India to US: Time to teach Pakistan a lesson

New Delhi: India strongly raised the issue of Pakistan sponsoring terror outfits operating in the Kashmir Valley with the United States, saying that America must go beyond merely freezing the financial assets of such groups and declare their top operatives as global terrorists.

Sources said that at the delegation-level talks during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s just-concluded visit to the US, India stressed that the US should use its "political and economic clout" to ensure that Pakistan does not let terror organisations targeting India operate out of its soil. The US needs to reiterate to Pakistan that it should not let outfits like the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammed operate from there as they are directly involved in terror activities in the Kashmir Valley and are being backed by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, the Indian delegation told the US.

India and the US had a detailed discussion on the changing terror scenario in the Indian sub-continent, particularly in the wake of the US pulling out its troops from Afghanistan.

The Indian delegation informed their counterparts that India had given incontrovertible evidence on how these terror outfits were operating with impunity in Pakistan and their plans to step up attacks on India.

“What we want America to do is to exert more pressure on Pakistan to ensure that our neighbour cuts down support to Lashkar and Jaish. Though the US has been cooperating with us by banning such outfits and declaring people like Hafiz Saeed and Dawood Ibrahim as global terrorists, it has to raise the bar now,” a top security official said. With the US delegation seemingly convinced with India’s argument, the Indian agencies are likely to seek the assistance of the US to get Dawood Ibrahim extradited to make him face trial in Mumbai serial blasts and other cases.