pakistan has never been able to go beyond the generalities to pinpoint the Indian ‘hand’ behind the unrest in various parts of the country. Is there an Indian counterpart of Hafiz Sayeed, Maulana Azhar Mahmood and the host of ISI ‘masterminds’, ‘handlers’, ‘trainers’ named by India in the past and more recently by Ajmal Amir Kasab, the lone Pakistani survivor of the 26 November Mumbai terror attacks?

More to the point, is it Pakistan’s case that India uses terror the way it does--to acquire ‘depth’ on its (western) borders and to ‘bleed’ the ‘enemy’ (India)? Even its friends acknowledge that Pakistan uses terror as a state policy and that requires it to sustain a vast terror machine.

Even when terrorism is condemned unequivocally by Indians, it can be said that most of them would perhaps not mind, at least secretly, if some of the charges against RAW are true. The kind of ‘heroics’ that Pakistan has attributed to it would raise the stock of the otherwise little admired Indian ‘agency’. The best place for the Pakistani ‘dossier’ would be—you know where. If that hinders the process of ‘dialogue’ with Pakistan, so be it. A bilateral ‘dialogue’, composite or otherwise, cannot proceed on the basis of hallucinations of one country or patently malafide intentions.

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