Pakistan involved in bizarre tit-for-tat stray dog incident with India

India-Pakistan engagement has been known to be based on tit-for-tat principle for the past 65 years. But this unwritten policy has now been given a bizarre twist, bordering on the absurd. A stray Indian dog accidentally boarded the Samjhauta Express at Attari station in Amritsar, remained unnoticed by the Indian security and custom officials and reached Lahore where the four-legged visitor was discovered.

The discovery was reported to the higher echelons in Islamabad and the Pakistani authorities found it to be a deliberate and grave provocation as the incident happened at a time when Indo-Pak tension was at a peak over the beheading of an Indian soldier on the Line of Control (LoC) in January 2013.



In retaliation the Pakistanis decided to return 50 stray dogs to India on the same train. They made their reprisal even more ingenious by making sure that the selected dogs were among the dirtiest they could find and were kept hungry for a day so that they would bark more at the Indians. So far there has been no formal reaction from India.

However, an Indian diplomatic source said that the Indian government has decided to keep a stiff upper lip over the incident and not even raise it with Pakistan through diplomatic channels. “We don’t wish to play up a non-issue by dignifying it with a comment. Let it be left where it is. We have no desire to enter a competition on who wins more brownie points over the most stupid things,” the senior official said. There has been no word as to how India has dealt with the 50 Pakistani stray dogs.