July 20, 2007	Friday	Rajab 04, 1428

NEW DELHI, July 19: After he was forced by former Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee not to visit Pakistan without coming also to India in October 2001, bugs were detected in the Delhi hotel suite of the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The Indian Express on Thursday quoted the book — The Blair Years, the diaries of Alistair Campbell, as saying that Mr Blair's “official visit to New Delhi (was) a trip that was added to his schedule only at the insistence of the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee”.

Mr Campbell was Mr Blair's high-profile chief of communications and strategy, and considered his right-hand man who had to quit in 2003 under a cloud of controversy over intelligence on Iraq. The report was curiously filed by the Express’s Jammu and Kashmir correspon-dent Muzamil Jaleel from Srinagar.

The book which was released early this month in the UK shows an entry dated October 5, 2001 at the beginning of a couple of days of shuttle diplomacy after September 11 when Pakistan had chosen to join the US-led “war on terrorism”.

Mr Campbell writes: “We arrived in Delhi and drove into town. TB (Tony Blair) motioned to the ambassador, asking if the car was bugged. He gave a kind of non-committal no. Then at the hotel our security service guys had found two bugs in TB's bedroom and said they would not be able to move them without drilling the wall, so TB used a different room.

We decided against making a fuss. I was given my own valet, Sunil, who just would not leave me alone. He followed me to the gym and I literally had to tell him to disappear. He was waiting at my door when I got back.”

In his entry on Wednesday, October 3, Mr Campbell says: “(Atal Bihari) Vajpayee was on the phone totally adamant that if TB went to Pakistan without visiting India it would be a real disaster for him. He was normally so quiet and soft spoken but there was both panic and a bit of anger in his voice.”

Mr Campbell quotes Mr Blair as saying that “having listened to (Mr Vajpayee) there was no way we could do one without the other”.

He recalls Mr Vajpayee as frail and his voice as weak, “but in part because he had no fear of silence there was a quiet force to him when he spoke...TB all drive and words and desperate to get everything right; Vajpayee calm, something almost mystical about him”.