NEW DELHI: India on Friday asked Pakistan to take strong action against wanted terrorist Masood Azhar, who is also the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief infamous for plotting and promoting terrorist activities on behalf of Pakistan’s intelligence wing Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Masood Azhar, a long-time terrorist proxy of the Pakistan military and orchestrator of the 2019 Pulwama attack, was designated a “global terrorist” by the United Nations in the same year.
New Delhi has consistently maintained Azhar’s presence in Pakistan, which Islamabad has always disputed, however, the JeM chief’s recent speech in a public gathering reportedly at Bahawalpur in Pakistan’s Punjab province has again laid bare ISI’s backing to Azhar.
Responding to reports on Azhar’s speech, ministry of external affairs (MEA) spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal on Friday said, “If the report is correct, then it has exposed Pakistan’s ‘duplicity’ in containing terrorist activities.”
“We demand that strong action be taken against him (Azhar) and he should be brought to justice. There has been denial that he is not there in Pakistan,” Jaiswal said.
Azhar, who Pakistan claims is in hiding in Afghanistan, is also among India’s most wanted and has – in the recent past – hit India hard.
In December 2001, members of his terrorist group, Jaish-e-Mohammed (literally, army of the Prophet) – JeM – attacked the Indian Parliament. After the audacious attack, the then-Atal Bihari Vajpayee government amassed an army at the border in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation that lasted several months.
In February 2019, the Narendra Modi government redrew its security response and conducted air strikes into Pakistani territory in Balakot. The response was an answer to Jaish’s suicide attack on a CRPF convoy in Pulwama that killed 40 soldiers.
Azhar was born to a poultry farmer in Bahawalpur. He studied at the Jamia Islamia at the Binori mosque in Karachi. There, he met students who were under the influence of leaders of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM), a terrorist organisation active in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Deeply influenced by the HuM, Azhar was 21, when he crossed over into Afghanistan to train as a terrorist.