Jaitley questions UPA-II’s cricket diplomacy with Pakistan

New Delhi: Senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley questioned the UPA-II’s cricket diplomacy with Pakistan and alleged that the Centre has no clear policy on peace talks with the neighbouring country.”The BJP-led NDA had a clear policy on India-Pakistan talks unlike the Congress-led UPA-II government,” Mr Jaitley said yesterday while addressing a meeting of the BJP Delhi Pradesh executive here.
He said watching a cricket match together was very good but talks between the two nations will not be fruitful until Pakistan takes action against terror elements operating from its soil against India.
He asked whether the government was sure that Pakistan was taking concrete action against those terror elements.
The BJP has said cricket and diplomacy should be kept separate and the game allowed to remain a game.
Pointing out that the government should realise that cricket diplomacy has not worked with Pakistan, the saffron party said though the party was in favour of good relations with the neighbouring country, it was against politics being mixed with sports.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had invited his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani to watch the World Cup semi-final between India and Pakistan at Mohali on Wednesday. On the sidelines of the match, the two leaders held wide ranging talks.
On March 28-29, Home Secretaries of both the countries also discussed various issues.
Mr Jaitley said a report has come in a newspaper that five days before the Home Secretary-level dialogue, US intelligence agencies passed on specific information to New Delhi about an alleged Lashkar-e-Toiba plot to target the Indian Mission in Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul.
The alert included summary of communication intercepts between suspected officials of the Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI.