PULWAMA, INDIA, Feb 16 (NNN-AGENCIES) —India has said it will ensure the “complete isolation” of Pakistan after a suicide bomber killed 46 paramilitary police in Indian-administered Kashmir.
It claims to have “incontrovertible evidence” of its neighbour’s involvement but has not provided it.
Pakistan denies any role in the attack by militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad, which is based on its soil.
Thursday’s bombing of the convoy was the deadliest attack on Indian forces in the region for decades.
Federal Minister Arun Jaitley said India would take “all possible diplomatic steps” to cut Pakistan off from the international community.
But a Pakistani minister has asked India to reveal their evidence, and offered to help them investigate the attack.
There has been an insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir since the late 1980s but violence has risen in recent years.
In the wake of the attack, authorities have imposed a curfew in parts of Hindu-majority Jammu city after an angry mob vandalised cars in a largely Muslim neighbourhood.
Both India and Pakistan claim all of Muslim-majority Kashmir but only control parts of it.
India says that Pakistan has long given safe haven to Jaish-e-Mohammad militants and accused it of having a “direct hand” in Thursday’s attack.
Jaitley set out India’s determination to hold Pakistan to account when speaking to reporters after attending a security meeting early on Friday.
He also confirmed that India would revoke Most Favoured Nation status from Pakistan, a special trading privilege granted in 1996.
Pakistan said it was gravely concerned by the bombing but firmly rejected allegations that it was responsible.
The country’s Information Minister, Fawad Chaudry, asked India to show its evidence, and offered to help the investigation into the attack.
“This needs evidence,” he told broadcaster CNN-News18. “This needs an investigation.”
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a speech that those behind the attack would pay a “heavy price”, leading many analysts to expect further action from Delhi.
After a 2016 attack on an Indian army base that killed 19 soldiers, Delhi said it carried out a campaign of “surgical strikes” in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, across the de facto border.
The bomber used a vehicle packed with explosives to ram a convoy of 78 buses carrying Indian security forces on the heavily guarded Srinagar-Jammu highway about 20km from the capital, Srinagar.
There have been at least 10 suicide attacks since 1989 but this is only the second to use a vehicle.
Prior to Thursday’s bombing, the deadliest attack on Indian security forces in Kashmir this century came in 2002, when militants killed at least 31 people at an army base in Kaluchak, near Jammu, most of them civilians and relatives of soldiers.
The latest attack comes amid a spike in violence in Kashmir that came about after Indian forces killed a popular militant, 22-year-old Burhan Wani, in 2016.
More than 500 people were killed in 2018 – including civilians, security forces and militants – the highest such toll in a decade.
Most recently, the group was blamed for attacking an Indian air force base in 2016 near the border in Punjab state. Seven Indian security personnel and six militants were killed.
The attack has also been widely condemned around the world, including by the US and the UN Secretary General. — NNN-AGENCIES
