Vaidik did not have New Delhi’s blessings
Now that the Indian High Commission in Pakistan has officially clarified that it was not in the loop over freelance journalist Ved Pratap Vaidik's meeting with 26/11 terror mastermind Hafiz Saeed in Pakistan, the Opposition should stop pointing fingers at the Narendra Modi Government over the incident. Since the Indian Mission did not know of the rendezvous, there was no question of facilitating it. The Opposition can still maintain that it is not satisfied with the Government's response, but then there is nothing to be done if it refuses to accept the truth. From the day news of the meeting broke out in the media, the Government has maintained that Mr Vaidik's meeting with India's most wanted man had nothing to do with any Track II diplomacy, that the Government had not authorised him to engage in any such endeavour — and most certainly not with Hafiz Saeed — and that he had not met the terrorist as a mediator or interlocutor or facilitator of any kind. No responsible Government in New Delhi would be so audacious and so foolish as to engage in diplomacy with Hafiz Saeed. It would have been doubly foolish of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led regime to do, given that the party and Mr Modi have been especially harsh on the previous Congress-led Government for being soft on terror. A few senior Congress leaders, who too were part of the delegation that went to Pakistan and which included Mr Vaidik, have also virtually dismissed the possibility that the High Commission could have been in the know. Certain Opposition leaders appear to have given credence to speculation by a bunch of journalists from Pakistan who claimed that the meeting could not have been organised without the Indian High Commission's knowledge, if not approval. Mr Vaidik has been claiming from day one that the initiative had been purely his, facilitated by some friends in the media in Pakistan. His penchant for dropping names and boasting about his supposed proximity to prominent political leaders in India, including Prime Minister Modi, must have nourished the impression that he had met Hafiz Saeed with the Union Government's blessings.
While the Modi regime is in the clear, what remains unsettled is whether the military establishment and the Inter-Services Intelligence of Pakistan had played a role in this ‘set-up' which left India red-faced and led to acrimony among political parties in this country. Knowledgeable sources from both India and Pakistan have been saying that Hafiz Saeed is an ‘asset' of the ISI and is the agency's ‘protectee'. While the ISI may not be micro-managing the terrorist's calendar of appointments, the latter's meeting with an Indian cannot have happened without its concurrence. Whatever the truth may be, the bottom-line is that the ISI will not be complaining about the hysteria that Mr Vaidik's meeting with the terrorist has created in India.