Tough stand on terror

HOURS after National Security Adviser Ajit Doval met a representative of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council in Kazakhstan on Tuesday, Jaish al-Adl militants attacked Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ premises in Rask and Chabahar and killed 11 security personnel. Jaish al-Adl is an extremist Sunni Muslim militant group that operates in southeastern Iran and the western Pakistani province of Balochistan. The terror strikes have reignited tensions between Iran and Pakistan after a lull. In January, Iran had targeted two bases of the Jaish al-Adl in Pakistan with missiles, prompting a retaliation from Islamabad.

The developments are of immense significance for India, which has been combating cross-border terrorism for decades. In his address at the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Astana (Kazakhstan), Doval stressed the need to shun double standards and hold sponsors, financiers and facilitators of terrorism accountable. He asserted that the perpetrators of terrorism should be effectively and expeditiously dealt with.

It is worrisome that Pakistan-based terrorists are causing trouble across the neighbourhood, be it in India, Iran or Afghanistan. Even as New Delhi has reiterated its tough stand on terror, The Guardian has reported that Indian spy agency R&AW was involved in killings in Pakistan as part of a larger strategy to eliminate wanted terrorists living on foreign soil. The Ministry of External Affairs has dismissed the allegations as ‘false and malicious anti-India propaganda’. The report, which quotes some ‘intelligence operatives of India and Pakistan’, is in line with the ploy of some Western countries to cast aspersions on India’s counter-terror measures. When national security is at stake, New Delhi knows how to tackle the situation without crossing any red line. The US-led West, whose war on terror came a cropper in Afghanistan and Iraq, should review its campaigns abroad before pointing fingers at a nation that has been bleeding from a thousand cuts made by its neighbour.