Pak on a suicidal mission

Arun Joshi

Pakistan’s geopolitics revolves around Kashmir. It was obvious from Pakistan premier Imran Khan’s address at the 75th session of the United Nations General Assembly on Friday. He devoted 15 minutes to Kashmir, spotlighting his delusional narrative on Kashmir, and exhausted all his vocabulary of name calling for India. This was the same old story that Islamabad and its leaders have been telling over the decades.

Imran Khan, whom the opposition parties identified as selected PM by the establishment (army) , sought to further the suicidal notion that Kashmiris wanted to be part of Pakistan. This unrealistic view of Kashmir and its people could prove suicidal for Pakistan. Its persistence that Kashmir is a “dispute” that had to be settled under the United Nations Security Council resolutions can pose an existential threat to it. This is the natural consequence of living with and perpetuating delusions.

The time is not far when Pakistanis would be asking serious questions to its leaders and army as to what happened about the narrative of “Kashmir banega Pakistan”. In fact, the public there has already started asking what is the Kashmir policy, and to what end it is being pursued and at what cost?

A seasoned diplomat of Pakistan Ashraf Jehangir has warned Islamabad that there are grave risks involved in its Kashmir policy and also highlighted the high costs involved in this directionless misadventure.

No one in Pakistan knows how to wriggle out of the difficult situation in which it has landed due to its unending obsession with Kashmir.

Kashmiris know the reality of Pakistan better than Pakistanis would ever admit. They know how Partition migrants are treated with contempt and called “mohajirs”.

Pakistan also keeps harping on obsolete swan song that it “stands in solidarity with the people of Kashmir”. Imran Khan played this song yet against at the UNGA. It needs to answer how it has shown “solidarity” with Kashmiris. The answer is simple – by radicalising youth and giving them guns and grenades to spill blood and expand graveyards. It is a mockery of its claim that it has been in the frontline of fighting terrorism. In reality, it is in the frontline of nurturing and exporting terrorism and now is on a suicide mission of self-destruction.