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We think essay competition is a
good idea: Tarun Vijay

Editor of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh mouthpiece Panchjanya Tarun Vijay on Tuesday strongly defended his decision to enter into a collaboration with Pakistani newspaper Jung to hold an essay competition based on the Indo-Pak summit.

The two publications have invited readers to suggest an agenda for the forthcoming summit meeting between Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf to be held in Agra in July.

Panchjanya has maintained a hardline stance against terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir and accuses Pakistan of abetting it.

Critics see it as a massive public relation exercise being carried out at the instance of Prime Minister Vajpayee and the Pakistani president.

"This is madness. What is common between Panchjanya and Jung? We have never shared our views on any subject, including Kashmir, earlier with any Pakistani newspaper," said a senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader who had accompanied Vajpayee on his bus trip Lahore.

"It might have been prompted by the visit of Pakistani High Commissioner Ashraf Jehangir Qazi to the RSS headquarters a couple of weeks back," he added.

Vijay has a simple enough reason for the move. "I thought that it would be a good idea to know what the people of the two countries think the agenda for the summit meeting should be. I knew the editor of Jung and spoke to him about it. He agreed it was good idea. So we decided on a tie-up," he said.

"The trouble with us is that we see a motive behind every move. Some people have asked if this is being done at the instance of the Prime Minister's Office. I don't know why the PMO comes into every story," he added.

Vijay informed that selected letters would be printed in Panchjanya and Jung before the summit and winners of the competition would get tickets for a Delhi-Bombay-Agra or Jaipur trip.

"Panchjanya would sponsor the winners selected by Jung in India and Jung would take care of Indian winners's visit to Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad," Vijay said.

He was reluctant to go into the details and also refused to answer questions on the stand taken by the magazine earlier on about the involvement of Pakistan in terrorist activities within India, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir.

"Khuda ke waaste iss samay aise sawal mat karne (For god's sake, pl do not bring up these issues)," he pleaded.

"I used these words because the English press alone cannot lay claim to being secular," he said by way of explanation.

Indo-Pak Summit 2001: The Complete Coverage

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