Govt calls PM’s goof-up ‘smart strategy’

Prime minister Manmohan Singh’s controversial joint statement with Pakistan at Sharm El-Sheikh is now being portrayed by officialdom as India’s “smart strategy” on Pakistan.

Highly-placed sources on Friday said there was no contradiction in delinking terror from Indo-Pak talks. Nor was India afraid of the B-word. This, a day after minister of state for external affairs Shashi Tharoor had downplayed the significance of the joint statement, calling it a diplomatic paper and not a legally-binding document.

After days of facing the heat on Singh’s Sharm El-Sheikh statement, South Block is now defending the PM, saying that he did what is best for the country. It says that those who are criticising the wording of the joint statement were doing so “not because of the formulation” of it but to make the issue a “political football”, losing sight of India’s long-term objective of containing Pakistan-linked terrorism.

These sources believe that the UPA government has adopted a “smart strategy” on Pakistan.  

Instead of amassing troops along the borders like the previous NDA government did after the Parliament attack, New Delhi has remained engaged and forced Pakistan to take certain steps against the Mumbai attackers.

And though India has agreed to a limited engagement at the foreign secretary level, there is no question of resuming full-scale dialogue with Pakistan in the near future unless more is done to contain terror outfits working against India.

Sources emphasised that what Singh has said about delinking dialogue with terror was to force Pakistan to act, irrespective of the status of the composite dialogue. “For the first time we have got Islamabad to take some action and file criminal charges against some of those responsible for the Mumbai attacks. Pakistan has never ever done this before... We have got them to do something… it may be half a step but better than nothing…It will be a long haul,” a top government source said. But there is no guarantee that Islamabad will do more. Therefore, for now, the limited dialogue with Pakistan will be only on terror.

On Balochistan, India had nothing to hide and New Delhi had no problems with mentioning the B-word. Pakistan had many times tried to blame India for its problems in Balochistan but those allegations made to the US and the UK have never been taken seriously. 

It was also clarified that Pakistan has not handed over any dossier about India’s involvement in Balochistan. A one-and-a-half page action-taken report on the Mumbai investigations was handed over to the Indian side with the photographs of those involved and short bio-datas of the alleged offenders.

The source added that India is not quite ready to engage with the inter services intelligence (ISI) chief Shuja Pasha. He is reportedly keen to be involved in future talks but at the moment there is no formal mention of the ISI being part of India-Pakistan dialogue, though it is well known that the agency dictates much of Islamabad’s India policy.