By
IOL South Asia Correspondent
NEW
DELHI, November 30 (IslamOnline) - The Indian ministries of defense
and external affairs seem to have contradictory estimates of the
situation on the Line of Control (LoC) and Pakistan's commitment to
stop supporting militants in Kashmir. The defense ministry says
Pakistan-trained militants' infiltration into Kashmir has trickled off
while the external affairs ministry thinks it has increased.
So,
whom do we believe? This is the question Congress Party chief whip
Priya Ranjan Das Munshi raised in Parliament Friday, November 29.
Munshi
demanded that Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee make a statement in
the lower house to clarify the situation. External affairs minister
Yashwant Sinha's recent statements on the issue have been quite
contrary to what the defense minister said in parliament.
Replying
to a question in Parliament on Thursday, November 28, about army
withdrawal from the Indo-Pakistan border, defense minister George
Fernandes seemed to suggest that massive forward deployment of troops
for 10 months had achieved a lot, contrary to popular perception that
the only achievement was tremendous wastage of public money.
The
mobilization exerted military pressure on Pakistan and forced the
Pakistani President to denounce support to Jihad through his speeches
of January 12 and May 27, Fernandes said. He went on to elaborate,
"Some of the terrorist organisations in Pakistan were banned,
some terrorist camps in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) were closed,
their accounts frozen and leaders arrested."
The
best point of it all, according to Fernandes, was that the
infiltration this year has come down considerably compared to the
figures of the corresponding period of previous year. But this is
precisely what the ministry of external affairs has been insisting
over the last couple of months has not happened.
The
ministry of external affairs has claimed that infiltration has
increased in relation to the corresponding period last year. According
to their estimates, over the 175 days since Pakistan President Pervez
Musharraf's speech on May 27 announcing end of infiltration, there has
been a high number of militant attacks and civilian deaths.
External
affairs estimates say there have been 1,624 incidents after May 27
compared to 1,403 before and 582 civilians have been killed after it
compared to 442 before.
The
defense minister's positive estimates of the situation could have been
because of fear of public criticism of huge expenditure incurred on
military deployment which did not serve any purpose whatsoever. The
deployment looks even futile keeping in view starvation deaths in two
states which could have been averted by spending only one percent of
the cost of deployment
