POLITICS-INDIA: Vajpayee Pilloried in Parliament over Failed Summit

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jul 24 2001 (IPS) - Tough talk against ‘cross-border terrorism’ in Kashmir did not save Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee from being pilloried in Parliament Tuesday for the failure of his high- voltage summit with Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, earlier this month.

In his first public comment on the Jul. 14-16 summit at Agra, Vajpayee blamed the failure of the summit on Musharraf’s refusal to acknowledge any role in violent separatism carried on in Indian Kashmir by ‘jehadist’ groups from the Pakistan-held part of divided Kashmir.

“India’s concerns in vital areas such as cross-border terrorism will have to find place in any document that future negotiations endeavour to conclude,” Vajpayee told Parliament in a statement initiating a debate on the summit.

Vajpayee reminded the sceptical house that he had emphasised during the summit that India had the “resolve, strength and stamina,” to counter terrorism and said his government was determined to “decisively crush it”.

But the opposition charged Vajpayee with allowing the general to hijack the summit to legitimise his rule in Pakistan and even obliquely justify a policy of aiding cross-border terrorism in disputed Kashmir.

Former defence minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, who leads the powerful, regional Samajwadi (socialist) Party, said the summit had exposed weakneses in India’s foreign policy and allowed Musharraf to emphasise the centrality of Kashmir in bilateral relations.

Madhav Rao Scindia from the Congress Party, which leads the opposition, said the summit had the effect of undermining the importance of the historic 1972 Simla agreement, long considered a benchmark in Indo- Pakistan relations.

Scindia said Musharraf had a “field day” launching a media barrage against India, while Indian officials were too confused to brief the media. The press then had to depend entirely on Pakistani officials and sources for information, he added.

Singh charged the government with according recognition to a military dictator who masterminded the 1999 war at Kargil in which hundreds of Indian soldiers died, with a view to garnering votes in forthcoming assembly elections in its stronghold, northern Uttar Pradesh state.

Both leaders ridiculed Vajpayee for accepting Musharraf’s invitation to visit Pakistan even as violence intensified after the summit. Over the weekend, at least 20 people in Indian Kashmir were killed in two separate incidents by groups suspected here to be Pakistan-based outfits.

Outside Parliament, supporters of Vajpayee’s own pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were chased by police with batons when they tried to carry out a demonstration against the weekend killings. The killings had targeted Hindus, including some who were on a pilgrimage to the cave shrine of Amarnath.

Congress Party leader Margaret Alva accused the prime minister of “trying to cover up a fiasco”, which she said was the result of poor preparation and a failure to sufficiently brief the opposition of what the goal of the summit was.

“Cross-border terrorism is not a new issue,” Alva told journalists. The former Union minister complained that far more information was gotten from newspapers than from official channels.

The summit was remarkable for Musharraf, a former commando, who held the focus of television cameras through the summit while Vajpayee was conspicuous by his total absence.

“We will engage in quiet, serious diplomacy,” Vajpayee said in apparent defence of the fact that Indian officials failed to brief the media that flocked to the Agra summit. India, he said, was not seeking propaganda advantage or trying to score debating points.

“He (Musharraf) carried out a media Kargil on us,” said Congress party spokesperson and former foreign minister Natwar Singh, referring to Musharraf’s going public in the middle of the summit by addressing top Indian editors and televising what was supposed to have been a closed-door session.

Musharraf, who was in charge of a sneak attack across the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir that nearly triggered a full-scale war between the nuclear-armed neighbours in 1999, told the editors that the insurgency in Kashmir was of an “indigenous” nature.

Vajpayee said the massacre of innocent people would not be allowed to be glorified as ‘jehad’. India could not “ignore the fact of terrorism and violence in the state (Kashmir), which is exported from across the borders,” he said, referring to Pakistan.

“We cannot accept that insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir today with its foreign mercenaries and generous assistance from abroad is anything but terrorism. Pakistan’s refusal to end cross-border terrorism is the main hurdle in the creation fo a conducive atmosphere,” he maintained.

Vajpayee brushed aside Musharraf’s claim that all he was seeking was a solution to the Kashmir issue in accordance with the wishes of the Kashmiri people.

“The primary wish of every single Kashmiri, whether from the Kashmir Valley or Jammu, Ladakh, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, the Northern territories or the Shaksgam Valley, is to live in peace, security and freedom so that he can make economic progress,” he added.

He also said India had made proposals to addressing issues of peace and security, including nuclear and conventional confidence-building measures.

Both Scindia and Singh said the summit failed primarily because it did not have a structured agenda and insisted that any future dialogue should be undertaken only after the government had done its homework.

They said that if Vajpayee does make a return visit to Pakistan, he would have to take care that India does not “suffer any more humiliation” and that “not an inch of territory is lost”.