By IANS,
New Delhi : The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Friday said New Delhi needed to be tougher in dealing with Islamabad and tell Pakistan that dialogue was not possible till anti-India terror was eliminated.
“The government of India must tell the government of Pakistan clearly that the anti-India terror should be eliminated. Unless you take effective and credible action against the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks there is no need to have dialogue with Pakistan,” BJP spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters here.
Prasad also criticised External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna for not defending India’s Home Secretary G.K. Pillai when Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi attacked him for his remarks on the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) during their talks in Islamabad Thursday.
“It is unfortunate. I have no words to condemn that. They were equating terrorist Hafiz Saeed with one of our senior civil servants. And we were expecting India to condemn it. It has not happened, I am shocked. I regret he was not defended by India’s foreign minister,” Prasad said, a day after the failed talks.
The almost seven-hour meeting between Qureshi and Krishna ended with no common ground but the two sides reiterated their known positions on thorny issues such as Kashmir. Krishna was on a three-day visit to Pakistan.
When asked about Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed’s hate speeches in Pakistan, Qureshi countered by bringing up Pillai and his allegations on the eve of the external minister’s visit that Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI was involved in the 26/11 Mumbai strike.
“Tell me, to what extent it helped (our dialogue)? It was uncalled for,” Qureshi said.
BJP spokesperson Prasad said Qureshi was making an issue out of Pillai’s comment, which was nothing but a statement of Lashkar-e-Taiba operative David Headley that the ISI had a role in the Mumbai attack.
“They have no reply or content but they are comparing it (Pillai’s remarks) with Hafiz Saeed without taking any action,” Prasad said.