PM clears Sartaj
Aziz’s visit
Tribune
News Service
NEW DELHI, May 29 —
Even as the operation "Vijay" is on in Kargil,
India is ready to have talks with Pakistan Foreign
Minister Sartaj Aziz.
The sources said that
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has personally
cleared Mr Aziz’s visit to New Delhi and has made it
clear that Indian armed forces would not cease its
operations till the armed intrusion has come to an end,
the sources said.
Doors for a dialogue
with Islamabad would never be closed, a spokesman of the
Ministry of External Affairs declared yesterday.
Mr Vajpayee is said to
be of the view that the relations with Pakistan could not
be brought to an even keel without taking into account
ground realities of the Pakistan’s polity where
armed forces play an overbearing role.
Planning the Lahore
initiative, the Prime Minister had counted the factor of
the Pakistan’s armed forces and then only had taken
the bus to Lahore, sources asserted. Path of peace has
never been an easy exercise, they said adding that Mr
Vajpayee had full confidence in the capacity of the
Indian defence establishment to counter any threat to
peace and good neighbourly mission.
One factor that Mr
Vajpayee could not calculate was the fall of his
Government, the sources pointed out.
Though the operation
"Vijay" launched to flush out the armed
intruders is unfortunate in the context of loss of life
of both defence personnel and damage to the civilian
life, but a positive fallout has been that the
contradictions within the Pakistani polity have come
glaringly into a sharp international focus.
Offer of the Pakistan
Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif to send his Foreign
Minister to New Delhi for talks is aimed not only at
containing the damage to its international reputation but
also to gain support at home, diplomatic circles said.
On why a covert
operation at all was executed by authorities in Pakistan,
diplomatic circles maintained that it was planned in full
knowledge of the United States of America which had been
wanting India to sign the CTBT this year.
The sources said that
the CIA, at the instruction of the US Administration, had
asked the Pakistani Army to prepare the Kargil operation.
Now with the operation
in Kargil ending in a fiasco, Pakistan, which of late was
resisting to sign the CTBT, is likely to be more amenable
to US pressures, diplomatic circles stressed.
But who is to blame for
Kargil in India, is a question uppermost in every mind as
the Government and the opposition continue to seek
answers to this vexed issue.
Is it the historic
Lahore bus journey of Prime Minster Atal Behari Vajpayee
which lulled the Indian Government and its defence
establishment into inaction resulting in such a massive
covert operation from Islamabad going unnoticed or there
is something more to it.
While none questions the
right of the Government to launch a massive operation to
clear out the Pakistan-backed armed intrusion in the
Kargil sector of Jammu and Kashmir, every Indian is keen
to know as what went wrong.
Preliminary, but
penetrating, inquiries indicate that the country’s
intelligence network was aware of the Pakistani designs
but the signals were ignored.
The Defence Minister, Mr
George Fernandes, well-informed sources said, was too
embroiled in former Navy Chief Vishnu Bhagwat’s
controversy to take cognisance of such vital signals.
The nature of the Indian
polity today is such that neither Mr Vajpayee nor the
Bharatiya Janata Party can afford to put the blame on Mr
Fernandes, whose handling of the Defence Ministry has
left much to be desired.
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