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Wednesday, Jan 14, 2009
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Pakistan says it has to study the “information”

Nirupama Subramanian

Gilani seeks to reassure public sentiment

ISLAMABAD: Even as it promises a “serious examination” of the dossier received from India on the Mumbai attacks, Pakistan is falling back on making a fine distinction between “information” and “evidence” in an apparent effort to reassure domestic public sentiment that the alleged Pakistani links of the attackers are far from proven.

On the floor of the National Assembly on Tuesday, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani repeated what Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir told a parliamentary committee a few days ago: “All that has been received formally from India is some information. I say information because these are not evidence. This needs to be carefully examined.”

In the course of making what was described as a “policy statement” on the Mumbai incident in the lower House of Parliament, Mr. Gilani, however, strikingly omitted any mention of Ajmal Amir Kasab, the surviving Mumbai attacker, who was last week acknowledged by the government as a Pakistani national.

The Prime Minister said the dossier had been forwarded to the Interior Ministry for “necessary inquiry in accordance with the law,” promising that the results would be shared with India in “due course of time.”

Underlining the need for “serious, sustained and pragmatic cooperation” as the way forward to getting to the perpetrators of the attack, Mr. Gilani recalled Pakistan’s proposals for conducting a joint investigation with India.

“India has, however, not responded to our proposal. We hope they will see merit in it and accept a joint inquiry, Mr. Gilani told the lower House of Parliament.

The government’s repeated emphasis on “evidence,” as opposed to “information,” has helped keep up a view in the Pakistani media that the material India has provided is of little value.

Indian officials here said it was never New Delhi’s claim that the dossier was evidence that could be presented as such in a court of law. Rather, it contained leads that point to the involvement of the Lashkar-e-Taiba in the Mumbai attacks.

It was now Pakistan’s job, the officials said, to follow the leads through its own investigations in order to collate the “evidence.”

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