New Delhi, April 21
While the Vajpayee government has summarily rejected Pakistan’s “baseless” allegations of New Delhi possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), senior officials believe that Islamabad is raising the WMD bogey as part of its much larger game plan.
Senior officials in the Vajpayee government here used Shakespearean phrases to describe the mindset and policy of the Pervez Musharraf regime in the wake of the second Pakistani official accusing India of storing WMDs.
Pakistan Information and Media Development Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed yesterday told a Pakistani private television channel in a phone-in interview that Islamabad had proof about not only India developing chemical and biological weapons, but also having kept them “in some neighbouring countries.”
The Ministry of External Affairs today rubbished the accusation as a “baseless charge” and its spokesman Navtej Sarna described the remark as “a vivid imagination of Pakistani Information Minister’s disinformation.”
However, senior officials said there was “a method in madness” (of Pakistan) and this “motive hunting for motiveless malignity” was not without a larger game plan.
One assessment of the Vajpayee government is that Pakistan’s renewed sabre-rattling against India with Iraq as a backdrop is to goad the international community to take an Iraq-type action against India, while at the same time, cleverly diverting the world’s attention from Pakistan’s WMD programme, as pointed out by the Indian leadership.
Pakistan’s latest witch-hunt also enables the Musharraf regime to divert attention from that country’s uninterrupted aid to terrorist outfits based there to continue with their proxy war against India.
Besides, the timing of such statements emanating from Pakistan coincides with news reports that Islamabad is trying to host the next South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit in Islamabad in December this year.
The already vitiated atmosphere in the subcontinent is being further poisoned by such statements from Pakistani ministers to evoke a cold response from New Delhi on the SAARC summit and then blame India for trying to wreck the regional body, sources said.
