Sherry Rehman’s bid to link India to Bondi Beach attack is Pakistan’s familiar but futile cover-up

Senator Sherry Rehman of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) took to the social media platform X on December 17 to associate India with terrorism. She wrote, “The #BondiBeachTerrorAttack continues to raise layers of questions about Indian links while the allegations made on Pakistan by Indian/Israeli media are backfiring at warp speed. Perhaps @FATFWatch should also look into growing support from India for terrorist groups operating internationally. The fingerprints are piling up.”

Sherry Rehman’s remarks are a crude and futile Pakistani attempt to put India in the dock on terrorism. They are part of Pakistan’s desire to demonstrate that India sponsors terrorism. This motivation springs from a never-to-be-achieved wish to shift the international community’s focus of sponsorship of terrorism from Pakistan to India.

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The fact is that the world continues, on the basis of solid evidence, to hold that Pakistan harbours terrorist groups and uses them in a calibrated manner against its neighbours. It also knows that these terrorist groups attract disaffected foreigners and indoctrinate them in Islamist thinking and train them to carry out terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings.

Sherry Rehman’s remarks obviously refer to Sajid Akram’s continuing to carry an Indian passport even though he had left his hometown, Hyderabad, in 1998 for Australia. Sajid Akram is 50 years old, while his son Naveed Akram is 24. He was born in Australia and is recovering from his injuries in a Sydney hospital. He is an Australian national. The father-and-son duo’s heinous attack on the Jewish group celebrating the Jewish festival of Hanukkah on December 14 is most worrying. It left fifteen persons dead. Sajid Akram was killed by the Australian police while carrying out the attack.

The fact that the perpetrators were father and son made it unique. This writer cannot recall a similar terrorist attack by a father-and-son twosome. There is no doubt that Indian intelligence agencies will fully cooperate with their Australian counterparts to get to the bottom of Sajid Akram’s antecedents. India needs to know if he had any connection with any individual or group in this country. However, that seems most unlikely.

The Telangana police, who have examined Sajid Akram’s family members, including, as per media reports, his mother and brother, who continue to live in Hyderabad, have publicly stated that he was ‘radicalised’ in Australia. Indeed, media reports also indicate that he had very little contact with his family in India.

The Philippines immigration authorities have confirmed that Sajid and Naveed were in the country from November 1 for a period of four weeks. They arrived in Manila and travelled to Davao, which is located on the island of Mindanao in the southern part of the country.

Philippine authorities are emphasising that there is no evidence of their receiving ‘military’ training in the Philippines. They are also asserting that the Mindanao Islamist insurgency has been severely ‘degraded’. All this may be true, but Mindanao has always been home to Islamist thinking, and a full investigation is required to examine why the Akrams stayed for almost a month in Davos and then, a fortnight after their return, carried out this terrible terrorist attack. Similarly, the Australians need to examine the inroads made by Islamist thinking leading to violent extremism in their own Muslim community.

Now, to return to Sherry Rehman and her social post.

Sherry Rehman began life as a journalist and achieved success at an early age. Later, she hitched her star to Benazir Bhutto and became close to her. After her death, Rehman remained a member of the PPP. The party came under the control of Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, and Rehman continued to do well politically. She became a minister and also had a term as leader of the opposition in the Senate.

Sherry Rehman takes an active interest in foreign affairs and also served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the US. She is involved in India-Pakistan track two diplomacy and has led Pakistani groups to dialogue with their Indian counterparts on this circuit. While subtly—and sometimes aggressively—propagating Pakistan’s viewpoint, she always projected an interest in the improvement of India-Pakistan relations.

Like other members of her country’s political class, she has always found it difficult to witness India’s progress and rise on the global stage. Hence, she has never missed an opportunity to cast aspersions on India and its democratic credentials. This has been particularly so since the coming to power of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The Pakistani political class has relentlessly attacked the Modi government’s policies towards the minorities and what it asserts is the rise of communalism in India. This has been especially so after the constitutional changes in Jammu and Kashmir on August 5, 2019. At that stage Prime Minister Imran Khan was in power, and he spewed venom on the Sangh Parivar. That should not be forgotten as his sisters try to enlist sympathy among Indians for the way the army under Field Marshal Asim Munir is treating him.

Sherry Rehman’s post also provides an occasion to note that the Pakistani political class has always supported the military establishment’s policy of using terrorism against India. This writer recalls telling the well-respected Pakistani politician and academic Mubashar Hasan in 1998 that as the two countries would engage in the Composite Dialogue, his country should give up the use of terrorism. His reply was shocking. He said, “If we do that, why should you talk to us?”

Thus, the Pakistani establishment always leads the political class on the country’s India policy. They act in concert, and currently the attempt is to show that India is sponsoring terrorism. These assertions are finding little traction in the world, but every opportunity, howsoever tenuous, is being used, as Sherry Rehman’s Bondi Beach post shows.

Unlike Pakistan, India has had no terrorist groups. Not only Pakistanis but foreigners too have been indoctrinated and trained to carry out terrorist attacks by groups such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Hizb-e-Mujahideen. These groups are able to do so because of the patronage of the Pakistan state. Besides, misguided youth of Kashmir also have been connected with these groups and went to Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) to undertake lessons in militancy and terrorism.

Pakistan’s self-esteem has always been deeply hurt by the FATF actions against it. It has been in the financial watchdog’s grey lists thrice since 2008: in 2008-2010, 2012-15 and 2018-2022. It escaped going on the group’s blacklist because it received support from some Islamic states and China. Objectively, its involvement in terrorism and terrorist financing merited that it should have been on the blacklist. Naturally, the FATF listings profiled its connections with terrorism.

Now the Pakistani establishment and the political class would want the FATF to look adversely at India. That simply will not happen, but Sherry Rehman’s post shows the direction Pakistani propaganda is taking.

It is necessary for the Indian government to investigate Sajid Akram's contacts with India completely, closely and quickly. It needs to come out with an official response so that its findings are on record. That would be the right response to posts such as that of Sherry Rehman.

(The writer is a former Indian diplomat who served as India’s Ambassador to Afghanistan and Myanmar, and as secretary, the Ministry of External Affairs. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)