India demands Pakistan hand over suspects
By James Lamont in New Delhi and Farhan Bokhari in London
Published: December 2 2008 10:05 | Last updated: December 2 2008 10:05
India on Tuesday appeared to take a military strike in response to the attacks on Mumbai off the table after it served Pakistan with a request to hand over 20 hardened militants.
”Nobody is talking of military action [against Pakistan],” Pranab Mukherjee, India’s foreign minister, told reporters yesterday in New Delhi.
The comment was made after US president-elect Barack Obama said last night that India had the right to defend itself from attack following last week’s strike on its financial capital. It also comes the day before Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, arrives in New Delhi in a bid to try to calm rising tensions in the region.
Mr Mukherjee said his government was seeking 20 of India’s most wanted terrorists.
”We have asked for the arrest and handover of those persons who are settled in Pakistan and who are fugitive of Indian law,”
The request, made on Monday night, is the first sign of the intense pressure that India is expected to exert on Pakistan, following the Mumbai attacks, which Indian authorities blame on Pakistani militants. The suspects are possibly linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba.
But few consider the New Delhi’s demand realistic since the militants are on the run and possibly not even in Pakistan.
The list includes Dawood Ibrahim, who is held responsible for the 1993 bomb attack on Mumbai; Masood Azhar, believed to have been behind the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament buildings; and Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba.
An Indian government spokesman said Pakistan needed to react in a way that showed it genuinely wanted a qualitative shift for the better in relations with India in the wake of the terror attacks.
Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Pakistan’s foreign minister, offered Islamabad’s hand of co-operation in bringing those responsible to justice, and appealed to India not to engage in a blame game.
But Pakistani officials and analysts warned they saw little prospect for extraditing their nationals to India unless this was done as a bilateral process where Pakistan also receives some of the people it has asked Delhi to hand over.
”We also have our own list of people and the Indians know that. This can move forward as part of a bilateral process” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a respected Pakistani scholar on security and political affairs.
”Unfortunately, India is going over ground that we have covered before. Right now, what we need is something entirely new rather than the path we have already treaded in south Asia which is that of just pointing fingers on the other side”.
In the past, Pakistan’s government has said it would consider extraditing Indian nationals suspected of criminal activity, but never Pakistanis.
Western diplomats in Islamabad said, it appeared unlikely that Pakistan will comply with India’s demands on the extraditions, though it was increasingly likely that the pressure from India might prompt a new crackdown in Pakistan.
”Handing over people in the way that the Indians are demanding, will lead to loss of face for Pakistan, it is something politically undigestable” said one.
”But given the pressure which is also coming from the Americans, there is a chance of a new crackdown in Pakistan, action taken against groups affiliated with Lashkar-e-Taiba” said one.
FT