Jaswant’s latest: ‘Agreement’ in Agra

New Delhi: Did India and Pakistan had an agreed draft statement before the 2001 Agra summit collapsed as has repeatedly been claimed in Pakistan?

Jaswant Singh, who was External Affairs Minister during the summit, throws some light on this abiding argument in his memoirs A Call to Honour which hit the stands on Friday.

Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Abdul Sattar had been told at the summit in July 2001 to attempt a draft and "together we tried our hand at writing something on a piece of paper."

"I attempted something in pencil on a piece of paper, he corrected/amended it, I did likewise and so it went on for sometime, to and fro. Finally, he said he would have to consult his President (Gen Pervez Musharraf) before he could assent or disagree," Singh says.

Sattar reported to Musharraf and returned with a "few changes" and asked Singh whether it was agreeable to him. Singh responded by saying he too had to obtain the clearance of his cabinet colleagues and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Singh recalls Sattar telling him that it was a "perilous" task on which both of them were set as "negotiators of an agreement and messengers of that agreement".

"In such tasks, believe me, quite often, it is the messenger who gets shot," he quotes Sattar as having said.

"This piece of 'paper' (draft) has been variously cited as evidence of discord within the NDA government, of my own personal 'soft approach' against some others, and all those speculative flights of fancy, all so entirely unnecessary," Singh says.

The senior BJP leader says, as during any other diplomatic negotiation, so too, in this, these very preliminary notes would have got refined or explained and would then perhaps have led to some forward movement.

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"This was an exercise at finding a starting point, it was not any agreed document. Besides, a draft is no more than a 'draft' so what is all this controversy about?" Singh asks.

He recalls showing the paper to Vajpayee, who then called his cabinet colleagues to the hotel suite.

"The collective view expressed there was that without sufficient and clear emphasis on terrorism, also accepting categorically that it must cease, how could there be any significant movement on issues that are of concern or are a priority only to Pakistan? And none that are in the hierarchy of priorities for India? How can we abandon Shimla or Lahore? Or forget the reality of Kargil? I went back and reported failure to Sattar," Singh writes.

One of the popular theories doing the rounds in those days was that some hardliners in the Vajpayee cabinet had scuttled the Agra talks.

Recollecting the special meeting Musharraf sought with Vajpayee in a last-minute effort to hammer out an agreement, Singh says, "I knew that a mistake was being made by our guest, for when I later asked Vajpayee what had happened, he said quietly 'nothing'.

"He said it in Hindi, in effect to mean, "the visiting general sahib kept talking and I kept listening'. This is an art at which Vajpayee, so often and so disconcertingly to the unfamiliar, specialises," the former minister says.