Home Minister L.K. Advani said on Thursday that India would not take "another betrayal" this time by Pakistan. Speaking to the media in Washington, he said, Pakistan has responded each time to India's "immense restraint" with an act of betrayal, with state-sponsored terrorism. "It has breached the limits of our endurance. We shall not take another betrayal this time around," Advani added.
Addressing a press conference at the Indian Embassy after his meetings with US Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tennet, Advani said "Pakistan must act sincerely, decisively, demonstrably and speedily" against the terrorists.
The Home Minister pointed out that the Pakistani spokesman's immediate response to the December 13 attack on the Indian Parliament was that the Indians must have done it themselves. Two days later, the Foreign Minister of Pakistan said that India was holding the Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Toiba responsible for the attack in order to give the "freedom struggle" in Kashmir a bad name.
The touchstone of Pakistan's sincerity, said Advani, will be its positive response to the "legitimate demands" put forth by India. He asked Pakistan to handover 20 terrorists India has demanded, close facilities, training camps, arms supply, funding and all other manner of direct and indirect assistance for terrorists on Pakistani soil, and stop infiltration of arms and men from Pakistan into India.
Advani also called on Pakistan to issue a categorical and unambiguous renunciation of terrorism in all its manifestations and wherever it exists, irrespective of the cause it seeks to further.
Advani described India and the US as "the twin towers of democracy." The terrorists, he said, "may have destroyed the steel and concrete structures of the World Trade Centre but they can never harm the structures and the spirit of our two democracies."
International terrorism has made India and the US its principal targets because "our two countries cherish and celebrate all that the terrorists abhor and consider impediments to the realisation of their own strategic objectives", Advani said.
"We both believe in pluralism and secularism, which is rooted in respect for all faiths. We are both open societies, in which freedom of the press, judiciary and enterprise are constitutionally guaranteed.
"The ideology of international terrorism, as propounded by al Qaeda, Taliban and other terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, born in India's neighbourhood, is feeling threatened by the steady advancement of these values. Which is why its attacks have become more audacious and diabolical in recent times," he said.
Advani said the happenings of September 11 and December13 have demonstrated terrorists' willingness and ability to strike any vital installation in any country at any time.
Focusing on Islamabad's "fundamental, deep and continuing role in sustaining international terrorism," Advani said the Taliban was created and propped up by Pakistan principally as a "force multiplier" in the proxy war against India, conducted through acts of terrorism not only in Jammu and Kashmir but also in other parts of the country.
Over the past two decades, terrorism, sponsored and directed from across the border by Pakistan's ISI as a matter of that country's state policy, has claimed nearly 60,000 of innocent Indian civilians and security personnel, he said.
Advani said Indians, as also many people around the world, were bemused when Pakistan effected a sudden U-turn in its policy towards Taliban and decided to join the US-led international coalition against terror in Afghanistan. "We cannot understand how Pakistan can now claim to be opposed to terrorism on its West and continue to rationalise, justify and patronise it on its East.”
"In a logic that flies in the face of every norm of civilised international behaviour, President Pervez Musharraf again indicated at the SAARC summit in Kathmandu last week that the terrorist acts in Jammu and Kashmir—and by corollary, elsewhere in India—are a part of a legitimate 'freedom struggle' which his government would continue to support," Advani said.
Advani asked: "What type of freedom fighters are those who set off serial bomb blasts in Mumbai, hijack a civilian airliner and take it, unsurprisingly, to Taliban-controlled Kandahar, routinely conduct mass killings of innocent civilians, carry out a terrorist attack on the Jammu and kashmir Legislative Assembly and strike at India's Parliament, the heart of the world's largest democracy?"
India agrees with Bush's exhortation that there cannotbe good terrorists and bad terrorists. Obviously, said Advani, "President Musharraf seems to think otherwise. He would like the world to believe that there are 'good terrorists' at work in the furtherance of Pakistan's stand on Kashmir."
December 13, said Advani, has steeled India's resolve "to take our battle against Pak-sponsored cross-border terrorism to the finish, guided by the objective of bringing it to a decisive end."
"India lost her former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to terrorism fomented in Punjab. It took us over a decade to overcome terrorism in Punjab. But vanquish it, we did. We are similarly determined to stamp out terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir and in the rest of India.”
"We hope that our diplomatic and political initiatives, coupled with the concerns expressed by the international community, will lead Pakistan to end cross-border terrorism." He appreciated what the us has done so far to make Pakistan begin to abandon its policy on terrorism.
"However," he said, "Pakistan has
so far neither shown any sincerity to end cross-border terrorism against
India nor taken adequate, demonstrable and effective steps in that direction."