WASHINGTON - An American professor has exposed India's role in destabilising Baluchistan, Pakistan's largest province in terms of area.
Christine Fair, Associate Professor at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, has stated in a tweet that Pakistan's eastern neighbour has in the past targeted the province through clandestine tactics.
According to her tweet, senior Indian officials had admitted to her in 2007, during the Manmohan Singh administration, that they had been spending money in Balochistan.
In the tweet, Fair used the phrase "pumping money into Balochistan", enclosing it in quotation marks, hinting that large sums of money may have been involved.
She does admit that she was "unclear" on the meaning of the statement, but it could be taken to refer to the ground realities of 2007, when suicide bombing was destabilizing the law and order situation of the country and political observers were accusing New Delhi of instigating terrorism in the province through proxies.
In another interview with Outlook, when Fair was asked to elaborate her expression, she said: "It was intended to cultivate assets. That's all I ever implied", though she was quick to clarify that she had no evidence for explicit support for terrorism.
In her tweet, the political commentator further claimed that the issue of India lavishing money on the violence-torn province was raised by the Pakistani authorities during the historic Sharm el-Sheikh huddle that took place between Premier Yousaf Raza Gillani and Manmohan Singh.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani shake hands at Sharm El-Sheikh in 2009.
During the meeting, Yousaf Raza Gillani, the prime minister at the time, hinted at Indian involvement in disrupting the law and order situation of polarised Balochistan when he stated "Pakistan has some information on threats in Balochistan and other areas.”
Apart from the tweet, Fair has also also exposed Indian activities in Balochistan in a magazine named "Defence Primer, Today’s Capabilities, Tomorrow’s Conflicts, 2017".
In that issue, Fair had written an article titled 'Doctrinal and Technological Innovations in the Indian Armed Forces', in which she had discussed how India had been actively pursuing its interests in Balochistan.
She wrote: "In recent years, India has flirted with giving a fillip to the Baloch insurgency," supporting the view that India had been playing dirty games to destabilise Pakistan using Balochistan, that shares a border not only with war-torn Afghanistan but also with fundamentalist Iran.
Furthermore, veteran Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, while appearing in one of the talk shows disclosed that the same US educationist divulged him that India was utilising its consulate in Zahedan city of Iran to interfere in Balochistan, though Christine denied any such statement. (see Video beginning at 15m)
Another indication of India's role in Balochistan is the arrest of the spy Kulbhushan Jadhav who was picked up by the Pakistani authorities in 2016 from Balochistan.
