Not-War Singh

I was reading this article on rediff about what Natwar Singh, India's foreign minister, had to say at the AICC annual meet held recently. I was quite amused by his comments. Mr. Natwar Singh claims that,

- The Simla accord in 1972 ensured peace for 27 years.
- The NDA government replaced Simla with Lahore and that amounted to a sell-off on Kashmir
- The credit for warm relations with China goes to Rajiv Gandhi's efforts while the credit for the recent warmth in Indo-Pak relations does not go to Vajpayee.
- The NDA government was ready to sign the CTBT but the Congress presured it to not do so.
- The NDA government was ready to send troops to Iraq but the Congress pressured it to not do so.

The truth on the other hand, is quite different.

- The Simla accord never maintained peace and friendship. A measure of the tensions can be had from the fact that when Rajiv visited Pakistan in the late eighties, it was the first visit by an India prime minister to Pakistan in 25 years. In my opinion, happy and peaceful neighbors visit each other much more often.
- There has been no bigger sell-off on Kashmir than the Simla pact. Everyone says that Indira Gandhi, negotiating from a position of strength after having just won the war, could have settled the Kashmir dispute for good. But Zulfikar Bhutto managed to fool her and got away just by giving hollow promises on resolving the issue. So if Lahore was a sell-off, Simla could perhaps be better described as charity.
- It was a Congress gvernment which was pressured by the US in 1994 to not conduct a nuclear test. What use is not signing the CTBT if you aren't gonna test anyway? In hindi we have this saying - ulta chor kotwal to daante!, which basically means the guilty have no right to accuse the innocent.
- The sender of the IPKF talks about how our troops would have suffered in Iraq!! Natwar Singh was Minister of State for External Affairs when the Indian Peace Keeping Force was sent to Sri Lanka. The contingent suffered heavy losses primarily because no one in the army knew for sure whom they were fighting against. Identifying the enemy in a war is a political function and the Congress leadership failed miserably at the job.

An aside: When the first of the IPKF contingents were returning from Sri Lanka, battered and bruised, they were supposed to make a pit-stop in Madras, the capital of Tamil Nadu. The people of Tamil Nadu were unhappy with the central government's decision to send in troops to fight against fellow Sri Lankan Tamils. Sensing the sentiment, M. Karunanidhi (leader of the DMK) who was the chief minister of Tamil Nadu at the time, did not even recieve the Indian troops at the airport. Under his express orders, not a single administration official was present to recieve the IPKF jawans and officers returning from duty!