KARACHI: As India continues its attempts to paint Pakistan as a sponsor of terrorism, two prominent Pakistani voices hit back, assuring the world that unlike India, Pakistan is not a “reckless and irresponsible state”, and assailing New Delhi for lying to its people about the Pahalgam attack.
In interviews broadcast on Wednesday, the country’s former foreign minister and the military’s chief spokesperson took the Indian claims head on, with the former even offering to work with New Delhi against the group that claimed the Pahalgam attack, if India was prepared to extend similar cooperation on the proscribed Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) and Majeed Brigade.
Speaking to Indian journalist Karan Thapar for The Wire, former foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari said that had Pakistan been involved in the Pahalgam attack, evidence would have surfaced and the perpetrators identified.
“As far as the Pahalgam terrorist attack is concerned, Pakistan has been willing to be part of an impartial international investigation; your government refused that,” he said.
ISPR chief accuses Ajit Doval of orchestrating terror attacks in Pakistan
“To this day, the Indian government has not shared with Pakistan, with the international community, with the Indian public… who exactly are these individuals that were involved in this terrorist attack that are from Pakistan?”
“It’s very uncomfortable for you that I point out the truth to the Indian public, that they have been lied to… that Pakistan was involved in this attack when we were not,” he asserted.
“The government has been unable to provide the evidence. That’s why during this war, the Indian media and the Indian government launched a campaign of disinformation to continue to bamboozle the people of India,” he added.
Thapar claimed that The Resistance Front — the group that supposedly claimed the Pahalgam attack — could not be proscribed by the UN due to resistance from China, at Pakistan’s behest.
To this, Mr Bhutto-Zardari responded that Pakistan was ready for any cooperation against this group, but reminded the interviewer that India had also blocked Islamabad’s attempts to have groups such as the BLA and Majeed Brigade outlawed by the UN.
The interview was quite combative – ‘quarrelsome’ by Thapar’s own admission – as Mr Bhutto-Zardari was frequently interrupted by the interviewer, even threatening to walk out if he was not allowed to respond.
Last week, Mr Bhutto-Zardari had told Al Jazeera that Pakistan had no objection to extraditing “individuals of concern” — namely Hafiz Saeed and Masood Azhar — to India as a confidence-building measure, as long as New Delhi showed willingness to cooperate in the process.
Asked about Saeed and the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Bilawal highlighted that the LeT chief was in prison and that the Mumbai attack case was still ongoing.
“The frustration that the courts and the Pakistani government and legal system are having with achieving a conviction is that India is refusing to participate in the trial and produce the witnesses necessary to record their statements,” the PPP chairman said.
He also spoke about Cold War roots of these banned organisations, saying that the fabric of such groups was connected to the Afghan jihad. Recalling his mother’s assassination, Mr Bhutto-Zardari told Thapar that he had personally been affected by terrorism.
When Thapar tried some ‘gotcha’ tactics by quoting Pervez Musharraf, Mr Bhutto-Zardari wryly reminded him that his party did not endorse the former military ruler’s policies.
Doval ‘chief architect’ of terror
Separately, speaking to Al Jazeera, Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) Director General Lt Gen Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry accused Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval of being the “chief architect” of terrorism in Pakistan and the region, as well as orchestrating transnational killings.
According to the ISPR chief, India provided funding, planning, intelligence and technical support to terrorist groups within Pakistan, such as Fitna al-Khawarij and Fitna al-Hindustan – the state’s terminology for the proscribed Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and BLA.
“Do you think it’s happening on its own? This terror enterprise cannot be sustained without the sponsorship of India,” he said. “Who is the chief architect? Mr Ajit Doval.”
“The strategy of India is to keep Pakistan embroiled in this menace of terrorism, so that its true power … potential is not realised,” Lt Gen Chaudhry said. “The power differential between the two countries keeps increasing, so that India can act as a regional hegemon, a bully and can dictate its own terms.”
The military’s spokesperson then added that terrorist commanders who had surrendered or been captured confessed that they received support from New Delhi, citing press conferences by captured Fitna al-Hindustan commanders and the case of captured Indian Navy officer Kulbhushan Jadhav.
“This evidence is all public. It is RAW,” he said.
“We must understand that terrorism is an internal problem of India as a result of the continuous oppression which India does to its minorities as part of its policy,” he said.
“Rather than addressing these grave injustices, inequalities, and doing soul searching, it (India) is very quick to put all the blame on Pakistan. Because of this senseless blame game that the Indians are resorting to, it is bringing the thresholds between India and Pakistan to dangerously low levels, to such levels that where one incident of terrorism or an act of violence can be turned into an act of war,” Lt-Gen Chaudhry said.
Published in Dawn, July 10th, 2025