Will pay India in its own coin: Islamabad

ISLAMABAD: A day after India threatened to make Pakistan pay for the attack on an army camp in Kashmir, Pakistan defence minister Khurram Dastgir Khan said any Indian aggression or misadventure would be “met with an equal and proportionate response”.

Responding to the warning from his Indian counterpart Nirmala Sitharaman, Khan said India should refrain from the “knee-jerk reaction of blaming Pakistan without substantiation”. “Pakistan will pay India in its own coin in case of any Indian misadventure. Any Indian aggression, strategic miscalculation, or misadventure regardless of its scale, mode, or location will not go unpunished and shall be met with an equal and proportionate response,” Khan said in a statement.

“We will defend robustly every inch of Pakistan’s soil. Instead of the knee-jerk reaction of blaming Pakistan without substantiation, India must answer for state-sponsored espionage against Pakistan. Living evidence in person of Kulbushan (Jadhav) is in front of the world,” he added, referring to the former Indian navyman in Pakistan’s custody.

India claims Jadhav retired from the navy and became a businessmen and that Pakistan picked him up from Iran where he was on business. Pakistan claims he is an Indian spy.

After visiting an army camp at Sunjuwan where six soldiers and a civilian were killed in a terror attack on Sunday, India’s defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman accused Pakistan of helping Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) militants launch the attack. She also warned that Pakistan “will have to pay for this misadventure”.

India has long asked for JeM chief Azhar to be designated an international terrorist by the UN, a move that has been blocked by Pakistan’s ally China.

But her Pakistani counterpart said in his statement that India had “failed to deliver justice to the 42 Pakistanis murdered in the Samjhauta Express” bombing in 2007.

“India is destabilising regional peace in word and deed, through irresponsible statements on nuclear deterrent and through its bloody, five-fold escalation in 2017 of attacks on unarmed civilians on the Line of Control and working boundary,” he added.

Pakistan’s armed forces are “alive to all possibilities, and prepared fully to defend our country’s territorial integrity”, Khan said.

“An aggressive Pak-centric doctrine and arrayed forces under a belligerent regime leading to possible strategic miscalculation by India will seriously impact the strategic stability in South Asia,” he added.

›

An aggressive Pakcentric doctrine and arrayed forces under a belligerent regime leading to possible strategic miscalculation by India will seriously impact the strategic stability in South Asia

K D KHAN , Pak defence minister