Daily Times, July 11, 2006
‘Vajpayee offered J&K military bases to US to fight Taliban’
NEW DELHI: A former Indian navy chief has revealed that the former government of Atal Behari Vajpayee had offered the United States the use of military bases in Jammu and Kashmir and other areas to carry out strikes against Afghanistan in 2001.
Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, the first service chief to be dismissed from his post (seven months after India conducted nuclear tests in 1998), has also charged that the country’s atomic tests led to a series of “surrenders” of India’s sovereignty. In his latest book - “The Eye Opening: As I Saw It” – Bhagwat claims that India had offered the US use of three air bases in its battle to overthrow Afghanistan’s Taliban regime: Avantipur base near Sriangar; Adampur in Punjab; and Jamnagar in Gujarat.
“The informal offer was politely declined, in favour of logistically and politically more convenient environment of the Pakistani military bases,” he writes.
Quoting official sources, Bhagwat says that India had already initiated “operational cooperation” with US officials by providing them with intelligence on Afghan camps and the Taliban. “The Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) had gathered a wealth of details on Pakistani military assistance to the Taliban,” he asserts.
Terming India’s Pokhran-II nuclear tests as a “push-button affair for the BJP-led NDA government which took office six weeks earlier (to the May 1998 explosions)”, the former navy chief insists that they created a “culture and mindset of dependency”, rather than adding to national strength and self-confidence or accelerating all-round national capability through self-reliance.
While the government claimed the tests to be a great success “internationally, and with the superpowers . . . we had created quite a mess for ourselves”. Indeed, Bhagwat claims that the tests marked a “series of surrenders in every sector of the national polity, economy and science and technology”.
Bhagwat also describes the declaration of a unilateral moratorium on nuclear tests and the holding of summit-level talks with Pakistan in Lahore in February 1999 as being detrimental to India’s interests.
In his book, Bhagwat also underlines the necessity of a thorough review of the military-military relations with both the US and Britain. The former navy chief, who stands accused of disclosing India’s plans to make a nuclear-powered submarine, writes that a mini revolution was under way in India regarding the design, production and installation of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence-vision and architecture in the ships. iftikhar gilani
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