Ahmedabad: Extending full support to India’s surgical strikes across the Line of Control (LoC) to neutralise terrorists in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), former Army Chief VP Malik said that the Indian army was ready to cross the LoC during the 1999 Kargil war, but was stopped by then-Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.
According to reports, Malik, who was Army Chief in 1999, said that following international pressure and due to the general elections imminent for later that year, the Indian government stopped the army from crossing the LoC.
Malik , speaking at the Switch Global Expo in Ahmedabad on Monday, said he was ‘very unhappy’ with Vajpayee’s direction to him to ‘let go of Pakistan’. He said that it took 3 meetings on a single day to convince him to follow Vajpayee’s decision.
Malik said, “On June 2, PM Vajpayee told the Army not to cross the border. The then national security adviser Brajesh Mishra had said in an interview that the Army was told ‘not to cross the border today, but we don’t know about tomorrow’.”
However, Malik added that ‘in hindsight, it was the right decision’.
Asked about the war of words between the BJP and opposition parties Congress and AAP over the surgical strikes, he said that politicians who do not have the knowledge about national security should not speak. He called for unity across the political spectrum on the issue.
The former Army Chief stated he did not believe Pakistan would change after one surgical strike. “We must be prepared for more action from them and more reaction from us,” he said.
Malik said that after the strikes, India does not have to beg the international community to rein in Pakistan on sponsoring terror, but merely tell them that if Pakistan continued to do so, India would go to war.
