How India sent Terrorist to Pakistan and Why ?

INDIAN TERRORISM IN
PAKISTAN The Story Of
Three Spies And One
Saboteur

The death of Sarabjit Singh is a reminder
of how India expanded its limited conflict
with Pakistan over Kashmir into an all-out
animosity.

Executive Summary 

1. Pakistan faced a wave of Indian terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s. The
arrest of two spies, Kashmir Singh and Surjeet Singh, and one terroristsaboteur
Sarabjit Singh, came in this period.

2. Way before 9/11 and al-Qaeda, India was the first source of State and
Non-State terrorism in the region.

3. Pakistan’s dispute with India was limited to Kashmir at the UNSC. Bilateral
relations were normal. But India expanded the conflict into other areas in
1950, 1971, 1974 and 2002.

4. In 1950, three years after Pakistan’s independence, India launched a proxy
war against it from Afghanistan.

5. In 1969, India exploited low Pakistani deployment on East Pakistan border
and began organizing and recruiting a terror militia. In 1971, sensing an
opportunity, India launched an invasion across international borders, aided
by the terror militia, to seize territory and declare it Bangladesh.

6. In 1974, India introduced nuclear weapons in the region. The move was
unnecessarily and unprovoked, just like its invasion of Pakistan three years
earlier.

7. Evidence and statements by Kashmir Singh and Surjeet Singh to the
Indian media confirm that a third terrorist-saboteur Sarabjit Singh was a
killer sent by India to eliminate Pakistani civilians in public places.

8. The cases of the three Indian agents prove how India sent terrorists to
Pakistan from 1973 [Kashmir Singh] to 1990 [Sarabjit Singh].

9. Pakistani track record of treating Indian prisoners, including convicted
Indian terrorists, is impeccable. In comparison, India returned a Pakistani
PoW without a tongue. India ‘executed’ a Kashmiri and never returned his
body to family.

10. Pakistan has pardoned two Indian spies and released several others
without any bodily or mental harm. India never reciprocated.

11. Indian media and government officials clearly exploited the accidental
death of convicted Indian terrorist Sarabjit Singh in a prison brawl to whip
up anti-Pakistanism and war hysteria.

12. Instead of coming clean and mending fences, India lied to its public about
the terrorist activities of its agents in Pakistan and misled the public
opinion.

13. In 2002, India returned to Afghanistan to revive anti-Pakistan terror
activities, coming full circle since 1950.

14. What drives Indian terror activities against Pakistan since 1950? One
answer is: the Hindi-speaking northern Indian minority that rules India.
More information is provided in this backgrounder on the so far hidden role

INDIAN TERRORISM IS A REALITY
Indian officials and media smugly accuse Pakistan of being a source of
terrorism. Unfortunately, thanks to the unbridled support from American
governments and some lobbies in the American media, India gets away with
portraying itself as a victim of terrorism.

But the truth is that way before Pakistan ever had a problem with Al-Qaeda
presence, India was the source of all state and non-state terrorism in the
region. In fact, India introduced state-sponsored and non-state terrorism,
mainly targeting Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and China at different
times.

Soon after independence, both Pakistan and India had a very civilized dispute
in a way, conducted at the UN Security Council over Kashmir. Bilaterally, the
relationship was normal and friendly, especially from the Pakistani side. Sadly,
India quietly sent agents to Afghanistan, then an ungoverned badland, to
organize terrorism across Pakistan’s western borders.

India started a proxy war against Pakistan in 1950, merely three years after
Pakistan’s independence. Pakistan then was a very weak state, hardly posed
any threat to India. The only reasonable explanation for this Indian move was
that India’s ruling Hindi-speaking minority was so determinedly antagonistic
toward Pakistan that it pushed both nations on to a course of permanent
animosity. [Click here for more on Hindi-speaking minority of northern India]
Indian intelligence agents began recruiting and organizing Afghan elements to
conduct terrorism inside Pakistan’s western provinces of Balochistan and
NWFP. This was the beginning of what later became to be known as BLA, or
the Balochistan Liberation Army, an Indian- and Soviet-created proxy militia
tasked with keeping western Pakistan destabilized and attempt to wrestle
away the strategic province of Balochistan from Pakistani control.

In 1969, Pakistan had a minimal military footprint in East Pakistan, with few
soldiers on the Indian border. This showed Pakistani goodwill and good
intentions toward India. Islamabad believed its conflict with India was limited to
Kashmir and the conflict was adequately managed at the diplomatic level at
UNSC. Hence, Pakistan saw no reason for a large military presence along
India’s border with East Pakistan where both countries had no conflict.
But Pakistan was wrong to trust India.

Exploiting this, India in 1969 formed a terror militia called Mukti Bahini. Terror
training camps were erected across Indian border regions with East Pakistan.

A large number of poverty-stricken Pakistani Muslim and Hindu youth were
recruited for training. India nurtured this terror militia quietly to be used at an
appropriate time. The opportunity presented itself two years later, in 1971,
when elections went chaotic in Pakistan and resulted in high political tensions.
India exploited the political tensions and the low Pakistani military footprint to
launch a large-scale invasion of East Pakistan across international borders,
aided by the terror militia it created.

Just like 1950, India in 1971 expanded its conflict with Pakistan into a larger
conflict. What was just a dispute over Kashmir was now taken to a new level,
where India attempted and succeeded in seizing Pakistani territory. India
created reasons for Pakistan to avenge the Indian acts of terror. A small
minority in New Delhi, drawn from the Hindi-speaking belt of northern India,
succeeded in dragging two large nations into a wider conflict.

Let’s start with the two Indian spies Surjeet and Kashmir Singh, and one. Indian saboteur Sarabjit Singh, all working for India’s Research and Analysis Wing [RAW], the Indian external intelligence agency.

THREE INDIAN TERRORISTS

 
In 1973, Pakistani intelligence arrested someone named Ibrahim on the
Peshawar-Rawalpindi highway. It was Kashmir Singh, a former Indian Army
soldier and a spy for Indian intelligence.

Kashmir Singh served in the India Army between 1962 and 1966. According to
MediaPoint.pk, here is how he was caught:

“In 1973, he was arrested on the 22nd Milestone on the Peshawar-Rawalpindi
road by Pakistani intelligence officers. At the time of his arrest, his family
included his wife, Paramjit Kaur, and three children under the age of 10.
Subsequently in the same year, he was sentenced to death by a Pakistan
Army court. This verdict was upheld by a civil court between 1976 and 1977
and a mercy petition followed this, but to no avail. After being sentenced to an
indefinite jail term, he said that he ‘was tortured third degree for the first few
months by the authorities’ as they pressurized him to confess to being an
Indian spy. Singh was lodged in seven different jails in Pakistan and was kept
in solitary confinement and remained chained for 17 long years.”

 
In early 2008 a Pakistani human rights minister pleaded with Ex-President Pervez
Musharraf to release Kashmir Singh because the Indian spy had spent 35
years in jail. Many pro-India lobbyists in Pakistan argued he was not a spy.
Musharraf pardoned the Indian and the spy crossed Pakistan’s eastern border
into India on March 4, 2008.

But to the embarrassment of Indian government and his Pakistani supporters,
Kashmir Singh told Indian media he was a spy, that he served his country, and
that India abandoned him.

See Link => http://j.mp/11XV13s

Surjeet Singh is another Indian spy. He was arrested in Pakistan in 1982 and,
like Sarabjit Singh, confessed to working with Indian intelligence and spying on
Pakistan. But he did not have any link to organizing bombings inside Pakistan.
If he did, Pakistani authorities could not prove it. In 1989, late Prime Minister
Benazir Bhutto took up his case and asked President Ghulam Ishaq Khan to
commute his death sentence, handed down to him by a Pakistan Army Court.
Bhutto was trying to improve relations with India and thought releasing a spy
working for Indian government would be a goodwill gesture. But she failed to
secure his release.

Surjeet was released in June 2012 by the government of President Asif
Zardari. Sherry Rehman, the Pakistani ambassador to United States, lobbied
for his release [See http://j.mp/Kr2qPE ] probably as a gesture to Washington
which was keen to see Zardari grant concessions to India to improve relations.
Pakistanis were disappointed at how their government failed to hold India
responsible for Indian terrorism inside Pakistan over the decades.

See Link => http://j.mp/U3WzE1

As soon as Surjeet Singh landed in India, he confessed in front of the full glare
of national media that he was a RAW spy in Pakistan.

See Link => http://j.mp/QtIrTl  &
See Link => http://j.mp/OADUjt

Surjeet said he sent vital information from Pakistan to India but accused the
Indian government and its spy agency of abandoning him.

See Link => http://j.mp/NYX2q4

Surjeet said he was recruited by a Border Security Force [BSF] officer to
sneak into Pakistan for espionage.

See Link => http://j.mp/QILwiq

Most importantly, Surjeet told the Indian media that Sarabjit Singh was a
“terrorist” whom India sent to kill Pakistani civilians. [See http://j.mp/YgLOmo ]

BBC interviewed Surjeet Singh in India in 2012. To understand how India sent
terrorists to Pakistan, read BBC’s report, ‘Meet India’s Angry Spy Surjeet Singh’.

See Link => http://j.mp/105sbKD 

 

Sarabjit Singh is the third high-profile Indian intelligence operative in this
story of decades-long Indian terrorism in Pakistan. He also went by the names
Jaljit Singh and Manjit Singh. Sarabjit Singh was arrested in Lahore for
involvement in a series of bombings in markets and public places in Lahore,
Faisalabad and Multan in 1990. Unlike Kashmir Singh and Surjeet Singh, who
were spies, Sarabjit is a terrorist, an operative of the Indian government sent
to kill Pakistani civilians, spread panic and instability in Pakistani cities, recruit
and organize local cells for RAW, and train them to execute bombings in
Pakistani cities.

Just like Indian saboteurs and spies before him, Sarabjit maintained he was
innocent, that he was a simple farmer, and that he strayed into Pakistan. [To
have an alibi in case caught, RAW sent spies and terrorists to Pakistan in the
1980s from Indian villages near the Pakistani border. But unfortunately for the
Indian government, several Indian spies arrested during that period admitted
to affiliation with RAW, thereby rendering this alibi useless.

See Link => http://j.mp/11XV13s

Evidence left little wiggle room for Sarabjit and he was sent to the death row.
There was a small controversy in June 2012 when Islamabad pardoned a
convicted India spy. The media wrongly mentioned Sarabjit’s name. The
correct name was Surjeet.

Sarabjit’s mercy petition was rejected by former President Pervez Musharraf.
Sarabjit was attacked by two Pakistani death row inmates on Friday, April 26,
2013, and nearly beaten to death. The incident occurred during a routine
transfer of the convicted Indian terrorist from one prison to another.

He was reportedly attacked because the other death row inmates thought the
Indian has a campaign working for his release despite his serious crimes while
other inmates will be executed for lesser crimes.

HOW PAKISTAN TREATED SARABJIT

 
Pakistani authorities accorded terrorist Sarabjit Singh good treatment, and by
all standards far better than how India has treated Pakistani and Kashmiri
prisoners so far. He was allowed to meet his Pakistani lawyers. India was
given consular access to him, his family was permitted to meet him and
communicate with him under supervision. He was given security, exercised in
jail and received overall good treatment. Never once during his 22-year jail
time did he complain verbally or in writing of bad treatment. This was a
generous Pakistani treatment considering he was convicted of killing innocent
Pakistani shoppers in market places. He died because of wounds sustained during a brawl with two Pakistani death row inmates. The inmates were probably incensed at seeing many Pakistani lawyers and activists campaigning to release the terrorist whereas the other inmates would probably be executed for lesser crimes than the Indian terrorist committed. As usual, the Indian media fed by official sources tried to peddle conspiracy theories about an ISI attempt to kill Sarabjit. These accusations were dismissed by
other Indians.

India’s own record of treating prisoners is dismal. On February 9, 2013, it
executed Kashmiri activist Afzal Guru, seen in India as a terrorist. The
execution was done secretly, he was not allowed to meet his family for a last
time, the family learned of the execution from the media, Guru’s body was
strangely buried inside the prison compound, and the family was refused
access to the grave and to the body. All of this raised legitimate questions
about the possibility that Indian security officials killed Guru during
interrogation and hurriedly buried his body inside the jail to hide marks of
torture.

In 2005, India released a Pakistani prisoner of war, soldier Maqbool Hussain.
He was kept in jail for 40 years. When he was released, he had no tongue. It
was pulled out during one of the torture sessions by Indian interrogators.
Pakistan has received many Pakistani prisoners who left Indian jails
permanently damaged either mentally or physically or both.

PAKISTANI MEDIA vs. INDIAN MEDIA

 
The Indian media exploited the death of Indian terrorist Sarabjit Singh in a
prison brawl to whip up anti-Pakistanism in India. The propensity of Indian
media to beat the drums of war when it comes to Pakistan is disturbing,
immature, and indicative of how much the media in the world’s largest
democracy is easily controlled by strong lobbies in the government. The Indian
media failed to discuss a key question: What was Sarabjit Singh, and before
him Kashmir Singh and Surjeet Singh, doing in Pakistan killing innocent civilians?

Not a single commentator, anchor or guest on mainstream Indian television
dared question the Indian government policy of sending terrorists and
saboteurs to Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s.

Surprisingly, the Pakistani media played along with the Indian media in giving a pass to Indian terrorism. This shows that, unlike India, the Pakistani media is not in the control of Pakistani government. 

Pakistani television anchors glorified the Indian terrorist at the expense of fourteen Pakistanis he killed and the dozens of their relatives affected by Indian terrorism. Some Pakistani journalists reported on social media that the country’s main media watchdog,
PEMRA, considered sending notices to some Pakistani channels informing
them of violations of media code where convicted terrorists must not be
glorified.

THE BEHAVIOR OF INDIAN GOVERNEMNT
The Indian government is the worst culprit in the saga of Indian spies and
terrorists arrested in Pakistan. In the words of those spies released by
Pakistan, New Delhi is guilty of sending agents to Pakistan and then
abandoning them once they were caught. And even when Islamabad
graciously pardoned some of the Indian spies, New Delhi could have used the
opportunity to own up to its mistakes, mend fences with Pakistan, and pay
compensation to the families of the young spies whose lives and the lives of
their families and children it ruined. This is what Indian spy Surjeet Singh
demanded in front of the India media as soon as he crossed into India after a
Pakistani pardon. Even in the case of Sarabjit Singh, the Indian government
could have provided background briefings to the media and the Indian public
about the exemplary Pakistani treatment given to Indian convicts accused of
spying, how Pakistan released two of them who were convicted of death and
several others without trial. Instead, the Indian government chose to help
create an anti-Pakistan hysteria inside India and portray the accidental death
of terrorist Sarabjit Singh as a premeditated murder blamed on Pakistan.

THE BOTTOM LINE ON INDIAN TERRORISM
After starting proxy wars in the region in 1950, and after the unprovoked
invasion of Pakistan in 1971, the unprovoked nuclear detonations of 1974, and
the wave of Indian terrorism in Pakistani cities in the 1980s and 1990s, India
returned to Afghanistan in 2002 to use Afghan soil against Pakistan, much like
it did in 1950. It was full circle for India.

Instead of Soviet Union, India teamed up this time with the United States and
the warlords of the Afghan Northern Alliance. Together they did several things

The first order of business was to revive the BLA, or the Balochistan Liberation
Army, created during the 1960s and 1970s by India and Soviet Union. The
BLA was used unsuccessfully between 2002 and 2012 to incite a civil war
inside Pakistani Balochistan. Moreover, the Indians established links to the
criminal gangs collectively known as TTP, or the Pakistani Taliban, which
specialize in killing Pakistani civilians and soldiers. The TTP was kept alive
through mysterious funding and training in Afghanistan despite the near
complete strangulation of TTP by Pakistani military. The TTP was being used
in a war of attrition against Pakistani military and the State. The chief of staff of
Pakistan Army, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, bluntly accused unnamed “enemies in
the region” of using TTP against Pakistan, in his keynote address at a Martyrs
Day ceremony on April 30, 2013.

Some Afghan officials in the Karzai government have privately told visiting
Pakistani journalists that India used Afghan soil against China. According to
this account, India is using its own Muslim population to establish terror camps
in Afghanistan to train terrorists and send them to China’s Muslim regions.
India also finds Afghanistan a safe place to train Tibetan saboteurs. The shift
came after the Tibetan terror camps inside India came under intense Chinese
scrutiny.

Indian acts of terrorism are also well documented in Kashmir, Sri Lanka, and
Bangladesh.

This history of Indian export of terrorism sharply contrasts with the carefully
cultivated image as a responsible country. 

In reality, India is a source of instability, threat and terrorism for its neighbors. As the events of 1971 indicated, no neighbor of India is safe from a possible, unprovoked, Indian
invasion or military action when the time is right.

M Javed Butt