Battle of boycotts: Indian envoy was cut from Karachi event hours before it began

Who really started the battle of boycotts? You’ve heard of the Shiv Sena getting the Ghulam Ali concert cancelled in Mumbai and trying to prevent a Pakistani foreign minister from releasing his book in the country’s financial capital. But it seems that India has also been at the receiving end of a similar boycott before that. According to a report in the Times of India on Thursday, India’s high commissioner to Pakistan TCA Raghavan had landed for an event in Karachi on 26 September only to be told that he wouldn’t be hosted. [caption id=“attachment_2487822” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Ibnlive image[/caption] Raghavan was reportedly going to attend an event at the historic Sindh Club being hosted by a group called the called Pakistan-India Citizens’ Friendship Forum where among other things the grandson of Muhammad Ali Jinnah was going to make a speech. However, when the high commissioner arrived in the city and checked into a hotel he was told that his event had been cancelled and till date hasn’t got an explanation on why they decided to do so. It isn’t very clear why this incident is coming to light only now and may have something to do with former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf equating the Shiv Sena’s founder Bal Thackeray with Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s Hafiz Saeed. “Are we catching any Sena leader? Was not Bal Thackeray a terrorist… did anybody catch him… a serving Army colonel was involved in the Samjautha blast in which 100 (sic) Pakistanis were killed. You are talking about Saeed, give us that Colonel,” the former president reportedly said at an event on Saturday. As the Times report points out, the envoys of the two nations are no strangers to finding themselves cut from events at the last minute. Pakistan’s envoy Abdul Basit had reportedly also been set to visit an event in Chandigarh, only to have his name excluded just hours before he left for it.