Union minister Prakash Javadekar on Friday trained his guns on the Congress party, a day after Pakistan minister Fawad Chaudhry admitted his country’s role in the Pulwama attack last year. Chaudhry, the science and technology minister in Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Cabinet, had said on the floor of parliament that Pakistan had entered India and beaten it on its own soil.
“Pakistan has admitted its hand behind Pulwama terror attack. Now, Congress and others who talked of conspiracy theories must apologise to the country,” Javadekar, the Union information and broadcasting minister, tweeted on Friday.
Chaudhry made the remarks as he responded to comments by Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) lawmaker Ayaz Sadiq. Sadiq had said that foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi was shaken at the possibility of an Indian attack to free Indian pilot Abhinandan Varthaman, who was shot down in a dogfight amid the standoff in February last year.
“The confidence with which he [Sadiq] said such things, that Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s legs were shaking because India was about to attack. Hum ne Hindustan ko ghus ke mara hai (We went inside India and hit them),” Chaudhry said, speaking in Urdu. “And our success in Pulwama, that was the success of this nation under Imran Khan’s leadership,” he added.
This is the first time a Pakistan minister has admitted what India has long maintained — that the country, directly and indirectly, encourages and supports terror groups that target India. Forty troopers of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were killed when a suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden car into a bus, part of a convoy of security forces, in Pulwama on February 14, 2019.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had attacked the Centre in February this year asking a series of questions in a veiled reference to the allegations that the BJP might have benefitted from the dastardly attacks. Senior Congress leader BK Hariprasad had also alleged there was a “match-fixing” between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan which allowed the Pulwama terror attack to occur.
Before this, the BJP’s national spokesperson Sambit Patra had attacked Gandhi and the Congress party. “Terrorism anywhere in the world has its roots in Pakistan. But it is irony that Rahul Gandhi and his associates from Congress party termed the Pulwama attack as a match-fixing between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Imran Khan. “This exposes that Congress and its leaders in their hatred for Modi have turned anti-India,” he had said on Thursday.
