By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Foreign Office has dismissed as “baseless” a claim by India’s home minister that a terror network dismantled in a nationwide crackdown last week was backed by Islamabad, accusing New Delhi of waging a “malicious campaign” against its neighbour to distract from problems closer to home.
The rebuttal, issued on Monday, followed a social media post from Indian home minister Amit Shah in which he said security forces had “destroyed” a group known as the Shahzad Bhatti Network, describing it as backed by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Shah said the operation, carried out on 12 August across 14 states, had resulted in the arrest of more than 200 alleged operatives and thwarted plans for “subversive attacks” timed to coincide with India’s Independence Day celebrations three days later.
Although Pakistan’s Foreign Office did not name Shah directly, its statement left little doubt about who it was addressing. “Pakistan strongly rejects the allegations made by India’s home minister, attempting to link Pakistan with certain arrests in India,” said Tahir Andrabi, the Foreign Office spokesperson, adding that the claims amounted to “yet another demonstration of India’s malicious campaign against Pakistan to divert attention from its domestic security challenges and to blame Pakistan for narrow domestic political gains”.
Andrabi went further, characterising India as “a repressive state, brutally oppressing its minorities and silencing dissent” at home while “exporting terror and abetting terrorists” abroad. He said India’s allegations could not obscure what he called its own record of “state-sponsored terrorism, targeted assassinations, and subversion in foreign territories”, and insisted Islamabad had “repeatedly shared evidence” of Indian involvement in destabilising Pakistan.
As has become customary in such exchanges, the spokesperson invoked the case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, a former Indian naval officer who has spent close to a decade in Pakistani custody after being convicted by a military court of espionage and sabotage. Andrabi described Jadhav as “undeniable proof of India’s direct involvement in subversion and terrorism in Pakistan”. India has always maintained that Jadhav, who it says had retired from the navy, was seized from Iran rather than arrested on Pakistani soil, and has repeatedly sought his release; the International Court of Justice ruled in 2019 that Pakistan had denied him consular access but stopped short of ordering his release.
The Foreign Office called on the international community to reject what it described as India’s baseless accusations and to instead hold New Delhi to account for terrorism it said was sponsored by the Indian state across the region.
The row was triggered by Shah’s announcement, made on X, that coordinated raids across 14 states on 12 August had broken up the Shahzad Bhatti Network, which Indian authorities allege has links to Pakistan’s ISI. According to figures later confirmed by India’s home ministry, the operation led to 253 detentions, more than 200 of which resulted in formal arrests, with the largest numbers recorded in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi and Punjab.
Monday’s exchange is only the latest in a long-running pattern of mutual recrimination between the two nuclear-armed neighbours, who have fought several wars since partition in 1947 and remain locked in dispute over Kashmir. Pakistan has consistently accused India of financing and directing separatist and militant groups on its soil, including the Balochistan Liberation Army and factions of the Pakistani Taliban, while India has long accused Pakistan’s security establishment of nurturing militant networks aimed at Indian territory.
The Foreign Office statement echoed arguments Pakistan’s diplomats have made before on the international stage. Last month, addressing the UN Security Council, Pakistan’s first secretary Ansar Shah accused India of using accusations of terrorism as cover for what he called its own sponsorship of violence against Pakistan, alleging that groups including the Pakistani Taliban and the Balochistan Liberation Army had killed thousands of civilians and security personnel on Pakistani territory. He also accused India of carrying out extrajudicial killings beyond its borders, including in North America — a reference to allegations, which India denies, of Indian state involvement in the killing of a Sikh separatist leader in Canada and a foiled plot in the United States. Shah added that India was itself “a perpetrator of state terrorism” in Kashmir, where he said the population’s right to self-determination continued to be denied in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.
Neither government has offered independent verification of the claims made against the other, and both have a long history of trading similar accusations without resolution. The exchange is likely to add further strain to a relationship already marked by minimal diplomatic contact and periodic military confrontation along their shared border.
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