This was one of the most shocking revelations made that stunned the entire country. Then, the Congress had denied the charges and said the Wikileaks was spreading fake news to malign the Congress party.
But today, the man himself who witnessed the deal between India and Pakistan has exposed the Congress’s double face.
Shyam Saran, who was the foreign secretary of India until 2006, in his upcoming book part-history-part-memoir titled How India Sees the World, has revealed that he along with his Pakistani counter part Riaz Mohammad Khan had struck a deal on orders of Congress government to take back Indian troops and give away the Siachen Glacier to Pakistan.
But this deal was sabotaged and scuttled by the then National Security Advisor MK Narayanan, who literally saved India from Congress’s illogical and stupid decision.
In his book, Sharan writes that Manmohan Singh wanted to settle the deal with Pakistan by handing over Siachen glacier for which all stake holders were consented. The deal was even consented by the Indian Army, and mentioned its finer points, including current positions of the forces of the two countries, the positions to which they would withdraw, a schedule for redeployment, and a joint monitoring mechanism to prevent mutual intrusions. All this would have been recorded in an annexure to the main agreement.
“To give the document additional strength, we insisted, and the Pakistani side agreed, that both the agreement and the annexure will be signed, and that the main agreement will explicitly declare that the annexure had the same legal validity as the agreement itself,” writes Sharan. “I did many rounds of consultations, both at the senior bureaucratic and ministerial levels in the ministries of defence, home and finance (whose members are part of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS).”
He claims that the then Army Chief JJ Singh and all chiefs of the Intelligence Agencies were brought on board. The deal was consented by the Army and its intricate technical details including the points and timing of redeployment and also the phases in which it would have been implemented and the structure of the monitoring mechanism were actually worked out by the Director-General Of Military Operations.
But it was during the CCS meet, the NSA Chief M K Narayanan raised serious concerns about the deal and argued about compromising the National security of the country.