NEW DELHI, 27 September 2006 — Although the July 2001 Agra summit between then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf failed to yield any accord, neither of the two leaders was insulted there, Vajpayee said yesterday.
Referring to such an assertion by Musharraf in his recently released memoirs, “In the Line of Fire,” the former prime minister said: “I am still to see the book, but his reported comments on the failure of our talks at Agra surprised me. No one insulted the general and certainly no one insulted me.”
Saying that such high-level talks should not be assumed to be failures if they do not lead to any accord or agreement, Vajpayee recalled his bus journey to Lahore to meet then Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. “That trip was appreciated by all, but it yielded no results,” he said.
Recalling his government’s invitation to Musharraf, following the change in Pakistani establishment, Vajpayee said: “Gen. Musharraf readily accepted our invitation and came to Delhi. But at Agra during our talks, he took a stand that the violence that was taking place in Jammu and Kashmir could not be described as ‘terrorism.’ He continued to claim that the bloodshed in the state was nothing but the people’s battle for freedom. It was this stand of Gen. Musharraf that India just could not accept and this was responsible for the failure of the Agra summit.
“Pakistan came to our viewpoint when, in the joint statement of January 2004, it agreed that the Pakistani government would not allow Pakistan or any land in its control to be used for purposes of terrorism.”
Musharraf’s book is due to hit Indian shelves later this week following its release in New York on Monday. But the knives are already out for the memoirs’ most contentious claim in Indian eyes that the Indian Army’s desire to capture territory led to the 1999 Kargil conflict.
“He’s rewriting history with an eye on the 2007 elections in Pakistan — he wants to project himself and the army as entities to be counted on,” Indian security analyst Uday Bhaskar said. “He has got ‘chutzpah’, real nerve,” he said.
“All that he is saying is a pack of lies, he attacked us and then lost — that’s the reality,” former Indian National Security Advisory Brajesh Mishra told the CNN-IBN television network. He dismissed Musharraf’s description of the Kargil conflict as a “landmark in the history of the Pakistani Army.” “India did not cross the Line of Control (dividing Kashmir),” Mishra said. “The Pakistan Army did and it was defeated.”
India has always maintained Musharraf was responsible for dispatching troops across the cease-fire line above the town of Kargil and that it repelled the invaders.
Musharraf, however, insists no Pakistani soldiers crossed into Indian territory and that New Delhi stepped up the conflict after its forces ran into Kashmiri militants who had moved ahead of Pakistani troops.
Retired Gen. V.P. Malik, then Chief of Army Staff, said: “He (Musharraf) is only trying to whitewash all his sins of the Kargil War, if I may use that word. The facts are totally different. We know the number of people who intruded into our territory. He has talked of four divisions. We had only two divisions — three and eight Mountain divisions — and yes we had superiority in artillery and we had security and that is how you throw out the intruders. So, this part of his (memoir), I’m afraid, is not true. It is a typical bluff and bluster and that mindset that we are superior to Indians, that is coming out.”
Rejecting Musharraf’s charge that New Delhi’s uranium enrichment technology “could be a copy” of Islamabad’ centrifuge design, chairman of the Department of Atomic Energy, Anil Kakodkar said in Bombay: “Our technology is based on our indigenous research and development and action consistent with responsible behavior.”
