Jugular Vein: Post-Pahalgam massacre, India asks IMF to review Pak loans
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: A week before the Pahalgam massacre, when Pakistan Army chief Asim Munir reinvoked Muhammed Ali Jinnah’s” Two Nation Theory”, and said that Jammu and Kashmir was Islamabad’s ‘jugular vein,’ he may not have realized that he inadvertently gave India a clue: that International Monetary Fund (IMF) was, in fact, Pakistan’s jugular vein!
That’s where New Delhi is focusing now.
The media reported on Friday that New Delhi has asked the global lender to review its loans to Pakistan.
Almost a failed and bankrupt state, jackbooted by its discredited army since 1947, Pakistan received a USD 7 billion bailout from the IMF last year to support its tottering USD 350 billion economy. In March, it also got a new USD 1.3 billion loan to help with climate issues. Pakistan says these loans helped it avoid a financial crisis.
India has now told the IMF that it is worried about the fate of these loans and wants the lender to review them.
India and Pakistan have announced a raft of measures after the last week’s attack on Hindu tourists at Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir killed 26 men and there is a fear that the latest crisis between the nuclear-armed rivals could spiral into a major military conflict.
The IMF programme is critical to the basket-case economy of Pakistan, which claimed it has stabilized under the bailout that helped it stave off a default threat.
The advisor to Pakistan’s finance minister said the IMF programme is “well on track.”
“The latest review has been done well and we are completely on track,” Khurram Shehzad said, adding that Pakistan had “very productive” spring meetings with financial institutions in Washington.
“We did about 70 meetings … interest has been very high for investing and supporting Pakistan as the economy turns around,” Shehzad said.
The soaring tensions between the two countries has drawn global attention and calls for cooling tempers.
US Vice President JD Vance said on Thursday that Washington hoped Pakistan would cooperate with India to hunt down Pakistan-based assailants.
New Delhi’s request came a week after the Pakistan-sponsored Islamist terrorists’ deadly attack on tourists in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir, killing at least 26 tourists and wounding many more.
India said it identified the terrorists and two of them are from Pakistan. However, as it did before, Pakistan routinely denied any role in the attack and wants a so-called ‘neutral investigation’ which no country, except China, has supported.
Strongly reacting to the April 22 massacre, India suspended a key river water supply deal, the Indus Waters Treaty (1960), with Pakistan. Islamabad also suspended the Simla Agreement. The two countries shut their airspace for each other’s airlines.
Meanwhile, Pakistan admitted its role in funding and supporting the terror activities from its soil and defined it as a mistake from which they have learnt.
Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) chairman and former Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said that Pakistan made mistakes in the past by having ties with terrorist groups, but the country has now taken steps to correct those mistakes.
In an interview with Sky News on Thursday, he said, “It is not a secret that Pakistan has a past… As a result, we have suffered, Pakistan has suffered. We have gone through wave after wave of extremism. But as a result of what we suffered, we also learned our lessons. We have gone through internal reforms to address this problem.”
His comments came soon after Defence Minister Khawaja Asif also admitted in a separate TV news channel interview that Pakistan had supported terror groups in the past. Asif said, “We have been doing this dirty work for the United States for about three decades… and the West, including Britain… That was a mistake, and we suffered for that…”
Bilawal agreed with this view, saying, “As far as Pakistan’s history is concerned, it is history and it is not something that we are partaking in today. It is true that it is an unfortunate part of our history.”
