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Wednesday, Sep 27, 2006
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"Musharraf to blame for summit failure"

Special Correspondent

He described terrorists as freedom fighters: Vajpayee

A. B. Vajpayee

NEW DELHI: The former Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, on Tuesday said the Agra Summit of 2001 failed because Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf refused to accept terrorism as the cause of bloodshed in Jammu and Kashmir, insisting that it was a result of the people's battle for freedom.

Mr. Vajpayee was responding to reports quoting from General Musharraf's memoirs, In The Line of Fire: A Memoir.

According to the reports, just before leaving Agra, he told Mr. Vajpayee: "There seems to be someone above the two of us who had the power to overrule us," which led to the failure of the talks.

Advani to blame?

The Pakistan President was in all probability referring to the then Home Minister, L.K. Advani, who was reported to have rejected a draft joint statement that was never adopted.

In a one-page statement here, Mr. Vajpayee said: "Everyone in our Government was acutely alive to the fact that there could be no normalcy in Indo-Pak relations until cross-border terrorism, which had cost thousands of lives, was ended." He undertook the bus journey to Lahore "precisely to thrash out this and other issues in person." That trip yielded no results, and when the government changed in Pakistan, he decided to invite the General to Agra.

"During the talks, he [General Musharraf] took a stand that the violence that was taking place in Jammu and Kashmir could not be described as `terrorism.' He continued to claim that the bloodshed in the State was nothing but the people's battle for freedom." It was this stand that led to the failure of the Agra Summit, Mr. Vajpayee said.

Joint statement

It was later in Islamabad in January 2004 that Pakistan "came [round] to our viewpoint" by agreeing not to allow any land under its control to be used for terrorist strikes against India, he said. That yielded the joint statement in Islamabad, and became the starting point for the composite dialogue.

India's position

Had General Musharraf accepted India's position at Agra, the three subsequent years could have proved valuable for taking forward the initiative, Mr. Vajpayee said.

Separately, Bharatiya Janata Party leaders denied that Mr. Vajpayee and Mr. Advani adopted different positions at Agra and that finally it was Mr. Advani's view that prevailed.

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