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The successful conduct of polls in Jammu and Kashmir would enable India to score a victory over Pakistan-sponsored proxy war, Deputy Prime Minister Lal Kishenchand Advani said on Monday.
"We are looking forward to these elections in J&K, which is changing the situation [in the state] still further. We will win the ongoing proxy war through the successful conduct of these elections, as we did in all the overt wars [against Pakistan] earlier," Advani said after launching a book on terrorism in New Delhi.
Castigating the Pervez Musharraf regime for criticising the J&K polls, he said, "What kind of a ruler is he who mocks these elections... It needs quite some cheek to say that. The day Atal Bihari Vajpayee took over [as prime minister], he [Musharraf] ousted an elected premier [Nawaz Sharief]... and now two former prime ministers are not being allowed to contest polls in Pakistan."
"I cannot guarantee 90 per cent polling [in J&K]... but the first round of polling has been decent," Advani said.
Stating that the United States and the West were "still not conscious" of the menace of the Inter-Services Intelligence, Advani described the Pakistani agency, the Taliban and Al Qaeda as "the dangerous triangular alliance" that was now the fountainhead of terrorism worldwide.
He said the feeling in Islamabad was that if the J&K polls were held smoothly, then it would be "a feather in India's cap". Hence, as soon as electioneering began, infiltration into J&K started rising.
Asserting that India was "not much concerned" about cross-border infiltration and was capable of tackling it on its own, he said, "The principle ingredient of terrorism is the existence of training camps in Pakistan or Pak-occupied Kashmir."
"We maintain that the first requirement of fighting terrorism is to wind up and dismantle the infrastructure [in Pakistan]... Nothing short of that is going to satisfy us and the whole world should be conscious of it," the DPM asserted.
He quoted an Australian researcher as saying that Washington had ignored the repeated warnings of the slain Afghan anti-Taliban commander, Ahmed Shah Masood, that "Pakistan was rapidly consolidating a potent geopolitical instrument in Afghanistan to further its regional ambitions", which turned that country into "a major source of instability in world politics".
Though the West had faced terror attacks earlier, the "real awareness" was generated only after the September 11 attacks in the US, he added.
Advani said a world opinion had been created against weapons of mass destruction after they were used against innocents, especially during the World War II.
"Similarly, I believe it is quite possible to create a climate against any country which uses terrorism as a state policy," he said, referring to Islamabad's support to terrorism in India.
He said Musharraf, who used to describe acts of terrorism in J&K as "freedom struggle", was now condemning such violence "to give a message to the world that these terrorist organisations are not under his control. But we know what the facts are".
"Now he has promised to end terrorism permanently. At least, by saying so, he has admitted that he was encouraging it earlier," Advani said.
Air chief S Krishnaswamy, who presided over the function to release senior bureaucrat Bhure Lal's book Terrorism Inc, said terrorism had nothing to do with religion, but the fact that educated people were now joining terrorist ranks was a "disturbing feature".
This, he said, made it imperative for the society at large to counter terrorism instead of leaving the job just to the police or those in uniform.
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