All is not well in the land run by the Italian Queen and her gallery of rogues. There is trouble in the horizon where the red rays of the sinking sun reflect the red hot rage of the people against the atrocious beheading and mutilation of Lance Naik Hemraj and Lance Naik Sudhakar Singh, followed by raucous celebrations of the murderous act by the Pakistani soldiers.

Reaction from the Government was predictably tame. “We condemn the provocative action. The government will take up the incident with the Pakistani government. We expect Islamabad to honour the ceasefire agreement (which came into force in November 2003) strictly,” said the defense ministry. The eminent Sardar reluctantly issued a terse, “It cannot be business as usual with Pakistan.” The Congress Party, steeped in the inertia of “track two diplomacy” and the “peace process”, quickly retreated into its comfort zone, “I see, I hear and I shut up.”

All of this had the force of a straw in the wind and had little effect in Pakistan which haughtily dismissed the whole affair as India’s internal problem.

Needless to say, India’s foreign policy regarding Pakistan has been running on empty for quite some time. While the cauldrons of bigotry across the border are constantly poised to hit with sharpened knives, the Government of India (GOI) is busy with confidence building measures (CBM’s), visa free entry, Track 2 nonsense, demilitarization of Siachen, and unending dossiers regarding 26/11. Anyone with common sense would know that the much hyped “peace process” is a one way street where India’s bending has broken its spine and the enemy’s morbid fascination for Indian blood has met with zero consequences.

Hence the bloody setting of the border has seen many such soul shattering instances of bestiality. In 1971, two men from 22 Rajput were stripped naked and dragged through the streets behind jeeps. There were others whose eyes were gouged out. While Indian soldiers continue to languish in Pakistani jails, some of them driven to madness with relentless torture, 93000 Pakistani prisoners of war who committed atrocities in Bangladesh enjoyed the hospitality of India and were escorted like royalty to their country. They were not even tried for their war crimes. The macabre story of the subcontinent continues on the same track since the atrocities in Baramula in 1947 when at the fall of Skardu, the Pakistani commander gleefully wired back, “All Sikhs killed and all women raped.”

Every time that Pakistani gunfire meets the echo of official silence, the intruder gets bolder.

In February 2000, Ilyas Kashmiri, one of the former special services group (SSG) of the Pakistan army, led a guerilla attack on a listening post in Rajouri district in which 7 indian soldiers were killed and Sepoy Bhausaheb Maruti Talekar’s throat was slit and his head hacked off. Kashmiri brought back the beheaded head as a trophy and presented the severed head to the very “honorable” Musharaff, who rewarded him with one lakh rupees. Again in July 2011, two troopers of 20 Kumoan regiment, Jaipal Singh Adhikari and Devendar Singh were beheaded. The Urdu press in Pakistan periodically gloated with stories and pictures of beheaded Indian soldiers right from the 1990’s but the media in India appears to have a one track mind – reading the lips of the establishment and ignoring the violent glint in the enemy’s eyes.

It is an eternal shame for India that the murderous Musharaff, the vicious architect of Kargil, who rewarded Kashmiri for the severed head of Talekar is wined and dined in the august halls of Delhi and honored with several speaking arrangements and media interviews. But to the horrendous mutilations, murders and beheadings of our valiant soldiers including Saurabh Kaalia and his men, there is not a ripple of reprimand or even a semblance of reaction from the GOI - nothing but a towering silence from the mute establishment.

The nature of a scorpion is to sting and even its own maker cannot change that. The nature of the Pakistani Army is Jihad. No less than a high level politician, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, former opposition leader in Pakistan, has attested to the diabolic mindset of the Pakistani army when he revealed that even the Taliban fighters were thrown out of helicopters from a height of 1000 feet or more to instill fear and terror among Taliban ranks. When the scorpion like Pakistani army can sting so badly their own jihadists, can they really be intimidated by the dossier oriented GOI?

Sometimes, it is worthwhile to provide correct labels to recalcitrant problems. The Pakistani army should be labeled as such. It is a terrorist army which the blind Dhirtharashtra ruler of India refuses to see. The terrorist army runs a terrorist nation and deserves an appropriate answer. Unless, they stop their terrorist attacks in India, there should be no TV interviews, no Pakistani artists in India, no cricket matches, no CBM’s, no cross border trade, no visa free entry, no people to people idiocy, no express buses or trains across the border. Moreover, the Indian army must be allowed to support a huge covert network inside and outside the enemy territory. Whenever there is a beheading or cease fire violation, India’s navy should be given a free hand to strike, harass the borders in Karachi and cause its economy to flounder—of course with a built-in plausible deniability of their actions. Let there be costs to doing business as the terrorist.

As long as the civilian government of Pakistan is under the boots of the military, India must treat it as an enemy country at war. Several mammoth efforts to placate the terrorist nation have resulted in turmoil in Kashmir, Siachen, parliamentary attack, Kaluchak, 26/11, Kargil and many more. Our efficient military has projected a few options, but sleeping with the enemy is certainly not one of them. Unless the GOI also realizes this and gets its act together, the nation of India will always be under the gun of the cold blooded architects of atrocity, the Pakistani army.