India's hit-back scrambles Pak brains, mins cut sorry figure

One indication of how India's overhauled response calculus since Pahalgam has been scrambling Pak brains is how its ministers and politicians have been cutting a sorry figure on TV, prompting foreign secretary Vikram Misri to quip that they had been doing a far better job of presenting India's case than him.

Defence minister Khawaja Asif, in particular, has done so with laughable regularity. He single-handedly overturned a long tradition of Pakistan denying it had anything to do with sponsoring terrorism by admitting in an interview with Sky News that "we have been doing this dirty work for... about three decades." He said it's all been at the behest of the West, of the US and UK, but they're hardly likely to corroborate him.

Then, Bilawal Bhutto admitted on Sky News, "I don't think it's a secret Pakistan has a past as far as extremist groups are concerned." I&B minister Attaullah Tarar told Sky News there are no terrorist camps in Pakistan, only to be fact-checked by the interviewer.

In an interview with CNN , Asif was forced to confess that Pakistan's claims of shooting down IAF jets had no basis other than "social media". Asked if he had concrete evidence, he was left tongue-tied. The interviewer tried to put him on the mat on whether Pakistan had used Chinese equipment to counter the Indian strikes. He refused to answer. Clearly, it's okay for Pak mantris to diss their country but not China. That too tells you something.

Amid the numerous gaffes by its ministers, Pakistan also dismissed India's statement that it had launched drone and missile strikes on 15 Indian military sites, including Amritsar, Srinagar, and Chandigarh, branding them as "cinematic fabrications" aimed at deflecting domestic scrutiny. Pakistan also claimed that its forces had downed 25 Indian kamikaze drones and five jets.