December 14, 2002	Saturday	Shawwal 9, 1423

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NEW DELHI, Dec 13: India on Friday marked the anniversary of last year’s armed attack on parliament, spewing angry words at Islamabad even as Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee claimed that his military alert against Pakistan had sent out a strong signal to all concerned.

Indian TV channels were not sanguine, however, that Vajpayee’s claim of success in the military standoff was rooted in reality. Some of the channels even scoffed at his remarks on Dec 13 last year when he had declared that India would now fight a decisive battle against terrorism.

Vajpayee said the troop deployment on the borders sent a “strong message” to Pakistan to end alleged cross-border terrorism.

“I can tell you that the message is working. We’ll make sure that it works,” he told the captains of industry at a business club.

“We were forced to deploy our troops on the borders to send a strong message to our western neighbour,” he said, adding the message was “clear and simple” that the government was determined to end cross-border terrorism.

“The message was, and it continues to be, clear and simple: that we are determined to end cross-border terrorism and to protect the unity and integrity of India, whatever it takes,” he said.

Vajpayee’s comments found an echo also in Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha’s interview to Britain’s Independent newspaper on Thursday in which he demanded that Pakistan be considered part of the axis of evil that Washington spoke of.

Sinha, who stopped over in London on Wednesday on his way to Cape Town to attend a Non-Aligned Movement Foreign Ministers’ conference, told the paper that “while (US President) Bush may have the idea that there are three members of the axis of evil, one may conclude that one has been left out: Pakistan.”

Calling Pakistan a “sham democracy,” he alleged it continued to support cross-border terrorism into India. “Pakistan is a difficult country and we will have to deal with them”.

Earlier, Sinha told a television channel that there could be no “worthwhile” dialogue with Pakistan unless it stopped supporting anti-India activities. Sinha, who met his British counterpart, Jack Straw, said that India stood for peaceful resolution of all outstanding issues, including Kashmir, but it was Pakistan’s “recalcitrance” which was preventing this.