New Delhi, October 23
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee today asked Pakistan to decide what exactly it wanted from India: peace or a relationship in which Islamabad keeps on threatening New Delhi with “dire consequences”.
With today’s hard-hitting speech, the Prime Minister has made it clear that his government was back to its old policy vis-a-vis Pakistan — that there would be no talks with that country until it stopped its cross-border terrorist activities against India.
Addressing a gathering of Sikhs from the Capital who had gathered to express their solidarity with the government’s war against terrorism, Mr Vajpayee spoke candidly about Pakistan and launched a frontal attack on the Islamabad’s policy of aiding and abetting terrorism against India for nearly two decades.
Taking a dig at Pakistan's flip-flop foreign policy, Mr Vajpayee remarked: "Sometimes it (Pakistan) wants peace and on other occasions threatens India with dire consequences. I tell him to first decide what they want. They supported the Taliban. At times they even threatened us by saying that the Taliban was with them. Now they are fighting the Taliban. Who will believe them?"
The Prime Minister lambasted the Taliban and referring to its harsh governance in Afghanistan said, "There is no freedom or democracy. There is dictatorship there and atrocities are committed on people to make them agree to the whims and fancies of the rulers. Women have been denied their rights".
Mr Vajpayee made a mockery of Pakistan's repeated claims that what was going on in Jammu and Kashmir was "freedom struggle" and not
terrorism.
ISLAMABAD: Continuing its blow-hot, blow-cold approach, Pakistan today urged New Delhi to review its stand of not holding talks until Islamabad stopped promoting cross-border terrorism.
“We hope that India would review its position and there would be resumption of dialogue,” Pakistan Foreign office spokesman Riaz Mohammad Khan told reporters, a day after President Pervez Musharraf threatened to teach India a lesson.
Meanwhile, the Directors-General of Military Operations (DGMOs) of India and Pakistan today discussed the situation on the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir where the exchange of fire between the two countries has gone up in the past one week.
