NEW DELHI, Sept 26: Former Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee on Tuesday rejected the claim by President Gen Pervez Musharraf in his book that their Agra talks were torpedoed by someone opposed to their success.
Mr Vajpayee said in a statement that the talks had in fact failed because Gen Musharraf refused to describe the violence in Jammu and Kashmir as terrorism.
Expressing “surprise” at Gen Musharraf’s comments in his book “In The Line of Fire” that both of them had been “humiliated” at the summit, Mr Vajpayee said: “No one insulted the General and certainly no one insulted me.”
Mr Vajpayee said that during the talks Gen Musharraf “took a stand that the violence that was taking place in Jammu and Kashmir could not be described as ‘terrorism’. He continued to claim that the bloodshed in the state was nothing but the people’s battle for freedom.
“It was this stand of Gen Musharraf that India just could not accept and this was responsible for the failure of the Agra summit.”
Mr Vajpayee claimed that Pakistan eventually accepted the Indian version on terrorism in January 2004, when the two sides issued a joint statement in which Gen Musharraf promised not to allow Pakistani territory to be used for terror activities against India.
“If Gen Musharraf had been willing to accept our position in 2000, the Agra summit would have become successful, and the three subsequent years may have proved very valuable to take our initiative forward,” he said.
