Pakistan an old sinner

Mumbai: The ongoing ‘Operation Sindoor’ has been punctuated by fresh instances of cease-fire violations (CFVs) along the Line of Control (LoC) by Pakistan in specific border areas, as revealed by the Indian Army this week.

The trend is not new and Pakistan has been adept at CFVs with official data showing an average 13 daily breaches of truce during 10 years from 2010-2021.

During that period, the LoC in the erstwhile state Jammu & Kashmir suffered some 14,411 CFVs, with the figures dramatically shooting up after 2014 when the NDA government headed by PM Narendra Modi took office.

The eye-popping data was revealed to Pune activist Prafful Sarda in a RTI reply, showing 593 CFVs during the erstwhile UPA’s former PM Dr. Manmohan Singh’s tenure, and 13,818 under the NDA regimes post-2014 – totaling to 14,411 in 10 years.

Interestingly, the figure of border infringement was just one (01) in 2004 – when Dr. Singh’s government came to power - which shot up to an astronomical 4,645 in 2020.

This was despite the admirable surgical air-strikes in Balakot (Feb. 2019) and the country acquiring a sleek fleet of Rafale fighter jets (July 2020).

As per the RTI reply, the truce violations pertained to the LoC, and the government had categorically refused to divulge details of CFVs along the India-China borders, including specifics like the Doklam deadlock (June-Aug. 2017).

“The government invoked Sec. 8 (1)(a) of the RTI Act, 2005 to deny the Doklam details. The officialdom feels that such disclosure could affect India’s sovereignty and integrity, her security, strategic, scientific or economic interests, relations with foreign states, et al,” Sarda told 'The Perfect Voice'.

Starting with one CFV in 2004, it climbed to 6 (2005), 3 (2006), 21 (2007), 77 (2008), down to 28 (2009), and thereafter kept soaring each year – 44 (2010), 51 (2011), 93 (2012) and 199 (2013), at the fag end of the UPA’s second tenure.

Under the NDA, things appeared bright as CFV dropped to 153 (2014) and 152 (2015), and after PM Modi’s surprise visit to Pakistan to meet and greet ex-PM Nawaz Sharif on his birthday in Dec. 2015, the truce was flouted a whopping 228 times (2016).

In 2017, after Nirmala Sitharaman became Defence Minister, the rumblings on the borders increased with a staggering 860 CFVs – almost quadrupling over the previous year which also saw the Uri attacks by Pakistan and India’s retaliatory surgical strikes.

The CFV’s kept shooting up – 1,629 (2018), 3,233 (2019), and as NDA 2.0 was settling down in office, there were 4,645 truce violations (2020), and 524 (Jan-Feb. 2021) – the last two at the height of the Coronavirus Pandemic when the country remained under different lockdowns.