By David J. Karl
The Indian defense minister may have inadvertently acknowledged the limits of India’s conventional deterrence.
India’s defense minister Manohar Parrikar, who has a track record of making controversial statements, stirred up criticism recently when he emphasized the resort to covert action in response to another major attack on India from Pakistan-based militants. Speaking at a public forum, he declared “We have to neutralize terrorists through terrorists only. Why can’t we do it? We should do it.”
Critics rebuked Parrikar for surrendering the moral high ground that India, which has suffered grievously from Pakistan-borne terrorist activity (PDF), has enjoyed with regard to its troublesome neighbor. His remarks also served up an ill-timed propaganda coup for Islamabad, which in recent months has been accusing New Delhi of being behind its own struggles with terrorism. Pakistan’s foreign affairs czar retorted, without a hint of hypocrisy, that “it must be the first time that a minister of an elected government openly advocates use of terrorism in another country on the pretext of preventing terrorism from that country or its non-state actors.”
Parrikar’s statement was the second occasion in recent weeks that a senior Indian official has highlighted the option of putting terrorist groups to work vis-à-vis Pakistan. Neeraj Kumar, a former Delhi police commissioner, earlier in his career oversaw the investigation of a series of bombings in Mumbai in early 1993 that left over 300 people dead and some 1,400 injured. He revealed in mid-April that the Indian security establishment had once formulated a plan to use “non-state” actors “to get at a certain gentleman in Pakistan,” presumably a reference to Dawood Ibrahim, the head of a powerful criminal syndicate in Mumbai who orchestrated the 1993 bombings and who is now reportedly being sheltered in Karachi by the Pakistani security service. Kumar added that the operation was on the verge of being carried out when the Indian leadership put the kibosh on it.
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