India flatly denies Pakistani media story calling surgical strikes a ‘bluff’
NEW DELHI: India has rejected as “completely concocted and baseless” a Pakistani newspaper story today, which claims that India’s foreign secretary S Jaishankar told the German ambassador here that no surgical strikes took place on terrorist camps in Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir (POK).
Pakistan has been consistently saying that what India calls a surgical strike was merely routine fire along the Line of Control. It appears Islamabad is now using its media to convey what it likely wishes were true. This story comes days after Islamabad restricted the movements of a Pakistani journalist, because he wrote a report saying that the civilian government is annoyed with the Pakistani army for not cracking down on home-grown terror.
Our statement on a concocted and baseless News International Pakistan story
That story says “an informed official source” told Pakistani officials in Berlin that “the Indian Foreign Secretary has categorically denied and said that there was no ‘surgical strike’ undertaken by Indian Army inside Azad Kashmir, Pakistan.”
Azad Kashmir, is, of course what Islamabad calls Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir.
India swiftly put down that report this morning.
In an involved retelling of the course of events that led to this “startling information” being revealed, the newspaper writes that on October 4, 2016, Rukhsana Afzal , a Pakistani embassy official in Berlin, met with German Foreign Ministry officials Karen Goebels and Jens Wagner and a senior officer of AfPak Division, Simone Stemmler.
The newspaper writes that when Afzal raised the issue of the Uri terror attack – which the same newspaper called a fake attack staged by India – Stemmler told her about the supposed exchange between foreign secretary S Jaishankar and the German Ambassador in New Delhi.
The story quotes another “official source” as saying that “with the so-called mantra of surgical strike”, the ruling BJP government wanted to achieve many objectives.
These objectives apparently are “…to prove to the world that Pakistan is a terror sponsoring state and India has the military muscle to put it under restrain, Kashmir’s freedom movement is nothing more than Pakistan’s sponsored terrorism, to satisfy its populations’ demand of avenging Uri attack and to create an unrivaled political space ahead of UP’s (Uttar Pradesh’s) state elections,” according to the “official source.”
A day after the Uri terror attack, The News International suggested that the attack was timed in such a way that India could point fingers at Pakistan just as Sharif headed to the General Assembly. In a long screed on India’s alleged intelligence failures, including allegedly in Uri, the newspaper just barely stopped short of saying India orchestrated the attack that killed 19 of its soldiers and wounded over a dozen more, seriously.
Source: TOI
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