The explanation of the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, in the Lok Sabha on July 29, 2009, on the statement issued by him jointly with Yousef Raza Gilani, the Pakistani Prime Minister, at Sharm-el-Sheikh in Egypt on July 17, 2009, skilfully sought to control the damage done by the ill-advised and ill-drafted joint statement.
It was ill-advised because it has enabled Pakistan to claim to the international community that our PM was satisfied with the action taken by it against some Pakistan-based members of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) for their involvement in the Mumbai terrorist attack of November 26-29, 2008, in the hope that this would result in a relaxation of the international pressure to act against the LET.
The international pressure on Pakistan to act against the LET has been there since the attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001. It was because of this pressure that Pervez Musharraf, the then Pakistani President, banned the LET through a gazette notification on January 15,2002. The ban is still in force, but has not been implemented effectively by either the previous government of Musharraf or by the present government of Asif Ali Zardari.
There was intensified international pressure on Pakistan after Mumbai 26/11 because among those killed were 25 foreign civilians. It was this pressure and not the bilateral diplomacy of the government of India, which made Pakistan register an offence against five members of the LET and investigate their involvement and place Prof Hafeez Mohammad Sayeed, the Amir of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JUD), the political wing of the LET, under house arrest.
As a result of the ill-warranted certificate of good neighbourly co-operation given by Dr Manmohan Singh to Pakistan, there are already signs of this pressure being relaxed. This would be evident from the absence of forceful international reaction to the farce of the legal proceedings against Sayeed, which has resulted in his being released from house arrest.
The joint statement was also ill-advised because it has unwittingly conveyed an impression to Pakistan’s political leadership and military-intelligence establishment that a terrorism fatigue has set in among our political leadership and that continued use of terrorism by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) against Indian civilians and economic infrastructure could ultimately make India amenable to a change of the status quo in Jammu & Kashmir.
The Prime Minister is right in wanting peace and good-neighbourly relations with Pakistan, but unwise in giving an impression to Pakistani leaders that he is over-keen for peace with Pakistan and that he does not have the stomach for a prolonged confrontation with Pakistan on the terrorism issue--whether the confrontation is political, economic, military or covert. That was the impression which Gilani and his advisers would have got at Sharm-el-Sheikh and the Prime Minister’s well-drafted statement in the Lok Sabha has not been able to dissipate that impression.
The Prime Minister made use of the dossier given by Pakistan before Sharm-el-Sheikh on the investigation made by it so far against the LET in two ways. He tried to project this dossier as justifying the action taken by him at Sharm-el-Sheikh. He also tried to score a debating point against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led opposition coalition by claiming that his government through pressure had been able to make Pakistan concede the LET involvement whereas the BJP-led government was not able to do this.
If the BJP members had carefully studied and mastered facts and figures, they could have effectively countered the PM’s claim of credit by pointing out the following: