India has taken a series of high-profile steps in recent days aimed at “punishing” and “isolating” Pakistan for the September 18 attack on the Uri military base. The attack, which was carried out by JeM militants, killed eighteen soldiers.
The publicly announced steps are of a diplomatic and economic character. Yesterday, the Indian government announced that Modi will boycott the SAARC (South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation) summit in Islamabad in November and indicated that it has convinced other member states—Indian news reports named Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan—to do the same.
On Monday, India said it would increase its water withdrawals from three rivers that flow through India to Pakistan to the maximum permitted under the 1960 Indus Water Treaty (IWT) and cease its participation in meetings of the Permanent Indus Commission, set up under the IWT, until “terror comes to an end.”
By maximizing its water rights and under conditions where Pakistan has repeatedly been hit by drought and electricity shortages, New Delhi hopes to deliver a major blow to the Pakistani economy.
Modi has convened a meeting for later this week to discuss stripping Pakistan of Most Favoured Nation Trade status. Given the paltry level of bilateral trade between South Asia’s rival nuclear-armed states, this will have only limited adverse impact on Pakistan, but India is intent on moving on as many fronts as it can.
Speaking last Saturday before the national council of BJP, Modi for the first time explicitly labelled Pakistan as the author of the Uri attack. “Pakistan’s rulers should know that the sacrifice of our 18 soldiers will not go to waste.”
“Every time there is a terror attack,” he continued, “it appears that either the terrorist has come from Pakistan or like [former Al Qaeda leader] Osama Bin Laden has sought asylum there.”
Modi then went on to contrast India and Pakistan, saying the two countries “got independence at almost the same time, (but) have traversed difference paths” such that India today “export(s) software” while “Pakistan export(s) terror.”
The Prime Minister went on to ridicule the speech Nawaz Sharif had given to the UN General Assembly the previous week, saying that it “had been written at the behest of his masters, the terrorists, to serenade Kashmir.”
To be sure, Sharif’s posturing as the defender of the Kashmiri people was an utter fraud. The Pakistani government has denied the Kashmiris in PoK their basic rights.
On Monday, Swaraj used her speech at the UN General Assembly to castigate Pakistan as a terrorist state and call for its diplomatic isolation. Although she did not directly name Pakistan, her meaning was unmistakable. “There are nations,” she said, that still speak that language of terrorism that nurture, peddle it and export it.” Such countries “should have no place in the comity of nations.”