NEW DELHI: India’s External Affairs Minster Pranab Mukherjee has categorically denied making a threatening call to Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari. But at the same time he slammed Pakistan for attempting to “divert attention from the fact that a terrorist group operating from the Pakistani territory planned and launched a ghastly attack on Mumbai.”
The call, from someone claiming to be Mukherjee to Zardari, put Pakistan on high alert of a military strike by India while militants were still fighting security forces in Mumbai.
The caller told Zardari that India would take military action if Islamabad did not hand over those behind the attacks, Pakistani newspapers reported on Saturday.
Dismissing the stories about his being named as the caller as “misleading,” Mukherjee said that India was informed by “friends from third countries (United States) that ... Zardari believed that he had received a threatening call from me on 28 November, after the attack on Mumbai.” India immediately clarified to “those friends” and to Pakistan authorities that “I had made no such telephone call,” Mukherjee stated.
Elaborating on the only conversation he had had with Zardari, Mukherjee said: “My last and only conversation with President Zardari was in Islamabad during my May 2008 visit in Pakistan.”
“The only telephone conversation that I have had with a Pakistani leader since the attack on Mumbai was on the evening of Nov. 28 when I spoke to the Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi who was then in New Delhi,” Mukherjee said.
“It is, however, worrying that a neighboring state might even consider acting on the basis of such a hoax call, try to give it credibility with other states, and confuse the public by releasing the story in part,” Mukherjee said. On whether India had ruled out military action against Pakistan, Mukherjee said: “I am not making any comment on the military option, what I am saying is that every sovereign country has the right to protect its territorial integrity and take appropriate action and when it feels necessary to take that appropriate action.”
Without commenting on military action, Mukherjee said that it had become “difficult” to continue the peace process.
Notwithstanding war-like tension over the hoax-call and the Mumbai-issue, the peace-process has not yet been derailed. Senior Indian and Pakistani security officials held their quarterly meeting yesterday in Islamabad. They discussed joint patrolling along the border, defense construction, the issue of inadvertent border-crossers and border demarcation at certain disputed points, sources said. The discussions were held in a “very cordial and friendly atmosphere,” sources added.
