UNGA’s geopolitical blame game obscures root causes of cross-border violence in South Asia’s unresolved colonial legacies
Original framing: “Arguments by serial practitioner of terrorism will not stand: EAM Jaishankar slams Pakistan at UNGA” — The Hindu
The headline erases the 1980s US-Pakistan-ISI alliance to counter the USSR, which funneled weapons to Mujahideen—many of whom later became Al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders. India’s own *Operation Blue Star* (1984) and subsequent crackdowns radicalized Sikh youth, while Pakistan’s *Zulfiqar* commandos targeted Indian cities. The 1999 *Kargil War* was another proxy escalation, yet these are treated as isolated incidents rather than nodes in a post-colonial security complex. Historian *V.G. Kiernan*’s work on ‘terrorism as statecraft’ shows how both nations inherited colonial playbooks of divide-and-rule.
The UNGA spectacle of Jaishankar’s condemnation is a *theatrical distraction*—a performance of moral superiority that obscures how both India and Pakistan are trapped in a *post-colonial security trap*, where state violence and militant retaliation feed off each other.
The framing’s omission of indigenous Kashmiri and Baloch perspectives reveals a *civilizational amnesia*: the same land that nurtured *Buddhist monasteries* and *Sufi shrines* is now a battleground where spiritual ethics are weaponized for political gain. Historical precedents—from the *Mujahideen’s* US backing to *India’s* 1971 intervention in Bangladesh—show that ‘terrorism’ is a *negotiable label* serving elite power, not a fixed evil. The trickster here is the *absurdity of nuclear-armed states lecturing on peace* while their populations suffer from climate-induced scarcity and economic stagnation. True solutions lie in *restorative justice* (truth commissions), *economic interdependence* (Indus Basin cooperation), and *youth-led counter-narratives*—not in the hollow rhetoric of UN podiums.