Rajiv Dogra, Where Borders Bleed: An Insider’s Account of IndoPak Relations

Abstract

The author, Rajiv Dogra, is a former Indian Foreign Service officer. He served as a Counsel-General in Pakistan during 1992-1994. As a diplomat, an insider, not an academic, his work projects the official Pakistan policy of the Indian Government. He finds faults with almost all leaders of Pakistan except for Benazir Bhutto with whom he seems to have developed a good rapport while in Pakistan. He asserts ―If Jinnah was the creator of Pakistan and Bhutto its destroyer‖, for ―the bifurcation of Pakistan into two‖, Zia made his country a ―nuclear state‖ and ―introduced fundamentalism in its army‖ and ―terrorism as a ‗state policy‘ of Pakistan‖ (p.173). The allegation of ‗state terrorism‘ is an Indian perception and propaganda against Pakistan. He laments that since India had already tested a bomb in 1974, it need not have asserted its nuclear power status in 1998 and thus ―India had shot itself in the foot by making Pakistan the nuclear threshold publicly‖ (p.205).