M A I N   N E W S

Post-26/11, India’s tough talk rattled Pakistan, recalls Rice

Washington, October 28 
Rattled by India's tough talk after the Mumbai terror attacks, a "terrified" Pakistan pressed the panic button and told the US, China, Saudi Arabia and "everyone that India had decided to go to war".

Islamabad informed the White House that India had warned them they had decided to go to war and a US Presidential aide anxiously called her to convey this, says the then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "That isn't what they're (India) telling me," she told the aide. "In my conversations with Indians over two days, they'd emphasised their desire to defuse the situation and their need for Pakistanis to do something to show they accepted responsibility for tracking down terrorists," Rice wrote in her book 'No High Honors', set to hit stores.

Talking about what transpired beyond public gaze after the 26/11 attacks, Rice says the origin of the panic in Pakistan were the "stern words" conveyed by then External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee to his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi during a phone call. Rice asked the operations centre to get Mukherjee on the phone, but they couldn't reach him. She started getting nervous and she thought Mukherjee was trying to avoid her as New Delhi was preparing for war.

"I called back again. No response. By now the international phone lines were buzzing with the news. The Pakistanis were calling everyone -- the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Chinese. Finally, Mukherjee called back. I told him what I'd heard," Rice wrote in her 766-page book.

"'What?’ he said. 'I'm in my constituency. (The Indians were preparing for elections, and Mukherjee, who was a member of Parliament, was at home campaigning.) Would I be outside New Delhi if we were about to launch a war?'" Mukherjee asked.

Rice said Mukherjee explained that the Pakistani Foreign Minister had taken his stern words in their recent phone call the wrong way. "'I said they were leaving us no choice but to go to war', he said," Rice recalled adding, "This is getting dangerous, I thought." As a result of the wrong rumour coming out of Pakistan, the then US President George Bush asked her to travel to Islamabad and New Delhi to defuse the situation, Rice said.

On her emergency visit to New Delhi after the Mumbai attacks, Rice said PM Manmohan Singh and the Foreign Minister both categorically told her that they were against war, despite increasing public pressure, but wanted Pakistan to do something.

And when she arrived in Islamabad, the Pakistani leadership was still denying what the world knew by then that the attackers were from Pakistan.

"The Pakistanis were terrified as well as dismissive of Indian claims. President Zardari emphasised his desire to avoid war but couldn't bring himself to acknowledge Pakistan's likely role in the attacks," Rice writes.

Pakistani PM Yousuf Raza Gillani, in a speech, told her terrorists who had launched the attack had nothing to do with Pakistan. "Mr Prime Minister, I said, either you're lying to me or your people are lying to you. I then went on to tell him what we-the United States-knew about the origins of the attack," she wrote. — PTI