Sharm shocker was drafted on the spot

NEW DELHI: Government leaders on Thursday confirmed that the reference to Balochistan in the Indo-Pak joint statement was included after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh���s meeting with Mr Yousaf Raza Gilani in Sharm-el-Sheikh.

Neither senior colleagues of the prime minister nor Congress leadership was in the loop over this disastrous decision, sources said. The Congress and the prime minister���s colleagues in the Cabinet committee on security had only expected the two leaders to ink a statement that detailed action on terror at Sharm-el-Sheikh.

Sources said the statement was drafted in ���bits and pieces���. They said it was a reflection of what had happened at the meeting between the two prime ministers. Mr Singh himself had told journalists that Mr Gilani had summed up the discussions to the two foreign secretaries, who were tasked with working on the joint statement.

The Congress has distanced itself from the joint statement���s contentious provisions with the result that the document has now become the object of a blame game within the government. The prime ministerial establishment on Friday indicated that the ���discordant voices��� coming out of the ministry of external affairs (MEA) on the joint statement was not helping the government���s case at all.

A top minister said the whole purpose of a summit meeting was to take decisions on the spot. ���The buck stops there,��� the minister said, arguing that even the statement of minister of state for external affairs Shashi Tharoor ���which stated that the Indo-Pak joint statement was not ���legally binding��� but merely a ���diplomatic paper������was equivalent of the government disowning its own commitment. The leader also panned foreign secretary Shivshankar Menon���s comments that one could ���argue on the drafting��� of the joint statement.

The Congress continued to be full of contrasting opinions on the matter. But its fear that Balochistan reference could hurt the party was evident when it despatched senior ministers to TV studios to assert that India has no role in Baloch.