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Tara Shankar Sahay in New Delhi
External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh said on Wednesday that the crucial meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security had been postponed till Thursday evening to enable Defence Minister George Fernandes, held up in Siachen, to attend.
Briefing reporters outside Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's residence, where the CCS met on Wednesday evening for about 45 minutes, Singh said Vajpayee told the meeting that no crucial decision could be taken in Fernandes's absence.
The meeting took note of the situation along the international border with Pakistan and the Line of Control in Jammu & Kashmir and asserted that India's defence forces were fully prepared to "meet any challenge".
Singh asserted that the renaming of terrorist outfits Lashkar-e-Tayiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed to avoid the freezing of their funds and other assets had made a mockery of the American directive to Pakistan to act against them. India would continue its diplomatic offensive against the terrorism emanating from that country, but the details would be discussed on Fernandes's return, he said.
Meanwhile, a senior official in the prime minister's office told rediff.com that the government was contemplating declaring some senior personnel of the Pakistani high commission in India personas non grata because it had clinching evidence of the misuse of their diplomatic status to engage in espionage.
Asked if these officials would include High Commissioner Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, the official said, "We will have to wait and see."
Arun Singh, joint secretary in the external affairs ministry, had recently caused eyebrows to be raised by summoning Deputy High Commissioner Jaleen Abbas Jilani and telling him that a member of the mission staff, Mohammed Sharief Khan, had to be withdrawn within a week for indulging in 'activities inconsistent with his diplomatic status'.
Jilani being summoned even when Qazi was present in the capital set off speculation about the likelihood of the government deciding to cut down the mission's size by at least 40 per cent. With about 110 employees, the mission is currently one of the largest in the capital.
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