COMPLIMENTS TO ARMY CHIEF

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On August 6 last week, Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid conveyed to four BJP leaders in Parliament, Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley and me that the Prime Minister wished to discuss with us the issue he had briefly mentioned to us before he had gone to Bangladesh, namely, settlement of the border between our two countries. In relation to this issue, NSA Shiv Shankar Menon had later made a presentation to a larger contingent of BJP leaders, including Jaswant Singh and Yashwant Sinha, besides several others from West Bengal and Assam.

When a few minutes before 5.30 p.m., the time fixed for our meeting with the P.M., I reached Race Course Road, almost the same time A.K. Antony also arrived. I mentioned to him that BJP leaders had been invited to discuss the Bangladesh enclaves issue with the P.M. Had he too come for the same meeting, I asked. He candidly said he had been ‘summoned’, he was not aware of the subject matter.

This was the day on which five of our jawans had been killed at the L.O.C. by Pak soldiers and Pak-trained terrorists. This had been stated by the Army’s official press release that morning. That afternoon, however, Defence Minister had made a statement in the House in which he had changed the Army’s version of the event in a way as to blame only terrorists for the killing. The statement made not only Parliament angry but had so upset the families of the martyred jawans that one of the widows refused to accept the Rs.10 lakh compensation offered by Government. A press report said that Pushpa Rai, wife of Vijay Rai said in anguish, “Can Rs.10 lakh compensation bring back my husband?  We don’t want compensation, but strong military reply to Pakistan.”

At our meeting with the Prime Minister, not only Salman Khurshid, but A.K. Antony also was present.  Both the issues – Bangladesh enclaves as well as the L.O.C. ambush by Pakistan – were discussed.  We responded firmly on both issues.

About the Bangladesh matter, we told the P.M. that our state units were strongly opposed to the proposal, and so we could not agree to it. 

On the issue of Pakistan’s massacre of our jawans, we were equally firm. It was at this meeting with the Prime Minister that I used a word as harsh as “goof-up’ for the Defence Minister’s statement that day. I have always had great warmth and respect for A.K. Antony.  So I was really surprised by his statement that day. Later I gathered that it was the PMO which had made Salman Khurshid persuade the D.M. to change the Army version.

At this Race Course Road meeting it was agreed that the Defence Minister would make a revised statement the next day after he had heard the full version of what had actually happened from the Army Chief. The Chief had gone to Jammu to get a first hand report about the incident. We said we would await the revised statement.

I would like to compliment the Army Chief for having made the Defence Minister not just confirm what the Army press note had said, but specifically to add that “Specialist Troops of the Pakistan Army were involved in this attack.” We in Parliament felt happy that in his revised statement Antony had not confined himself to the L.O.C. incident, but had further asserted that  there cannot be business as usual with Pakistan, unless -

1)     the terrorist infrastructure is dismantled;

2)     there is tangible movement towards bringing those responsible for the Mumbai terrorist attack in November 2008 to justice; and

3)     those in Pakistan responsible for the killing of five jawans this week, and the beheading of one of our jawans some time back are also punished.

Ordinarily, I may have bracketed the Defence Minister also with the Army Chief in my above compliments. But I could have done that only if he had shown courage to formally withdraw his statement of August 6, and in his revised statement, apologized to the Army for the ridiculous alterations he had made in the Army’s version, which was absolutely accurate. No Minister can say anything in the House which is false. If he does say something untrue because he had been misinformed, the least he must do is to express regrets.

The country hopes that after this kind of firm assertion by the Minister and the Army the Prime Minister would abandon his keenness to have peace talks with his Pakistani counterpart. These very days, the world has been watching how a Snowden asylum made Obama call off his scheduled meeting with Putin !

TAILPIECE

In the course of an editorial page article titled “SCARED WITLESS”, Shekhar Gupta, Editor-in-Chief, The Indian Express has compared A.K. Antony to Shakespeare’s Mark Antony in his play “Julius Caesar”, and lauded his paper’s cartoonist E.P. Unny for being “so brutally and brilliantly right” with his caricature of Defence Minister A.K. Antony in a toga, described as “Mark-II Antony speech!”

The article adds: “You’ve had other ministers go back and forth with their statements on sundry other issues. But a defence minister on an incident on the LOC? He now says he first spoke only from ‘available’ information and now that he knew better, terrorists dressed in army fatigues became not just Pakistani regulars, but also from their special forces.”