New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Lahore visit to reach out to Pakistan has apparently not gone down well with RSS whose senior leader Dattareya Hosabale today suggested that sincerity aspect of the other side needed to be kept in mind while making attempts to improve ties.
He said Modi’s unannounced visit to Lahore on December 25 last year had ended up in Pathankot terror attack, just like former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s bus yatra to the Pakistani city had met a similar fate.
“I am not opposed to maintaining good ties ties with Pakistan but while making the attempts (to improve ties, we have to see) how sincere the other side is in taking it forward,” Hosabale said.
“The Lahore bus yatra (of Vajpayee in 1999) ended at the Agra Summit. The visit of Prime Minister to meet Pakistan Prime Minister at his Lahore residence ended in Pathankot.
Whatever attempts you make, the problem is Pakistan’s anti-India and anti-Hindu sentiment,” he said.
Speaking at an event to launch “Pakistan Watch”, a quarterly journal by Sangh-linked India Policy Foundation, Hosabale said that despite many talks, there has not been any movement of “even an inch” in resolving the problems between the two countries as Pakistan considers India as its “enemy”.
“Atal ji started a bus to Lahore, but within 24 hours, there was a reversal (of the effort),” the RSS leader said in an apparent reference to Pakistani incursion in Kargil
Similarly, he said, Modi went to Lahore to improve ties with Pakistan but Pathankot happened.
He said India has no cultural ties left with Pakistan as it turned into a theocratic state, which he asserted that India “can and will never be”.
When a nation’s feelings are against another country, “then no nation can progress”, Hosabale said.
“It has been rightly said that it is a nation-less state because its nation-hood could not develop for last so many years. That is why Pakistan remained a nation-less state, it is not a nation state.
“In that Pakistan, where street power overpowers the state power, State power where it buckled under the rogues’ power, obviously it becomes a terror state…
“For so many years, Pakistan never developed manufacturing sector and never moved forward. It manufactured only Taliban terrorists and could not run any other factory,” Hosabale said.