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| Nothing to emerge out of Thimpu talks | | Indo-Pak Dialogue - II | | RUSTAM
EARLY TIMES REPORT
JAMMU, Feb 7: Pakistan again in 1999 made a concerted attempt to annex Jammu and Kashmir. It attacked Kargil to achieve its sinister goal. As expected, the Indian Army again inflicted a crushing defeat on the Pakistani intruders but in the process sacrificed hundreds of precious lives. The Indian soldiers once again demonstrated their remarkable commitment to the national cause and made the Pakistani Army to bite dust. This was Pakistan's fourth successive humiliating defeat and India's yet another spectacular victory that made India really proud. It would not be out of place to mention here that it was the most difficult battle the Indian Army had fought in years.
Pakistan had invaded Kargil after its low-intensity, but highly dangerous, proxy war, which it had unleashed in the early 1990, failed to produce the desired results. Islamabad had expected that this low-intensity proxy war would certainly force New Delhi to strike a truce with Pakistan over Jammu and Kashmir and succeed in obtaining concessions from India it had failed to obtain thus far. The proxy war, which has consumed thousands of our brave and dedicated soldiers, has been continuing since then unabated. In fact, Pakistan has been using terror as a political weapon to push forward its pernicious agenda and break India into smithereens, but with the no result. For, the Indian nation is standing like a rock between the weak-kneed Government of India and the belligerent Pakistan, notwithstanding the fact that the nation has at regular intervals suffered immense losses in terms of human lives and otherwise. It is hardly necessary to catalogue here all the terror-related incidents that the nation witnessed between early 1990 and till date, as everything stands already catalogued.
In between, Pakistan has umpteen times sought to involve the United States, China, Organization of Islamic Conference and similar other pro-Pakistan and pro-fundamentalist countries so that India is brought to its knees and Pakistan achieves its most cherished goal of annexing Jammu and Kashmir and balkanizing India. However, it would be only appropriate to say that all these countries have contributed to the mess in their own way, with the policy-planners in New Delhi quite often seen yielding but not conceding under the pressure of Indian public opinion.
The Foreign Secretary-level talks, which were held at Thimpu on February 6 between Nirupama Rao and Salman Bashir, should also need to be viewed in this context. It was expected that nothing would emerge out of the Thimpu Talks and it exactly happened, leave alone the fact that both the Foreign Secretaries expressed the hope that the stalled composite dialogue process between the two countries would be resumed sooner than later.
That the talks were not to produce any tangible result had become quite evident just on the eve of the talks. Several developments in Pakistan had only served to vitiate the atmosphere, with even the liberals or some India-based Pakistani supporters making it quite clear that the Thimpu meeting would be no more than a photo opportunity for the Indian and Pakistani Foreign Secretaries and that they would sit together for few minutes, have tea/dinner and restate their stated positions and disperse.
What exactly had been done by certain Pakistani elements to vitiate the atmosphere on the eve of the Thimpu talks? Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani had declared that Kashmiri continued to remain a core issue and that the scheduled meeting should be a result-oriented meeting. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari had expressed similar views and made it absolutely clear that Pakistan could not deviate from the path it charted for itself in 1947. Earlier, Pakistani Foreign Office spokesperson Abdul Basit had bitterly criticized India for what he called its failure to bring to justice those involved in the terrorist attack on Samjuauta Express. "India seems to be lacking courage to unearth culpability of Hindu extremists and their links with some Indian Army personnel," Abdul Basit had said in a statement in Islamabad. India had rejected outright what Basit had said.
Not just this. On February 5, the so-called Solidarity day, Syed Salah-ud-Din of Hizbul Mujahideen and United Jihad Council had made highly provocative statements in Pakistan-occupied-Jammu and Kashmir. The same day, Hafiz Saeed of Jamat-ud-Dawa/Laskar-e-Toiba, who masterminded the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attacks crossed all the limits. Addressing a huge rally of nearly 20,000 Pakistanis in Lahore, he asked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to quit Kashmir or prepare India for facing nuclear attacks from Pakistan. In fact, he urged Pakistan to use nuclear weapons against India in case New Delhi refused to quit Kashmir. He addressed this rabidly anti-India rally under the very nose of the Pakistani authorities.
The fact of the matter is that the Pakistani President, the Pakistani Prime Minister, the Pakistani Army, the Pakistani Foreign Office, the Pakistani dreaded ISI and Hafiz Saeed and Syed Salah-ud-Din worked in tandem to vitiate the atmosphere. And, it was in this backdrop that Nirupama Rao and Salman Bashir met at Thimpu. (To be continued) |
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