'Terror stand led to Agra failure'

Contesting Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf's version of the Agra summit, former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee today said the meeting failed as Musharraf kept on describing terrorism in Kashmir as a "people's battle for freedom."

Vajpayee rejected Musharraf's remarks in his book, In the Line of Fire, that both leaders were insulted at Agra by someone "above the two of us".

"I am still to see the book, but his reported comments on the failure of our talks at Agra have surprised me. No one insulted the General, and certainly no one insulted me," Vajpayee said in a statement here.

Vajpayee recalled his government's invitation to Musharraf.

"General Musharraf readily accepted our invitation and came to Delhi. But at Agra, during our talks, he took a stand that violence in Jammu and Kashmir could not be described as terrorism. He continued to claim that the bloodshed was people's battle for freedom," Vajpayee said.

"It was this stand of General Musharraf that India could not accept and this was responsible for the failure of the Agra summit," he added

Vajpayee cited his 2004 statement with Musharraf in which the General promised he would not allow Pakistani territory to be used for terror acts against India. "Pakistan came to our viewpoint when, in the joint statement of January 2004, it agreed not to allow Pakistan or any land in its control to be used for terrorism," he said.

The former prime minister maintained that the 2004 joint statement was the starting point for the composite dialogue process between the two countries.

"If General Musharraf had been willing to accept our position in 2000, the Agra summit would have become successful, and the three subsequent years might have proved valuable in taking our initiative forward," Vajpayee said.

"Ever since the NDA government was formed in March 1998, establishing normalcy in Indo-Pak relations had been a principal item on our agenda. But everyone in our government was acutely alive to the fact that there could be no normalcy until cross-border terrorism, which had taken thousands of lives, was ended," Vajpayee said.