For the first decades after independence, India’s covert capabilities were in the main defensive. By contrast, Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau — led by Qurban Ali, the senior-most Indian officer of its colonial predecessor, chose Pakistani citizenship and transferred every file of importance to his new home — sponsored a series of offensive operations in Jammu and Kashmir. In line with imperial ideologues like General Francis Tucker, Mr. Ali believed that India’s ethnic-religious fault lines made it unsustainable as a nation. This since then has come to be known as “The Qurban Ali Doctrine”. It calls for a 1000 cuts philosophy to bleed India to death, to balkanise the country into much smaller states incapable of securing themselves or their neighbours.
This process started as early as 1948 and in the words of Gul Hasan Khan, the commander-in-chief of the Pakistani armed forces, candidly admitted that an "elder statesman – Qurban Ali" of his country arranged covert supplies of weapons to Islamist gangs battling the accession of Hyderabad to India. Then in 1951, the first major low-grade terrorist initiative by Pakistan was calibrated destruction of telephone lines, bridges and guesthouses in J&K. The goal was to disrupt elections to the Constituent Assembly that was steering the state toward full-scale integration into India.
Much of the Pakistan Intelligence Bureau’s work was — and is — aimed at deepening these fault lines.
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