Author:
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: November 24, 2002
URL: http://www.rediff.com/news/2002/nov/24india.htm
External Affairs Minister Yashwant
Sinha on Sunday asked the international community to impose tough sanctions
on Pakistan.
"If the international community
wants, Pakistan will give up its acts of terrorism against India in no
time. There is obviously some disconnect between what they tell us and
what they tell Pakistan," Sinha said in an interview to Tim Sebastian on
BBC World's 'Hard Talk' programme, which will be aired on Monday.
"Putting pressure and talking sweetly
to the terrorist... it is not good enough for us," he said.
Sinha said he stood by his remarks
in London that the international community had lost its moral right to
advice India on the issue of terrorism vis-à-vis Pakistan since
it was making a "distinction between the good terrorist who operates in
India, especially in Jammu and Kashmir, and the bad terrorist who operates
elsewhere".
Asked why India was not talking
to Pakistan, Sinha shot back, "Is the West talking to Osama bin Laden?
The terrorism that Pakistan is unleashing against India is as bad as the
terrorism that the Taliban and Al Qaeda was unleashing in Afghanistan and
elsewhere."
"We expect the international community
to have the same standards in dealing with the terrorist who are coming
from across the boundary," he said.
"How do you expect the international
community to remain indifferent when two regional powers, India and Pakistan,
have nuclear weapons and a million troops at their borders with the serious
conflict that goes on. And you are not keen to talk to the Pakistanis?"
Sinha was asked.
The minister retorted, "So what
does it mean? If one country that has got nuclear weapons and threatens
another country, the international community will tell the threatened country
to start submitting, start surrendering. Is that what you are suggesting?"
On reports of a decline in the level
of infiltration, Sinha said Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf had assured
the international community of putting a permanent stop to the menace.
"It is a question of stopping terrorism.
If one of the two towers in New York had not come down, would you have
said that we should be happy because only one has gone down?"
The minister denied that anyone
was pressing India to talk to Pakistan. "They might be making their statements
in public, but nobody is pressurising. In any case, India is not going
to give into any pressures.
"We will talk to Pakistan. We have
never said that we will not talk to Pakistan, but there must be a conducive
atmosphere."
Asked whether a 54 per cent cut
in terrorism was not conducive enough, Sinha countered, "You don't talk
to a fellow who held a gun to the temple and say he has removed it by six
inches and now I will start talking."
He told the interviewer that the
fundamental mistake being made was in thinking that it was good enough
if infiltration and cross-border terrorism had gone down by 50 per cent.
"It is not good enough. It has to
go down 100 per cent. Terrorism has to stop," he emphasised.
Sinha said in the run-up to the
polls in Jammu and Kashmir, 800 people had been killed.
The minister said India expected
the West and others to put "enough pressure on Pakistan so that it is able
to put a complete and permanent stop to infiltration from across the Line
of Control and not permit its territory to be used, not have the whole
elaborate infrastructure of terrorism in that country to promote cross-border
terrorism".
Asked what kind of pressure India
was looking for, Sinha said, "All kinds of pressure."
About the US state department's
report on complaints of excesses by security forces in J&K, he said,
"I don't know what their sources of information are. Have they sent a team
here to make inquiries into the cases?"
