Union home secretary RK Singh may have saved the country from a fast spreading disaster by candidly sharing with the nation the findings of cyber experts. According to them, most of the bulk hate messages originated from Pakistan. He was also realistic enough to admit that Pakistan will deny any role in it.

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In most earlier cases of Pakistan-brokered aggression , the government’s public efforts concentrated on convincing people that state actors from Pakistan were not involved; be it 26/11 or other such cases. But by taking the nation into confidence, the home secretary has stymied the rumour machine, and to some extent exposed Pakistan for what it is. Ironically, the troubles in Assam seem to have started just around the time India was finalising further trade concessions for Pakistan.

The speed with which the communal colour was being given to the events in Assam was worrying. But what caught everyone by surprise was the methodical violence against police at Azad Maidan in Mumbai. This was followed quickly by targeting of people from the northeast in metropolitan cities.

Obviously, an operation of this scale and size cannot be planned and executed by a single individual or even a group sitting in Pakistan. For example, how would they be able to access thousands of mobile numbers in different Indian cities to send their messages to? Even if that data was available, how could they plan violence, and the threat of it, in so many different locations with military precision?

This isn’t the first time either that Pakistan has tried to rupture the Indian secular fabric. But must we merely be in a preventive mode? Isn’t there some way of cyber retaliation? After all, the entire concept of law and justice is based on the principle of punishment for a crime. Had it been the US or UK they would have also insisted on punitive compensation as they did with Libya in the case of Lockerbie. They might even have imposed sanctions if they felt that their national interests were adversely affected.

Look at the evidence India has so far. Many lakhs have been rendered homeless in Assam. About two lakh people are reported to have left their jobs or their college courses and rushed back to their homes in Assam. All this imposes huge financial costs on individuals. It also means disruption and losses for the business establishments they were employed with. The government too would be burdened with extra financial costs of settling refugees and compensation to the families of dead and injured besides that for the property that was burnt or looted.

Instead of ensuring that Pakistan pays for its mischief, we are in talks with them to export 500 MW of electricity. This, despite regular outages of electricity in energy-starved India. One-sided generosity is often taken for granted; indeed as the very right of the recipient.

Moreover, this isn’t the first time that Pakistan has acted inimically towards India. Its objective of bleeding India by a thousand cuts has remained just that over the last six decades; only the forms have varied.

For example, there was merely the hint of a plague scare in India in 1994. But what did Pakistan do? It closed the Wagah border, banned all Indian imports, stopped Indian flights from landing in Pakistan, quarantined four Indian ships outside Karachi port and gave this the widest possible publicity. This had the desired effect and for a few weeks the entire world seemed to have boxed India into an isolation ward. Eventually, the ‘plague’ turned out to be a small scare. The WHO confirmed it was not an epidemic. But the damage was done. Tourism to India dropped drastically, hotels suffered losses, and business lost orders. Had Pakistan not pro-actively scared the world, India and its people would not have suffered the financial losses that it did.

Nehru is often blamed for policies that led to the appeasement of Pakistan, but in a letter to CMs in 1957 he wrote, “No government in that country (Pakistan) has any other policy except of fear and hatred of India and till that ceases the future is dark.”

It stopped fearing India when it became a nuclear power, and it turned hatred to its advantage by mobilising terror groups. There is no way that it is going to relinquish these two Brahmastras. Occasionally, it improvises and adds other instruments like cyber mischief to its armour.

Pakistan does all this by strategic choice. It is convinced that though India’s partition was destructive, it was not final. Its wanton aggression is in pursuit of that end game, and to keep India off balance. The question that we must ask ourselves is whether any other country would have continued with a business as usual approach under similar circumstances?

A former Ambassador, the writer is a novelist and an artist