The Quetta gauntlet

As many as 59 lives were lost in the terrorist attack on Balochistan Police College in Quetta on Monday night. The story of benumbing violence and mayhem should make a chilling reading, both in Pakistan and India. Unfortunately, both countries have come to terms with terror and each has its own righteous narrative. Even though the so-called Islamic State is reported to have claimed responsibility for the attack, Pakistani officials were quick to blame “handlers” from Afghanistan for this horror. Quetta, it seems, is now the preferred battle ground for all those forces and groups which rely on terroristic violence as the currency of geopolitical exchange. In so far as last Monday’s attack was directed at a police college, it should be seen a frontal challenge to the Pakistani State. 

It is obvious that various militant groups and their patrons, on both sides of the Durand Line, want to settle as many scores as possible before a new administration settles down in Washington. The Monday night attack also demonstrates the limits of the Pakistani army's famed capacity to impose its will within the Pakistani boundaries, just as it reminds one and all that terror is a game that has no rules, no protocol, no referee, and that it can be played by anyone without having to seek permission from any gate-keeper. The elites, both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, have become inured to terroristic violence and its toll on mind and body. 

Many of us in India are barely able to conceal our glee that Pakistan has suffered the Quetta attack. We have given in so completely to a joyful hate and venom directed at all things Pakistani that we are no longer able to sympathise with our neighbour in its hour of grief.  We are losing our own sensitivity and compassion. Rather, we seem to insist on putting the onus on those immovable Generals in the Pakistani army for the region's miseries. If nothing else, Quetta should be a reminder to the political leadership in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan to reclaim the initiative from those who know only the idiom of violence and terror.