Bhubaneswar: The Congress-led Central Government's policy on terrorism was "deeply flawed", Bharatiya Janata Party leader L K Advani said on Wednesday while expressing "shock" at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's statement about India and Pakistan jointly fighting terrorism.
"I am shocked by the statement by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh reiterating his earlier stand that India and Pakistan should jointly fight the menace of terrorism," the BJP's prime ministerial candidate told reporters.
He was responding to Manmohan Singh's remark on Tuesday on the sidelines of the civil investiture ceremony in Rashtrapati Bhavan. "I have always said that India and Pakistan have to face jointly the scourge of terrorism," the Prime Minister had said while expressing his sympathies to Pakistan over the terror attack on a police academy near Lahore.
"This statement echoes Dr Singh's stand adopted after his meeting with the former Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf in Havana in September 2006 that India and Pakistan should establish a joint anti-terror mechanism," Advani, who is in Bhubaneshwar on a two-day campaign tour, said.
"I had personally questioned the rationale of India joining hands with a country whose government had refused to fulfill its 2004 commitment to dismantle the anti-India terror infrastructure on its territory."
"The fact that Pakistan itself has been the victim of home grown terrorist incidents cannot be an argument in favour of an India-Pak joint mechanism to fight terrorism," Advani said, describing the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government's policy on fighting terrorism as "deeply flawed".
Pakistan, he said, had created a Frankenstein that its rulers in Islamabad were unwilling to vanquish because they know it can be used in their proxy war against India.
"Another proof of the Congress-led UPA government's flawed policy towards Pakistan was the prime minister's shocking statement in October 2008 that he wanted to see the border between India and Pakistan become irrelevant."
"Our country has paid a heavy price because of the UPA government's wrong neighbourhood policy, made worse by the Congress party's policies of minorityism at home," the BJP leader added.
Advani, who landed here Tuesday, addressed several poll rallies in western Orissa soon after his arrival and is scheduled to address several meetings on Wednesday as well. This is his first trip to the state after the BJP's 11-year coalition with Orissa's ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) collapsed last month.
Orissa will go to the polls in two phases on April 16 and April 23 to elect 147 members to the state assembly and 21 members to the Lok Sabha. The BJP has announced it will contest all Lok Sabha and assembly seats alone.
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