It was all hype, white paper on Kashmir is off

It was all hype, white paper on Kashmir is off
HARISH GUPTA

SHIMLA, MARCH 25: The white paper on the activities of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, which Union Home Minister L K Advani had been promising for the past several months, will never see the light of day.

Though the white paper was prepared by the Department of Jammu and Kashmir in the Union Home Ministry, the proposal to table it in Parliament has been dropped.

Instead, Advani plans to make a detailed statement in both Houses of Parliament, when they meet after the recess, on why the white paper cannot be tabled.

Advani said he had been debating tabling the white paper. ``It is ready and can be tabled any time. But we have decided not to do so,'' he said.

His statement, however, will contain details of ISI's anti-Indian activities during the last 15 years and the damage that it has caused to the life and property of innocents.

Advani told The Indian Express that one of the reasons was that a white paper should also contain action taken by the government to check the ISI's activities in addition to its activities. It should also give details of the action-plan undertaken to meet the challenge. Now that the world had accepted the fact that terrorism was being sponsored by Pakistan from across the border, there was no apparent need to bring it out.

Advani, who was here to participate in the state-level celebrations of two years of BJP rule in Himachal Pradesh, said another reason for abandoning the proposal was based on the assessment that the ``battle against terrorism should not be affected'' by the white paper.