Maintaining its aggressive stance against India, Pakistan on Tuesday claimed it has "dismantled" what it called an "Indian terrorist network" operating in the restive Balochistan province and started working on a plan to initiate negotiations with "aggrieved people" and nationalists "not directly linked to India".

Addressing a press conference in Islamabad after a meeting of the federal cabinet, Minister for Information and Broadcasting Fawad Chaudhry said the criteria for those who were "directly linked to India" or were involved in terrorism would be different.

Chaudhry’s comments are a continuation of Pakistan’s recent spat with India over two drone-related incidents – spotting of the unmanned aerial vehicles over the Indian High Commission complex in Pakistan’s capital city Islamabad and an attack on the Indian Air force station in the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir - and a bomb blast in Punjab province’s capital Lahore city that killed three persons and injured 24 others.

New Delhi has accused Islamabad of involvement in the drone attack on the IAF complex in Jammu as also in the spotting of a drone over the high commission complex. Pakistan has in turn alleged involvement of the Indian intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) in the powerful June 23 bomb explosion near the residence of proscribed Jamaatud Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed in Lahore.

Both countries have rejected each other’s allegations.
 
Chaudhry said Punjab police and the Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) had jointly "exposed a big network of India", adding that more details about the network, including accounts, the names of people involved and the banks in Delhi through which money was transferred to the network, would be shared soon.

"It was the second-biggest network after [the one operated by Indian spy] Kulbhushan Jadhav which has been exposed in Pakistan. We have also broken the Indian network in Balochistan with great success.”

Chaudhry said people who were part of the network had been apprehended to a "large extent".

"You will see that Balochistan will soon become a hub of peace," he said.

The minister said peace in the province was important to the government because Balochistan was central to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Balochistan is Pakistan's largest province and borders both Iran and Afghanistan while in the south it opens out to the Arabia Sea. 

His statement came a day after Prime Minister Imran Khan said he was considering "talking to insurgents" in Balochistan during a day-long visit to Gwadar, a port city on the southwest coast of Balochistan. The Chinese have invested heavily in Gwadar as part of the CPEC.

"When the province progresses and there is peace, the people of Balochistan will understand that Pakistan is theirs and say we should also fight for it because it thinks of our basic needs and problems,'" Khan had said.

He said had development work been carried out in the province, "we would never have had to worry about insurgents."

"It may be that they had grievances in the old times and may have been used by other countries… India may have used them to spread chaos but the situation (now) is not the same," he added. (SAM)