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| 52 terrorist training camps in Pak, PoK | | No compromise on India's sovereignty over J&K:India | |
POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT
NEW DELHI, AUG. 24: In a significant turn of events, New Delhi has taken a rigid stand against Islamabad's talk of Kashmir continuing to be a disputed territory. The Congress-led coalition government at the Centre on Thursday declared that there can be no compromise on India's sovereignty over the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Neither will there be a compromise on India's unity.
Minister of State for External Affairs, E. Ahamed, told the Rajya Sabha during the Question Hour that India had not offered to Pakistan to restore Jammu and Kashmir to pre-1953 status. Ahamed divulged that Islamabad had made several proposals for resolution of the Kashmir issue. One of the proposals favoured joint management of Jammu and Kashmir by India and Pakistan.
E. Ahamed made his government's stand on J&K abundantly clear: "The State of Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India". Replying to a question, he said: "Concepts such as joint control or joint management of Jammu and Kashmir, proposed by Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, cannot be the basis of a settlement of the issue because the State is an integral part of India".
Significantly at a time when pressure is being built on New Delhi to re-activate the stalled dialogue with Islamabad, E. Ahamed declared on the floor of the Rajya Sabha: "There can be no compromise on the sovereignty of India over the State of Jammu and Kashmir and on India's unity". He informed the House that India has conveyed to Pakistan, at the highest level, that the dialogue process between the two countries would be undermined unless Pakistan takes effective action to disnmantle the infrastructure of terrorism.
These, Ahamed stated, would include training camps, launch pads and communication links between terrorist groups on Indian side and their handlers on the Pakistan side. Pakistan, he stressed, needs to take these steps in fulfilment of the commitment given by it in the joint press statement of January 6, 2004 that it would not permit any territory under its control to be used to support terrorism in any manner.
According to the statistics available with E. Ahamed, as many as 52 terrorist training camps continue to exist in Pakistan and Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK). He said that Pakistan had continued to raise the Kashmir issue at various international fora. India, he added, had conveyed to Pakistan its strong protests against the proposed construction of Basha Dam in territory that is part of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Jammu and Kashmir, he reiterated, "is an integral part of India".
Ahamed said, in reply to another question, that there was no definitive information on the size of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. However, he said that the US-based non-governmental Institute for Science and International Security, in a report, had let it be known that Pakistan was making a second heavy water production reactor, which was capable of producing enough plutonium for 40-50 nuclear weapns a year.
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