NEW DELHI/ISLAMABAD, 19 June — India yesterday fiercely denounced Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s comment that Islamabad’s nuclear deterrent has made New Delhi stand down, accusing the general of “nuclear blackmail”. In Islamabad late Monday, Musharraf told scientists and engineers that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal had brought “strategic balance” to South Asia and had prevented India from starting a “so-called limited war”.
Indian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Nirupama Rao demanded the world take note of Musharraf’s remarks. “The international community should not ignore such continued manifestations of Pakistani irresponsibility, loose talk and undiluted hostility toward India and the continued concoction of doomsday theory to justify Pakistan’s use of nuclear blackmail,” she said.
Musharraf, quoted by the official Associated Press of Pakistan, said Pakistan was “compelled to show them in May 1998 that we were not bluffing, and in May 2002 again we were compelled to show that we do not bluff.” Pakistan test fired three missiles, two of them capable of carrying nuclear warheads, at the end of last month in a defiant show of strength at the height of the military standoff with India.
“By testing with outstanding success the delivery systems of our strategic capability, these men validated the reliability, accuracy and the deterrence value of Pakistan’s premier surface-to-surface ballistic missile systems of the Hatf series, namely Ghauri, Ghaznavi and Abdali,” Musharraf said.
India earlier this month lifted a ban on Pakistani flights into India that was slapped on after the Parliament attack in December, acknowledging that fewer militants were crossing into its zone of Kashmir from Pakistani territory.
New Delhi, however, has ruled out a pullback of its troops from attack positions, saying Pakistan must do still more to rein in militants. But a senior Indian government official said yesterday that should Islamabad demonstrate it has shut down militants’ training camps, a troop withdrawal could happen at any time — “two to three weeks, or 10 to 12 weeks or more”.
“We need to see evidence on the ground that infiltration has stopped and Islamabad has dismantled the training camps for militants.”
