The Print: Pakistan foreign minister was in Delhi on 26/11. India’s only ‘retribution’ was expelling him
When the shooting began in Mumbai, just after 9 p.m. on 26 November, High Commissioner Satyabrata Pal was in Delhi for the visit of Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Pakistan’s new foreign minister. Qureshi himself was giving a pre-dinner media interview to CNN-IBN’s Suhasini Haider at Pakistan House, the residence of Pakistan’s high commissioner, Shahid Malik, when the news of the terror attacks broke on the evening of 26/11. The interview was never aired.
Qureshi should normally have been dining with his host, but India’s EAM, Pranab Mukherjee, had decided not to host a dinner for him, only a high tea. As the visit was being planned, Malik had joked that he would take his minister to Wimpy for a meal, since India was not hosting a formal dinner. Malik eventually did host an official dinner at his residence for both delegations; National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon and High Commissioner Satyabrata Pal were among those present.
The Indian minister seemed to have had a premonition about things to come; he could have been caught in the awkward position of breaking bread with a Pakistani minister as Pakistani terrorists sprayed bullets in Mumbai. Mukherjee had, however, agreed to have lunch with Qureshi the next day in Chandigarh; they had been invited for a round table discussion on India–Pakistan agricultural cooperation, by the Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development. The centre, headed by Rashpal Malhotra, where Manmohan Singh was one of the founders, also worked on bringing the ‘two Punjabs’ closer.
The talks earlier that day at Hyderabad House had gone off well. Mukherjee had announced to spirited applause at the post-meeting press conference that cricketing ties between the countries would resume. In the car ride back to his hotel, Qureshi exulted over the day’s proceedings and told Malik that they were going through perhaps the best period in bilateral relations. He had spoken too soon, the good times would last about three hours. After the engagements with Qureshi, Mukherjee left Hyderabad House that evening for his office in South Block. At around 9 p.m., his staff alerted him to breaking news on TV, of unfolding violence in Mumbai. Mukherjee watched the news in South Block, ‘shocked to see the audacity and scale of the attack’, and returned home only around midnight ‘but could hardly take my eyes off the TV’. Millions of Indians were up watching in horror, as the terror attacks played out live on television screens through the night. The body count mounted, as smoke and fire billowed from the rooms of Mumbai’s landmark hotels—the Taj Mahal Palace and the Oberoi, and other targeted buildings. The day was later dubbed 26/11, echoing the trauma of New York’s 9/11 seven years earlier.
The next morning, Mukherjee cancelled his visit to Chandigarh, but Qureshi decided to proceed with his scheduled programme to Jaipur, Ajmer, and Chandigarh. The siege of the hotels continued, as security forces tried to neutralize the ten Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s foreign minister was still holding meetings in India. A bizarre twist to the crisis diplomacy came when President Asif Zardari received a ‘threatening call’ from someone he thought was India’s EAM, Mukherjee. It turned out the hoax caller, who also tried to threaten Pranab Mukherjee and US leaders, was Omar Sheikh, the murderer of Daniel Pearl who had been released in the 1999 hijack drama and who was now lodged in a jail in Pakistan. He had managed to fool Zardari and hoped to con a few other world leaders or at least to alleviate some boredom in the Hyderabad jail.
President Zardari called PM Manmohan Singh on the morning of 27 November to condemn the attacks and surprisingly, promised to send the DG of the ISI, Shuja Pasha, to help in the investigation.
On the evening of 27 November, just before Qureshi addressed a group of journalists at the Women’s Press Club in New Delhi, Shahid Malik’s phone buzzed. It was Pakistan’s army chief, Kayani. The Pakistani diplomat was given the delicate job of relaying the army chief’s instructions to his foreign minister to walk back the rash offer made by his president. This was an announcement Qureshi made early in his presser—the visit of the Pakistani intelligence chief was not imminent.
During the media meet, Malik received another call. This time, it was the office of India’s external affairs minister, demanding that Qureshi be pulled out of whatever he was doing for an urgent conversation. When Qureshi came on the line, Mukherjee sounded furious. He read out a ‘speaking note’ prepared by Foreign Secretary Menon, concluding: ‘Mr Minister, no purpose will be served by your continuing to stay in India in these circumstances. I advise you to leave immediately. My official aircraft is available to take you back home whenever you find convenient. But it would be desirable if a decision is taken as quickly as possible.’
T. C. A. Raghavan, then heading the Pakistan desk at MEA, was woken up at 4 a.m. the next morning to be told that a Pakistan Air Force aircraft was on its way to Delhi to take the minister home. He had an hour to organize the flight clearances. India’s foreign minister had just politely expelled his counterpart in the throes of an official visit. Both the ignorance and the irrelevance of Pakistan’s civilian leadership was clear to India, but the gesture was important. Since he was already in Delhi, Pal did not need to be ‘recalled,’ or even called in for consultations. The expulsion of High Commissioner Shahid Malik was not considered necessary; this time, India had effectively expelled Pakistan’s foreign minister. Mukherjee recalled later:
As usual, Pakistan was in denial mode and some Pakistani leaders maintained that the terrorists were non-state actors. My response was sharp and strong. When asked by the media, I asserted ‘non-state actors do not come from heaven. They are located in the territory of a particular country.’ In this case, we had evidence that the terrorists came from Karachi port. They were dropped in mid-sea with a smaller vessel. They captured an Indian fishing vessel, killed the crew, and finally killed the pilot, upon reaching Mumbai coast.
But asking Pakistan’s minister to leave India was not retribution enough. As the attacks played out live on TV channels, 175 people lay dead, including nine terrorists and a few foreign citizens—Israeli, American, British. The impact on the national psyche was deep. The anger was mounting and the national mood was to ‘do something’. Even though the complicity of the Pakistan state had not been established, the Opposition BJP blamed the UPA government for its soft stance on Pakistan.
A pained Prime Minister Manmohan Singh addressed the nation on 27 November: ‘We will take up strongly with our neighbours that the use of their territory for launching attacks on us will not be tolerated, and that there would be a cost if suitable measures are not taken by them.’7 While India’s Pakistan policy has largely been run by prime ministers, Pranab Mukherjee, with his heft in the cabinet of Manmohan Singh, was an exception. He was detailing neighbourhood policy, even though he would consult with the PM frequently.
In one meeting, in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, as Foreign Secretary Menon, High Commissioner Pal, and Joint Secretary Raghavan sat across the table in his South Block room, he asked his advisers what should be done. After a brief silence, Menon said India could target the LeT headquarters in Muridke with a cruise missile. Visibly startled, Mukherjee paused to clean his glasses, then thanked the officers to signal that the meeting was over. Menon later confirmed that he had for a while argued for ‘immediate visible retaliation of some sort, either against the LeT in Muridke, in Pakistan’s Punjab province, or their camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, or against the ISI, which was clearly complicit.’ But ‘on sober reflection and in hindsight’, he was convinced that restraint was the right choice. While the public debate on policy choices was angry, with an overwhelming sense that
India’s reaction to Mumbai fell short, experts were trying to bring out the nuances of India’s policy considerations. Menon argued that the choice was made to use restraint and diplomacy at that point for multiple reasons, including the fact that a new civilian leadership had taken over in Pakistan which had nothing to do with the planning or execution of the attacks. Also, India could take the high moral ground and put global pressure on Pakistan to clamp down on its terrorist activities.
Perhaps a key factor informing India’s restraint was also the civil nuclear deal arrived at with the US, after a great deal of diplomatic manoeuvring. The deal could be jeopardized if India went into a full-scale war with Pakistan in a nuclear environment. India’s preoccupation with other geopolitical priorities, like the global economic crisis, stayed its hand in dealing with the terrorism problem in a firmer way.
In his 2016 book, Menon noted presciently that the policy would change with the next major terror attack:
All the same, should another such attack be mounted from Pakistan, with or without visible support from the ISI or the Pakistan Army, it would be virtually impossible for any government of India to make the same choice again. Pakistan’s prevarications in bringing the perpetrators to justice and its continued use of terrorism as an instrument of state policy after 26/11 have ensured this. In fact, I personally consider some public retribution and a military response inevitable. The circumstances of November 2008 no longer exist and are unlikely to be replicated in the future.
The policy dilemma was not new. A fierce debate had taken place in 2001 after the brazen attacks on India’s Parliament and would be reprised several times in the next decade after each act of terror; the response, however, would now be of a different order. In 2001, India had responded to the terror attack with Operation Parakram, a credible threat of conventional force, while the nuclear threshold was still being debated. The then NSA, Brajesh Mishra, had later argued that this was a one-off response pattern that could not be credibly repeated. In 2008, the countries were already a decade into being nuclear, with doctrines and systems in place; this was arguably a time when India could have found this space to give a ‘sub-conventional’ response to Pakistan through a military operation.
Another former NSA, Menon, had later assessed that the posture of restraint of 2008 would not be effective if repeated in the future. The debate continues to this day on whether India’s restraint gave the wrong message to the terrorists and their backers after Mumbai, about India’s high threshold of tolerance for terror. An attack then on Muridke, the headquarters of the LeT, may not have resulted in huge operational success, but could have been an important signal to Pakistan and the world of India’s resolve. In case India had reacted in 2008 the way it did in 2016 or 2019, with a surgical or air strike, a strong Indian response would have entered the security calculus of Pakistan and served as a disincentive for the Pakistan army’s support of India-focused militant groups. A decisive strike on a terrorist base like Muridke could have acted as an effective deterrent for the attacks India would face for a decade.
This book excerpt of “Anger management” was published in The print.