01 November 2004	Monday	17 Ramazan 1425

NEW DELHI, Oct 31: Former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi had no intention to invade West Pakistan after the fall of Dhaka in 1971 and had sought to work for a stable Pakistan after signing the Shimla Agreement in 1972, Indian Foreign Minister Kunwar Natwar Singh said on Sunday.

Speaking to Doordarshan to mark the 20th anniversary of Indira Gandhi's death, Mr Singh said: "We didn't want more pieces of Pakistan, we wanted stability."

Mr Singh said Mrs Gandhi was also aware that any move to pile on force against West Pakistan would draw the Security Council into the frame, with the Soviet Union, the United States, France and others putting their foot down.

As a foreign ministry official in Mrs Gandhi's administration, Mr Singh found out that it was a myth that she inevitably preferred to overrule her advisers.

"Even middle-level officers like me would go to her," he said. "She was an outstanding human being."

When he headed to buy appropriate clothes to go with his new found interest in politics, Mrs Gandhi counselled him to "better acquire a thick skin rather than new clothes to succeed in politics."

Meanwhile, Commonwealth Secretary-General Don McKinnon has said that India and Pakistan are aware that they both need to make concessions to resolve the Kashmir dispute, The Hindu newspaper said on Sunday.

Referring to the possibility of resolving issues that divided India and Pakistan, the secretary-general said it might mean that "each may have to give up a little bit of something" in the process.

"We have to support that," he said in an interview withThe Hindu with the hindsight of meeting both President Gen Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the past week.

Mr McKinnon said he was "left with the impression" that both President Musharraf and Dr Singh wanted a resolution to issues of concern to them. "I think that they both recognized that this had gone on for 57 years now. They both recognize that there's been an extremely high cost to human life."

On President Musharraf's decision to hold on to the post of army chief even after the Dec 31 'deadline', Mr McKinnon claimed that the Commonwealth ministers had been given the impression prior to the meeting - which lifted the suspension of Pakistan from the councils of the Commonwealth - that the 17th amendment to the Constitution would not only invalidate the president wearing the uniform, but also split the roles of president and army chief, the paper said.