New Delhi: In a sign of rising tensions between India and Pakistan following the Pulwama terror attack, Islamabad on Monday called back its envoy to New Delhi for consultations.
Pakistan high commissioner Sohail Mahmood’s departure follows India summoning its high commissioner Ajay Bisaria from Islamabad last week for discussions in New Delhi after a suicide bomber drove a vehicle packed with explosives into a bus ferrying CRPF personnel in Pulwama, Jammu and Kashmir, on Thursday.
“We have called back our High Commissioner in India for consultations. He left New Delhi this morning,” Pakistan foreign office spokesman Mohammed Faisal said in a Twitter post.
On Saturday, Bisaria met senior officials in the Indian foreign ministry for discussions. The decision to call him for consultations was one of the decisions taken during Friday's meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Securit, where the Indian government decided to initiate steps to isolate Pakistan diplomatically.
Following the meeting, India called in top diplomats of all permanent members of the UN Security Council in New Delhi, as well as heads of diplomatic missions of South Asian countries—besides other key nations—and briefed them on the Pulwama attack. Modi also authorized Indian security forces to craft an appropriate response on their terms and at a timing of their choice.
On Monday, with visiting Argentinian President Mauricio Macri at his side, Modi said that the “brutal attack on Pulwama shows that the time for talks has gone".
“Now all countries need to unite and take concrete steps to defeat terrorism. Hesitation to act against terrorists and their supporters is promoting terrorism,” Modi said.
According to two Indian government officials, the calling back of envoys can be read in different ways. “Ambassadors and envoys are called in for consultations all the time. It is of course the context that matters. In this case, calling our envoy back to New Delhi for discussions is in the context of the Pulwama attack that is a matter of grave concern to us,” said one of the two officials cited above, requesting anonymity.
Last year, Pakistan had called back its high commissioner to India for consultations after Islamabad complained that its diplomats and their families were being harassed and intimidated in New Delhi and that India had not taken any action on complaints. The Indian foreign ministry had then described the move as “routine", with spokesman Raveesh Kumar saying that it was “pretty normal for the high commissioner to brief its foreign office.”
The second official cited above recalled that in the aftermath of the 26/11 Mumbai attack, India had frequently called in its then high commissioner Satyabrata Pal in Pakistan for consultations.
New Delhi at that point mounted a major diplomatic offensive briefing all foreign envoys present in New Delhi on the evidence gathered against Pakistan’s involvement in the planning, plotting and execution of the attack on Mumbai in which 10 terrorists set sail from Pakistan’s Karachi port and targeted multiple locations after landing in Mumbai. The attacks claimed 166 lives, including six Americans.
It was, however, in 2001 that India took some of its toughest diplomatic steps that included recalling its then high commissioner Vijay Nambiar from Islamabad.
“Recall means there is no ambassador-level representation in a country, which can be taken as a serious expression of protest,” the second official said. This followed the attack on the Indian Parliament on 13 December 2001 by terrorists of the Pakistan based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) groups.
New Delhi had also reduced the number of its mission staff in Islamabad by half—110 to 55—to protest the Parliament attack, besides cutting off road, rail and air links with Pakistan and mobilizing its Indian troops on the border.
New Delhi had also banned Pakistan’s national carrier from using its air space.
Pakistan too retaliated with reciprocal steps triggering international concerns over the possibility of a war breaking out. Both countries rolled back these measures in 2004 when they resumed normal diplomatic ties.
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