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NEW DELHI: In what is seen as a damage-control exercise, Prime Minister Vajpayee on Wednesday night gave his NDA colleagues a blow-by-blow account of President Musharraf's courtesy call on him on July 16, as well as a chronological account of the reasons why the summit failed to produce even a joint statement.
The PM said he did some plainspeaking at his last meeting with Musharraf. He told the Pakistani president that he had invited him in the interest of peace in the sub-continent, despite the fact that he was seen in this country as the architect of Kargil.
Musharraf, however, chose to abuse Indian hospitality and televised his informal breakfast meeting with Indian journalists where he spoke of 1971. The PM said if we were to talk about the creation of Bangladesh, we could also dredge up the fact that Mujibur Rehman, who had won the elections democratically, had been prevented from taking over.
Musharraf, who the PM reportedly said was 'desperate' to take some sort of joint statement back, told Vajpayee it was difficult to do business since the word Kashmir was a taboo here. The PM replied that if India chose to focus on Kashmir, it would have to return to 1947, the accession of Kashmir to India as well as the way in which Pakistan had grabbed occupied-Kashmir. Musharraf said that was all in the past, to which the PM said delving into history could not be a selective exercise.
The PM also questioned the use of the phrase "freedom struggle" to describe cross-border terrorism that had taken the lives of innocent women and children. Musharraf said he had condemned the violence. Vajpayee then said he found it difficult to sign an agreement with someone who compared the situation in Kashmir with that in Palestine, and with someone who said that till the Kashmir issue was not resolved, there was no way relations could improve.
Vajpayee pointed out that in the last draft statement, Pakistan had included at the end of the listed points, a provision that all of this was contingent on forward movement on a resolution of the Kashmir issue. This, the PM stressed, was unacceptable, as was the Pakistani insistence on the use of the word dispute rather than issue to describe Kashmir, and their refusal to include the phrase "cross-border terrorism" in the document. And this despite India's acceptance of putting the Kashmir issue at the top in the draft statement, government sources added.
But there was also some acceptance of India's mistakes that it should not have harped on Simla or Lahore since it was an unstructured agenda anyway; And while the invitation to the Hurriyat and the televising of the breakfast meeting was an abuse of hospitality, the Indian side had goofed on media management.
Answering criticism about a summit without an agenda, the PM said Pakistan had consistently refused to exchange documents or have discussions at the official level in the run-up to the summit.
Clearly, belatedly, the government
has realised that it owes an explanation on why the talks broke down and
that it needs to build public opinion, starting with the political parties,
on the fact that it refused to give in to Pakistan ``in the national interest''.
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