New Delhi: Hours after Pakistan’s national security advisor claimed that India is planning a surgical strike on his country, India’s chief of the National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) has ridiculed the claim.
Pooh-poohing Pakistan NSA Moeed Yusuf’s claims, NSAB chairperson PS Raghavan told ETV Bharat on the phone: “Pakistan is just creating an excuse for some nefarious activity against India. It is a well-known trademark that we have seen for the last 73 years.”
On Friday, Moeed Yusuf, who advises the Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on national security, tweeted: “As @SMQureshiPTI has just informed international media in UAE, we have very specific and reliable intelligence of Indian plans to attempt surgical strikes against Pakistan.”
“We have informed the world that we know exactly what India wants to do. We also know that some capitals were already aware,” read another of his tweets.
Pakistan’s foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi tweets as @SMQureshiPTI. He is on a two-day official visit to the UAE.
Tilak Devasher, NSAB member and an expert on Pakistan also told ETV Bharat: “Pakistan’s foreign minister’s ongoing UAE visit is a failure and there is a need to divert public attention from domestic problems pursuing Pakistan, so I see it as an attempt to salvage or retrieve the situation.”
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Devasher also tweeted: “Strange that Pak Adviser on Nat Security should be revealing ‘specific and reliable intelligence’ on social media. Looks like anticipatory bail for an operation that Pakistan is contemplating & would then try & pin blame on India. Such tricks are unlikely to work.”
The NSAB comprises eminent national security experts outside of the government that advises the National Security Council headed by the PM with the National Security Adviser as its secretary.
For quite some time, Pakistan has been alleging about an Indian plot of incisive military action against it.
The ‘surgical strike’ lexicon has stayed with the Pakistani establishment after the Indian Army’s Special Forces commandos, in an unprecedented move, had carried out a series of surgical strikes after crossing the Line of Control (LoC) on the intervening night of September 28-29, 2016 after receiving “specific and very definite” inputs about terrorists at launch pads in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) planning attacks against India.
The surgical strikes were carried out about 10 days after a major terror attack on an army camp in Uri in Kashmir.
On Friday Indian army sources also denied and claimed as untrue Pakistan’s allegations that Indian troops ‘deliberately targeted a United Nations vehicle with two military observers on board’ in the ‘Chirikot sector’ on the LoC.
