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Sinha rejects Pak. plea on terrorism

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON MAY 19. The External Affairs Minister, Yashwant Sinha, today rejected Pakistan's argument that it had no control over terrorists who continued to cross into Jammu and Kashmir as they were from outside the region and belonged to non-Pakistani militant groups.

Mr. Sinha, who is here to attend a meeting of the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (CMAG), said it was difficult to accept this argument considering that Islamabad had been all too willing to capture and hand over to the U.S. about 500 Afghan, Arab and other Al-Qaeda linked terrorists.

Speaking to the BBC before going into the meeting, Mr. Sinha declined to say if India would continue to oppose Pakistan's re-entry into the Commonwealth which would be a main subject of discussion at the CMAG's two-day deliberations. At the last meeting, he had led the opposition to Pakistan's reinstatement arguing that it would be against the principles of the Commonwealth to revoke Islamabad's suspension before democracy was fully restored there.

Although observers believed that India would reiterate the old argument, Mr. Sinha was non-committal saying he would not like to "pre-empt'' the discussions. CMAG, he said, comprised eight countries and it would be appropriate for the entire group to come to a collective decision.

But he was quick to delink India's stand on Pakistan's re-admission into the Commonwealth from the initiatives the two countries have taken in recent weeks to improve bilateral relations. Pakistan was suspended from the Council of the Commonwealth in 1999, when Pervez Musharraf seized power after overthrowing the democratically-elected Government of Nawaz Sharif.

Mr. Sinha again voiced India's unhappiness over what it regards as the international community's "double-standards'' on condemning terrorism. He insisted that acts of terrorism in Kashmir should be condemned in the same unequivocal terms as the attacks in Casablanca, Bali and elsewhere. If Pakistan was certain that its agencies were not involved in cross-border terrorism then the two countries could work together to deal with the problem.

He shrugged off Pakistan's bid to seek international mediation on Kashmir and define it as a core issue. He reiterated India's stand that all issues between the two countries must be resolved bilaterally, and said that Kashmir was not defined as a core issue either in the Shimla Agreement or the documents signed in Lahore. In fact, the Agra summit failed precisely because of Pakistan's insistence on focussing on Kashmir to the exclusion of other issues.

On speculation that the U.S. was perhaps being soft on Pakistan because of the "imperatives'' of the war against terrorism, the Minister said that India had a "vibrant'' and strong relationship with the U.S. which was independent of its relations with any other country.

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