A day after India blamed Islamabad for the attack on the Sunjuwan Army camp in Jammu, Pakistan Defence Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan on Tuesday warned that any aggression from New Delhi will be met with an equal and proportionate response.
“Pakistan will pay India in its own coin in case of any Indian misadventure,” Khan said. “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.”
On Monday, Indian Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said that Pakistan “will pay for this misadventure” that has killed six soldiers and a civilian. Security forces also killed three militants. Sitharaman had said that India has compiled evidence against the militants and will hand it over to Pakistan. “[Despite] giving dossiers after dossiers, Pakistan has not taken any action,” she had said, adding that Islamabad’s culpability in such attacks had been “proved over and over again”.
In response to Sitharaman’s allegations, her Pakistani counterpart said, “Instead of the knee-jerk reaction of blaming Pakistan without substantiation, India must answer for state-sponsored espionage against Pakistan.” Citing the Kulbhushan Jadhav case, Khan said such “living evidence” was proof for the world.
India has failed to deliver justice to the 42 Pakistanis who were murdered in the 2007 attack on the Samjhauta Express, Khan added. “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.”
Pakistani forces, backed completely by the country’s citizens, is “alive to all possibilities” and prepared to defend the country, he 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.”
Earlier on Sunday, Islamabad had rejected India’s assertion that the militants who attacked the Army camp came from Pakistan. The Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs had urged the international community to ensure that India refrains “from any misadventure across the Line of Control” and put pressure on it to resolve the Kashmir dispute peacefully.
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