Senior Congress leader and former union minister Prof Saifuddin Soz on Friday said that Vajpayee’s perception on neighbourhood could be a guiding principle for PM Modi to establish meaningful friendly relations with Pakistan and other countries.
In a statement hereSoz said, “When in a written reply, the other day, MoS V Murleedharan told theLok Sabha that onus was on Islamabad to create an atmosphere for a conduciveatmosphere for dialogue, I could imagine that the present government had movedquite a far away from the Vajpayee’s path of conciliation, reconciliation andcordiality.”
“Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whom I knew closely, was decidedlyborn out of the RSS womb, yet his approach to deal with neighbhourhood wasuniquely pragmatic and workable. It was certainly a tribute to Vajpayee’s farsightedness that soon after Kargil war in October 1999 for which the then PakPM Nawaz Sharief had held General Musharraf squarely responsible, it waspossible for Vajpayee to sign Lahore declaration with Nawaz Sharief on 21February 1999. It was reallymiraculous,” he added.
“The present day rulers should know that Vajpayee hadrealized that since neighbourhood can’t be changed, ways had to be found topromote cordiality in the neighbourhood. It was on 8th June, 2003 that Vajpayeehad told the Lok Sabha that friendship with Pakistan had to be maintained asfriends can be changed but not neighbours. Vajpayee maintained the spirit ofhis vision when he visited Pakistan on 6th January, 2004 and thereafter. I haveno idea as to who can remind PM Modi that the only way forward happened to bethe same as adopted by the Vajpayee whose consistency on that path happens tobe the guiding principle for PM Modi,” he added.