“Bring his head back” were the only words on the lips of the grief stricken wife of soldier Lance Naik Hemraj Singh in Mathura, who last week became a casualty to the brutality on India-Pakistan Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir.
He along with Lance Naik Sudhakar Singh was found mercilessly killed in Poonch, last week. The body was badly mutilated and decapitated with the head cut off and still missing. The brutal act has escalated border tensions between India and Pakistan after having enjoyed months of relative peace.
It is not the first time such a dehumanizing act has been committed on the live border. The case of late Captain Saurabh Kalia’s during the Kargil intrusion is still being agitated and case is being made out to raise it before the international arena when such and inhumane act has surfaced again.
When peace in the region was prevailing, “cricket diplomacy” had succeeded in holding matches in India and “Aman ki Asha” was making headway in people to people contact among the colonially partitioned countries, such and barbarous act by state actors or non state actors from Pakistan was uncalled for.
Memories of the 26/11 Mumbai terrorism attack are still fresh and remain and it would be immature on part of India to believe that the Pakistani authorities would hold an impartial probe into the mutilation of India soldiers.
‘Other options’
With Indian polity in disarray, it is the hawks in the armed forces that have raised the ante with Air Force Chief NAK Browne talking about ‘other options’ for enforcing the mandated sanctity of the LoC.
This could cost the region and Pakistan dear
Without letting the guards down, India needs to strike where it hurts most and this is on the economic front, given the precarious fiscal status that Pakistan finds itself in today.
Trapped between a home grown insurgency, a fledgling democracy and USA drones pounding targets at will, Pakistan’s mounting debt leave nothing on the table with which the country can surmount it problems. International Monetary Fund forecasts inflation to rise in Pakistan into double digits in coming days.
Farooq Tirmzi in a blog post for Express Tribune as The Big Picture put it as “If the choice facing Pakistan is abandoning its claims on the Indian side of Kashmir in exchange for free trade with India, then I see it as an automatic choice to save the economic future of 180 million citizens of Pakistan against any vague political aspirations.”
De-stabilizing the region appears to the only objective Pakistan has as it sinks deeper as a failed state and blindly adopts the stance towards India of “hum to dubenge sanam, tumhe bhi saath le kar jhangey.”
A mechanical engineering graduate with a post graduation in marketing and sales, Ashish has combined professional experience of more than 4 years.
Ashish is a great fan of Martin Scorsese. He loves to write poetry in his spare time.
He lives in Shimla.
