By Sudeshna Sarkar, IANS,
Kathmandu: A clutch of confidential cables sent by senior American diplomats based in South Asia to their Washington headquarters shows amazing inconsistency over the role attributed to Nepal in terror activities targeting India, as the release of confidential documents by Wikileaks shows.
While a cable sent in 1997 from New Delhi by the then American ambassador to India Frank Wisner said Kathmandu was being used as a nodal point by terror group Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Front (JKIF) to dispatch men and material to set off explosions in India, it was contradicted by subsequent briefings by the then American ambassador to Nepal, Michael E. Malinowski.
Bilateral security issues were raised between Kathmandu and New Delhi in 2002 when the then newly crowned king, Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah, made his first official visit to India.
They were re-discussed the following year when the king’s relative, business partner and confidant Prabhakar Rana visited India after Gyanendra asked him to conduct a “diplomatic survey”.
After his return, Rana told the American envoy in Kathmandu that he had met the then Indian national security advisor, Brajesh Mishra, and raised the repeated Indian charges that Nepal failed to apprehend anti-Indian extremists operating from Nepali soil.
Rana said he reminded Mishra that the king had pledged assistance to the highest Indian authorities, including the then Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, then home minister L.K. Advani, and Congress leader Sonia Gandhi.
Since then, he reminded Mishra, Nepal had “quietly turned 45 Kashmiri militants over” to India.
Mishra conceded and gratefully acknowledged that, the royal confidant noted.
Rana also told Mishra that the government of Nepal had asserted greater control over the madrassas operating within its borders than India had and Mishra did not dispute that.
“The government of India accusations that Nepal is soft on extremists are thus unmerited,” Rana concluded.
In a later cable sent by Malinowski, the American ambassador noted that he had held talks with Nepal’s security chiefs and they had also confirmed that.
(Sudeshna Sarkar can be contacted at [email protected])