In a stunning climb down from its hostility towards India, Lashkar-e-Taiba today announced that it "will indefinitely postpone any attacks on India until the country's infrastructure improves." A spokesman for the group which is believed to have launched attacks on the Indian Parliament and on the Taj Hotel in Mumbai said, "The truth of the matter is that we have no idea what to attack any more. We have run out of targets. At the moment, the cost of each of our operations is more than the value of the target, which is unviable to our model. Until the government of India invests in significant improvement of the country's infrastructure, we plan to disband our operations and will lie low for as long as it takes."
Coming down heavily on the Indian government, the spokesman for the terrorist group bemoaned the government's complete disregard for planning and lack of execution skills in completing projects on time. "According to Mr. Pankaj Pachauri, the government's media adviser, the UPA government has laid only 2 lakh kilometers of roads, which is a mere 20 percent cumulative increase over the last nine years. Please compare this with the previous NDA government which built more roads than any other government in the history of India, and you'll know what I'm talking about. We find a 2% YoY growth in roads completely unacceptable especially when your economy has been growing by 6-8% YoY in the same period. We haven't seen any new airports come up outside of the metros in Tier 2 cities, which are normally excellent soft targets for us. Take Bangalore. The roads are pathetic. It takes 2 hours from the airport to the hotel, and an hour to get from anywhere to anywhere in the city. We have found it impossible to reliably execute our plans in such a place. New IITs and IISERs are great, but we'd like to see more push and commitment towards building nuclear power plants, airports and public parks in the years to come. To be perfectly honest, at this point we're all kind of secretly rooting for NDA to come back to power in 2014," he said in the most scathing attack on the UPA government by a foreign terrorist organization in recent times.
A video released by LeT later in the day on YouTube blasted the UPA government for "being the most scam ridden government in the history of mankind and completely incapable of getting anything done," and called on the people of India "to vote the buggers out." The video also went on to highlight several promises which have not been kept by the government such as bullet trains and port upgrades, and claimed that this had seriously impacted the terrorist organization's ability to engage in any kind of planning of their own. Hafiz Saeed, leader of the group, is seen making an impassioned plea in the video saying, "We're suspending hostilities until you guys get your shit together. We, as much as any other terrorist group, would love to poison your school lunches and generally cause chaos and mayhem in your country. But it looks like your guys have beaten us to that as well."
In other news, IRCTC outlined an ambitious vision to enter the brick-and-mortar retail segment, in which it aims to build the world's largest chain of inconvenience stores.