'We Have Tried'

A lot has been talked about in the House about the failure of the Agra Summitand about how Agra Summit was supposed to produce miraculous results and that weshould hang our heads in shame because we have failed to deliver anything.

But is it a failure because we did not conduct our Summit in the glare of themedia cameras? Is it a failure because we chose not to talk in the press anddecided that it would be in the best interest of the success of the Summit toconfine our discussion to the closed rooms? Is it our failure because there hasbeen no joint declaration? But where does it say that a Summit is successfulonly if you have a joint declaration at the end?

The process of dialogue between India and Pakistan has begun. We hope that itis an irreversible process. So much has been talked here about the lack of anagenda.

The Government of India put forward an eight-point agenda for Pakistan toconsider. They involved people-to-people contacts, they involved securitymeasures and they involved economic aspects of our relationship.

Shri Mani Shankar Aiyar just now said that in the absence of an agenda, weshould have called the dialogue off. Why did the Opposition then not stand upand say, please call off these talks. Do not go without an agenda.

We talked about preparation and how the Government of India went into thisSummit completely unprepared. But the Prime Minister was prepared. Hispreparation went to the extent of studying what and how the previous Summits hadbeen carried out and the previous tactics.

Who was not involved in the process of preparation? All Opposition partieswere included in the dialogue. Intellectuals have been spoken to. Media wereinvolved in the process of preparation. What else would you have us do?

The Prime Minister has rightly said that when we are talking about Jammu andKashmir, we are talking about the part of Kashmir that had been occupied byPakistan since 1947.

So much has been said about the unprofessional manner in which this Summitwas conducted by the Government of India. The Shimla Agreement is one of thecorner stones of relationship between India and Pakistan. But after 1971, afterthe signing of the Shimla Agreement, what steps did the Congress take to reclaimthe area of Kashmir that has been illegally occupied by Pakistan?

If you have secret solutions, do you not think that the country has the rightto know? We have been in the Government only for three years. Almost for fiftyyears, we had the Government of one party. Yet, you tell us that you aresuccessful and we are failures.

The process of dialogue has begun and, I repeat, it must continue. A jointstatement would have been possible if we had agreed on everything. The onecrucial issue that is of utmost importance to us is the cross-border terrorism.

Pakistan wanted to call it a freedom struggle or a Jehad. But in order tohave this so-called successful summit, would you have liked us to have given aninch of land? Would you have been satisfied, if in the interest of having aJoint Statement, we would let Pakistan call it some sort of a freedom struggle?Would you have liked us to give away our position?

The fact of the matter is that there is no indigenous freedom struggle inJammu and Kashmir. A Jehad, in Islam, is fought when Islam is threatened. Isthere anybody in this House who would tell me that Islam is more threatened herethan it is in Pakistan? We, in India, are proud of our secular heritage. Wherethen does the question of a Jehad arise?

We went to the Summit as well prepared as it was possible. Do I have toremind the Congress about their flip-flop policy on Kashmir? The Government ofIndia has consistently tried to create a condition conducive for dialoguefurther in Kashmir. But it was our initiative. They cannot accuse us of nottrying.

We had to try to ceasefire; we had to give those militants a chance to cometo the table and talk. Would they have us say that we do not want to talk tothem and rather we would shoot them? We have tried; where we have succeeded, wehave succeeded, where we have failed we have admitted.

Agra did not live up to the hype that the newspapers and the media generated,but no Summit would have lived up to the expectations that the media generatedfor Agra. But Agra created some very convincing and useful results. It createdan atmosphere for dialogue, which will continue.

Before I end, I would like to make one final point. So much has been saidabout Shrimati Sushma Swaraj, about what she was doing in Agra. If the Ministerof Information and Broadcasting was there, she was there with a purpose. She wasthere to ensure that the media did not have any problems.

We had always promised the people that in the Agra Summit we would notconfine our dialogue to one point and that we would talk about the comprehensivedialogue that we had structured. Most Favoured Nation status, which Pakistanmust accord to India, about the cross-border terrorism, about the avoidance ofnuclear war, about the cultural relations and about the Iran-India gas pipeline.The fact that Pakistan did not like it is not the issue.

At the end, I would just like to reiterate that as far as we, in the NationalConference, are concerned, it is our earnest hope that the process of dialoguebetween India and Pakistan continue at any level.