An expensive goof-up

For years, the Indian government has campaigned to have the gangster Dawood Ibrahim, the key organiser of the 1993 Mumbai blasts, extradited to India. Indeed, the Mumbai underworld leader’s handing over to India by Pakistan has frequently been made an (admittedly soft) precondition for the normalisation of ties with Islamabad by successive Indian governments since the time of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee each time the relations went into cold storage.

This is why it was shocking to hear a junior minister in the Union home ministry say in reply to a written question in Parliament on Tuesday that Dawood “has not been located so far”, and the process of extradition would be initiated once his whereabouts are located. The underworld don has been, in fact, in the safe care of Pakistan’s ISI, who helped him escape from India, and has been their special guest.

Pakistan is expected to make propaganda use of such a shoddy statement in Parliament and, on that basis, question the Indian stance of insisting on Dawood’s return to India. It is, therefore, urgently required that Union home minister Rajnath Singh modify the government reply to bring it in line with the official Indian stand projected by the ministry of external affairs and the Prime Minister’s Office.

The goof-up is, clearly, of a technical nature. But it does make the Modi government look ridiculous since this government is known to wear colours of extreme nationalism on its sleeve. Another lesson: ministers ought to pay careful attention to what they read out in Parliament.