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India outraged over beheading of Sikhs
New Delhi to raise issue at Foreign Secy-level talks
Ashok Tuteja
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, February 22
India today strongly condemned the ‘barbaric’ beheading of two Sikhs by the Taliban in Pakistan as Sikh organisations asked the government to intervene and take up the matter strongly with the Pakistan Government.

An anguished External Affairs Minister S M Krishna, describing the murders of the Sikhs in Khyber and Orakzai areas near Peshawar as shocking, said the issue would be raised by New Delhi at the Indo-Pak Foreign Secretary-level talks here on Thursday.

“We are in touch with the Indian High Commission in Islamabad and are looking into the matter. We will bring up the issue with Pakistan,” he told reporters at Parliament.

Union Sports Minister M S Gill, who met the Foreign Minister to ask him to act immediately in the matter, said he was extremely concerned that some Sikhs in Pakistan were being coerced into becoming Muslims. Last year also, he recalled, some Sikh families had been taken hostage in Pakistan and forced to pay ‘jiziya’ (religious tax).

The matter was also taken up in the Rajya Sabha on the opening day of the Budget session of Parliament with Independent member from Haryana Tarlochan Singh raising the issue when the House took up obituary references.

He wondered why an obituary reference could not be made about the beheading of Sikhs in Pakistan.

Though the Chair did not accept his suggestion, Tarlochan said since India was a secular nation, such an obituary reference should be permitted in the House.

An estimated 10,000 Sikhs lived in the NWFP and in the tribal belt, particularly Orakzai Agency, till the Taliban imposed 'jiziya' on them last year. Most members of the community then fled to cities across Pakistan.

According to reports from Pakistan, some more members of the minority community are still in the custody of the Taliban.

The Congress condemned as ‘extremely unfortunate’ the killings of Sikhs in Pakistan and said it expected the government to take up the matter with the neighbouring country.

“We condemn the killings. It is extremely unfortunate… we expect the government to talk to Pakistan to protect the lives of the minorities there,” Congress spokesman Manish Tewari said.

The BJP asked the government to mount diplomatic pressure on Pakistan to ensure release of the abducted Sikh residents in that country.

Minorities were facing threats in Pakistan and terrorism presented the real picture of that country, BJP spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad said.

Pak must check terror: Rao

Ahead of the February 25 India-Pakistan Foreign Secretary-level talks, New Delhi today made it clear to Islamabad that it must take effective action against anti-India terror outfits operating from its soil in the interest of the normalisation process.

“We are now making another attempt of dialogue with Pakistan. However, calls of ‘jihad’, hostility and aggression continue to be made openly against India. If the process of normalisation that we desire with Pakistan is to be sustained and taken forward, effective action against such groups by the Government of Pakistan is an absolute must,” Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao said while addressing in London the 3rd International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) seminar on ‘Perspectives on Foreign Policy for a 21st Century India’.

At the outset, the top Indian diplomat described India’s relationship with Pakistan as ‘complex’, adding that it was out of New Delhi’s desire for peaceful and good neighbourly relations with Pakistan that it had repeatedly taken initiatives in the past to improve the relationship. However, the dark forces of terrorism were seeking to erase the good that stemmed from such well-intentioned initiatives.

Noting that under pressure and faced with the threat of terrorism in its own country, Pakistan had initiated some steps to fight the scourge, she hastened to add that these steps were selective. “Distinctions between Taliban, Al-Qaida and terrorist outfits such as LeT are now meaningless, since they are now in effect fused both operationally and ideologically.”

India, she said, had consistently maintained that Pakistan should bring the perpetrators of the Mumbai terror attack to justice expeditiously and in a transparent manner. It should act decisively to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism on its territory.

On the upcoming meeting with her Pakistani counterpart Salman Bashir, Nirupama said India hoped the talks could build in a graduated manner better communication and a serious and responsive dialogue to address issue of concern between the two countries.