Former Pakistan President Gen Pervez Musharraf plays kargil card again

NEW DELHI: All but written off in Pakistani politics, former President and Army Chief Gen Pervez Musharraf played the Kargil card again while announcing that his floundering All Pakistan Muslim League (APML) party will contest for the upcoming local bodies elections taking place in the nation.

Musharraf, who ousted the democratically elected government in Pakistan after the 1999 Kargil conflict, has claimed that his armed forces had `grabbed India by the throat’ and that New Delhi would never forget the war. He was speaking at a party function of the APML in Karachi on Sunday.

The former Army Chief, who fought a bitter battle with the judiciary of his country before being ousted from power in 2008, said that `we entered Kargil from four points of which India was not aware’. He also said that `there was a second line force too which caught India by throat and that was latter given the status of army’, while addressing the party function.

He also blamed the then political dispensation for failing to exploit the Kargil `success’. “If government decided correctly on Kargil, a major victory would be ours”, he said. Musharraf, who was critical to Washington during their 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, has made several such claims about Kargil in the past, including in his autobiography.