March, 14 2005	Monday	03 Safar 1426

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NEW DELHI, March 13: Indian opposition leader Lal Kishan Advani has rejected suggestions, including a recent charge by President Gen Pervez Musharraf, that the hardline Hindutva leader was chiefly responsible for the failure of the Agra summit in July 2001.

Mr Advani told the NDTV news channel in a programme shown on Sunday that the ill-fated summit could have been actually saved had Gen Musharraf agreed to the clauses on terrorism in the draft proposals suggested by India at the time, which he eventually endorsed in the Islamabad joint statement of Jan 6, 2004.

But, Mr Advani added, Gen Musharraf was also the man in Pakistan for India to deal with as he could deliver on his promises because of his total sway on the political life of Pakistan.

He said contrary to the belief that his hawkish views on Pakistan were somehow responsible for the failure of the meeting between Gen Musharraf and then Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, it was, in fact, he who had pushed for the invitation to Gen Musharraf.

“For us to have invited him (Gen Musharraf) despite Kargil was not a small thing,”” said Mr Advani, who was India’s home minister at the time and has now become president of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party. “I would claim that I did it. I advised Vajpayeeji that it does not matter if the Lahore agreements had failed.”

Gen Musharraf recently inaugurated his personal website in which he claimed that the Agra summit saw “a great breakthrough” but ended up in a disappointing failure under the “negative influence of some radical Indian government functionaries, in particular Mr Advani”.

Mr Advani is holding an invitation from Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri to visit Pakistan, but the visit appears to have been postponed for now.

According to the BJP leader, the path India-Pakistan relations had taken must be pursued further and “with General Musharraf in office there, there is a possibility that we move forward”.

He asserted there was no major difference of opinion in the Indian cabinet on signing an Agra declaration. He poured scorn on several well-placed surmises that then foreign minister Jaswant Singh had pushed for an agreement with Gen Musharraf in opposition to the cabinet’s considered view.

Mr Advani said Gen Musharraf had come for the Agra talks “with a kind of confidence which made him feel that even though he would assert Jammu and Kashmir was a freedom struggle and there is no terrorism, India would be willing to sign a treaty”.

Mr Advani could not recall any reference to a breakfast meeting Gen Musharraf had with Indian editors as a factor in the Agra debacle.

Commenting on the perceived changes in Gen Musharraf’s stance since Agra, Mr Advani said: “I think in the meanwhile so many things happened in Pakistan. Things that developed in Pakistan made him realize terrorism is an evil which will affect every country and I think General Musharraf can deliver.”

On the domestic front, the BJP chief said his party’s stand on Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin remained an issue.

“How can you have, in a country of so many crores, a person of foreign origin as your leader only because the person is married in a certain family? It’s an issue in politics, in my mind and heart,” he said.